Alva Vanderbilt

Alva Smith was born to money in the mid-1800's, grew up summering in Newport, Rhode Island, and attended private school in Paris, France. So it was hardly remarkable that she might marry one of the Vanderbilt boys and wind up even richer.

Then, in 1895, she shocked polite society by divorcing her husband of twenty years, taking more than $10 million and several estates with her, and shortly marrying a good friend of the family who happened to be five years younger. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), he died only eight years later, giving Alva the opportunity to turn her undivided attention to the women's suffrage movement, which she did.

She used her money to bankroll the fight for women's right to vote in Great Britain, as well as the United States, founded the Political Equality League, and even bailed out women sweatshop workers who were arrested for picketing at a labor strike in New York City. More importantly, at a time when most of the women pushing for the vote were educated, middle class White women, Vanderbilt established a "suffrage settlement house" in Harlem and openly welcomed African-American and immigrant women to weekend retreats at one of her many opulent estates.

It is true that she was a pushy, sometimes arrogant millionaire who loved to live in the lap of luxury and once paid $3 million to put on a single party for a thousand guests. But she also wrote newspaper articles and spoke at and chaired conferences she often paid for, as well. And as the President of the National Women's Party, Vanderbilt helped to organize the first ever picketing of the White House. Her goal -- which she did not achieve (more's the pity) -- was to push through the Lucretia Mott Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It would have read "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." That might well have turned every woman in America into an in-your-face woman.

Adeline & Augusta Van Buren

Adeline and Augusta Van Buren were "society girls" in the early 1900's, but they were also most assuredly in-your-face women. The U.S. was gearing up for World War I and women were still being pushed to the side. They weren't allowed to fight. They weren't allowed to vote. They weren't even allowed to wear pants.

But the Van Buren sisters decided it was time to make a statement about how ridiculous all that was. So they put on military-style leggings and leather riding breeches, climbed on a pair of 1000 cc Indian Power Plus motorcycles in Brooklyn, New York, and set out across country to prove that women could carry military dispatches in a war zone, freeing up men to do other tasks.

Sixty days and 5,500 miles later, Addie and Gussie had proven their point. All it required of them was that they traverse awful roads through heavy rains and mud and the Rocky Mountains. They had to climb Pike's Peak. They had to be saved by a prospector when they ran out of water in the Mojave Desert. They even had to cross the Mexican border at Tijuana to complete their journey. And they did all that without flinching.

In spite of it all, however, not only were the two sisters still not allowed to join the military (or vote), but all along the route, they were repeatedly arrested by local police officers offended that the two were wearing "men's" clothing. The bikes were praised, but not the women. Newspaper articles criticized them at every turn for displaying their "charms" in public and using the military preparedness issue to escape their "appropriate" roles as wives and mothers.

Addie countered by becoming a lawyer and Gussie by becoming a pilot. So much for being ashamed of themselves. In-your-face women are too busy having fun to care if somebody else doesn't want them to.

Urraca

When Queen Urraca of Leon and Castile married Alfonso the Battler of Aragon in her late twenties, it set off some drama because her father had just died and his advisors were concerned that Alfonso would take undue control. And he might have. If he could have controlled Queen Urraca, that is.

Less than three years after they were married, however, the good queen left Alfonso because -- while he may have been "the Battler" at war -- she wouldn't stand for his physical abuse on the homefront. Outraged at his young wife's belligerance and not realizing that she was an in-your-face woman, Alfonso unwisely escalated the disagreement by entering into armed conflict with the queen. Two lovers later, Urraca had proved to be a formidable enough opponent that Alfonso agreed to an annulment of the marriage, which was a smart move on his part.

Queen Urraca never bothered to marry again, though she did have two babies out of wedlock, effectively using personal relationships and sex as a way to cement alliances without having to risk putting herself under another man's authority. Focusing on getting back every bit of the land she had lost in her conflict with Alfonso, she handed it over to her son when she died in 1126. Proving yet again, that an in-your-face woman doesn't need someone to put her on a pedestal. She prefers having her feet firmly placed on the ground. Her ground.

Tina Turner

When singer Anna Mae Bullock married guitar player Ike Turner and changed her name to Tina, the world was introduced to an in-your-face woman. Her voice (that seemed to emanate from the roots of the earth), her energy level (that was off the charts), and her breathless dance routines (that seemed unimaginable for an ordinary human being to deliver) had her millions of fans around the world buying the records and flocking to see the shows of this one-of-a-kind phenomenon. Surely, she was a powerhouse and a force of nature!

Then, in 1976, Tina left the Ike and Tina Turner Revue and wrote a book about the ruthless physical and emotional abuse she had suffered at Ike's hand throughout their fourteen years of marriage. A stunned world stepped back, trying to compute this new information. How could a powerhouse be overpowered? How could a force of nature be forced to submit?

