Conchita Cintron

Hailed around the world as “the blond goddess of bullfighting,” Conchita Cintron, born to a Peruvian father and an Irish mother in 1922, fought her first bull in Lima, Peru, at twelve-years-old and killed her first at fifteen. Only wounded once (receiving a 5-inch long gash from a bull’s horn) though she took all the celebrated risks the crowds expected, Cintron is touted to have slain at least 800 bulls (including the one that wounded her) in her thirteen year career, which took her to arenas all over the world.

Demonstrating her forceful mastery of a practice so male-dominated that she was actually arrested in France because it was not legal there for women to fight bulls, Cintron’s text-book precision on horseback and with the tools