But proving that an in-your-face woman has even deeper resources than her beauty and her talent, Tina Turner proceeded to crawl back up the ladder of success one rung at a time until she was even more amazing, more popular and more beloved than ever before. Called One of the Greatest Artists of All Time by Rolling Stone Magazine, Turner has eight Grammys, three songs in the Grammy Hall of Fame, and a position in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And her tour (at the age of seventy!) was one of the highest selling ticketed shows of 2008-2009. An in-your-face woman may do her share of crying, but she will have the last laugh.

Mary Tudor

Since Mary Tudor was the younger sister of King Henry VIII of England and stunningly beautiful to boot at a time when women were meant to do as they were told and above all else, marry well, she was more or less forced to become the wife of King Louis XII of France. The problem, as far as Tudor was concerned, was that Louis, at fifty-two, was thirty-four years older than his blushing bride. Unfortunately for Louis (and fortunately for Tudor), he was dead three months later from...well...too much "activity" for a man of his age. Which left Tudor a wealthy widow and free once more.

When her brother sent a young duke to escort Tudor back to England, she promptly married him before His Highness could trap her in another "good match" with another older man she didn't like. Henry was furious, of course, but it was too late. And the heavy fine they had to pay as punishment for Tudor doing what she wanted to do rather than doing her brother's will seemed inconsequential beside her triumph at having her own way and her happiness.

Later, when King Henry wanted to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn, Tudor further angered the ruler by publicly opposing what he wanted to do. Choosing what she wants for herself? Questioning what a man chooses? "What kind of woman is this anyway?" some at court must surely have asked. "An in-your-face woman," Mary Tudor might well have answered if she had ever heard the term.

Harriet Tubman

Araminta "Minty" Ross was born a slave in Maryland in the early 1820's, but she had a great role model to teach her how to resist her oppressors: her in-your-face woman mother who refused to give up her baby son when the man holding them both in bondage tried to sell him. Knowing she could easily be to whipped to death for her insubordination, she threatened to "split the skull" of anyone entering her shanty to take him and then hid him out until the whole idea of selling him just blew over.

Perhaps her desire to follow in her mother's footsteps is the reason Minty took her mother's name when she married a free Black man named John Tubman, but in any case, follow she did and always had. In fact, she started getting in trouble with racist White folks as a young girl, which once got her hit in the head with a two-pound chunk of metal, causing seizures for the rest of her life. But she didn't let a little thing like falling asleep in the middle of a sentence no matter where she was slow her down.

She set herself free -- leaving her husband behind -- when she was in her late twenties, returning at great risk multiple times over the next decade to rescue relatives, friends, and even strangers. "I freed hundreds of slaves," she later said, adding, "I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves."

Her personal best moment among many might have been when the Union Army enlisted her aid in organizing and carrying out the Combahee River Raid in South Carolina. With General Tubman's able leadership, a whole string of plantations were burned to the ground, thousands of dollars in food and supplies were seized, and more than seven hundred slaves carrying soup pots, pigs and their children boarded ships for the promised land -- all without loss of a single life on either side.

Lest we imagine that this in-your-face woman gave up all joy and only suffered through her life, it's important to note that, at nearly fifty-years-old, Tubman married a second time -- a man twenty years younger than her -- and they spent the next two decades together happily raising an adopted baby girl. She was also busy stumping for women's right to vote during that same period, of course, since an in-your-face woman often has trouble not being in anyone's face. On the other hand, that can make her pretty attractive to a certain type of man.

Trai and Nhi Trung

Trai and Nhi Trung were born into a military family in Vietnam at the beginning of the Common Era, so they learned martial arts as a matter of course. Even though they were girls, they spent long hours studying warfare and honing their fighting skills, at least partly in response to what they saw the Chinese doing to Vietnamese people after more than a century of occupation.

When they grew old enough, Trai married a young radical who was eventually executed for rebelling against the Chinese. So Trai and her younger sister decided enough was enough and in the year 39, they took over one city, amassed an army (constituted mostly of in-your-face women), and proceeded to take over sixty-five other cities, running the Chinese out of Vietnam. Trai's reign as queen didn't last forever, but she held off her much stronger foes for more than two years -- which no one else had been able to do.

Ultimately, the Chinese overpowered the Trung sisters' forces and re-occupied Vietnam for another seven hundred years. In a last act of belligerent self-will, the sisters robbed the Chinese of the satisfaction of ridiculing, torturing and executing them by jumping into the Hat River to drown.

Some have said that the power of the Trung sisters suggests that pre-occupation Vietnam was a matriarchal society. Either way, an in-your-face woman will always be just who she is and go out, when necessary, on her own terms.
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NOTE: The statue in the photo is of the Trung sisters and can be found today in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Evelyn “Bobbi” Trout

Evelyn "Bobbi" Trout was just short of her twenty-second birthday when she started taking flying lessons at Burdett Fuller's School of Aviation in California in 1928. A few lessons later, her instructor told her to three-quarter turn at a low elevation, causing her to send the plane spinning out of control. The resulting crash -- which totaled the plane -- would have discouraged most folks from trying it again. But Bobbi Trout was not easily discouraged. So she received her pilot's certificate a few months later.

Over the next decade, Trout engaged with a number of other women pilots in an almost continual process of beating each other out of one record or another: being in the air the longest; going the furthest; taking the most risks; pushing the envelope, their planes, and themselves to the limit over and over. On one occasion, Trout talked Hollywood starlet Edna May Cooper into going up in a plane for nearly 123 hours straight, a feat that got Trout recognized by King Carol II of Romania who gave her a Royal Decree and the Aviation Cross, only awarded to two other pilots ever: Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh.

Awards and recognition -- including a spot on the Women in Aviation Hall of Fame and the Howard Hughes Memorial Award for her lifetime contributions to aviation -- were common for Trout who never married, so she had plenty of time and energy to dedicate to her various career moves, in the air and on the ground.

Asked why she flew, Trout told a reporter, "Because I do it a lot better than I do other things." But according to a headline on one news story, she claimed she stayed in the air for seventeen hours once just to avoid washing the dishes. In-your-face women like to do what they like to do. Housework rarely makes the list.

Trieu Thi Trinh

When the Chinese took over Vietnam in the year 111 BCE, their massive military might, brutality, and sheer numbers more or less neutralized any opposition. Nevertheless, some resistance (such as that by the in-your-face women Trai and Nhi Trung) continued. And among its leaders was the revered Trieu Thi Trinh, often called Lady Trieu in Vietnam. Lady Trieu  -- in her early twenties in 245 CE -- was said to be nine feet tall with breasts three feet long, which she threw over her shoulders or tied behind her back when she rode into battle on the head of a war elephant, as she was wont to do.

Wearing yellow tunics and shoes with curved fronts, Lady Trieu had already killed her own sister-in-law and run into the hills before the Chinese arrived. Gathering a thousand followers because of her boldness and bravery, she robbed and harassed the occupying forces until she had to take them on full tilt. When her brother tried to talk her out of the onslaught, Lady Trieu is quoted as saying, "I only want to ride the wind and walk the waves, slay the big whales of the Eastern sea, clean up frontiers, and save the people from drowning. Why should I imitate others, bow my head, stoop over and be a slave? Why resign myself to menial housework?"

Ultimately overpowered, Lady Trieu committed suicide. But it is said that her ghost came back and haunted the Wu general who defeated her and continued to be a source of spiritual support to her people throughout a thousand years of Chinese occupation. An in-your-face woman quits when she's damn good and ready.

Tererai Trent

In the Shona language of Zimbabwe, the word "tinogona" means "it is achievable."And in-your-face woman Tererai Trent knows this very well first hand.

Born in the mid-1960's, Trent was told early and often that women are for marriage and not for school. So she tried to learn by doing her brother's homework, but it didn't prevent her from being married off at eleven-years-old to a man who beat her for wanting an education. Still, beatings or no, she worked as a community organizer and used her meager earnings to pay for correspondence courses while she bore and cared for the three children she had before she turned eighteen.

Two more children and many beatings later, Trent and her husband moved to the United States and she became adamant that she must have a college education. So, by 2001, she was awarded her Bachelor's degree in agricultural education at Oklahoma State University. Then, two years later, she earned a Master's degree and waved good-bye to her husband as he was deported for domestic violence. And in late 2009, this in-your-face, you-cannot-make-me-quit woman earned her Ph.D. with a dissertation on HIV/AIDS prevention programs for women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa.

Impressed by her courage and perseverance, media mogul Oprah Winfrey interviewed Trent on her television program and then gave her $1,500,000 to build a school for girls in Zimbabwe. Some in-your-face women live their whole lives on a wing and a prayer. Others don't.

Kishida Toshiko

When Kishida Toshiko was eighteen in 1881, she was so smart, refined and intelligent that she was chosen to tutor the Empress of Japan in literature. The problem was that her intelligence actually got in the way of her doing her job. So a year later, disgusted by the differences in men's and women's freedoms, she pretended to be sick to get out of her job and started speaking on women's rights instead.

In almost no time, she became famous for a speech she was busy delivering entitled "Daughters in a Box" -- about how well-intentioned Japanese parents were doing their daughters great harm by hiding them away and teaching them absolute and unquestioning obedience to authority. Unfortunately, the "authorities" didn't like the young in-your-face woman's speech. In fact, they disliked it so much, they arrested Toshiko, fined her, and locked her up for a while.

Even after Toshiko married a young politician, police continued to harass her, but Toshiko was unmoved. She wrote. She spoke. And she wrote some more. About women's rights and need for education. And most especially about the double standard related to sex. Men could have sex outside their marriage without risking divorce for adultery, while women most certainly could not.

Toshiko was convinced that equal rights for men and women would strengthen not only the home, but the nation. The politicians, however, disagreed and delayed until the 1920's the social change for which Toshiko called. The sad part of this was that Kishida Toshiko died of tuberculosis in 1901 so she didn't get to see the day when young Japanese women were finally able "to tread wherever their feet might lead and stretch their arms as wide as they wish," as she had suggested in "Daughters in a Box." In-your-face women don't always get to see the results of their work, but they know what those results will look like.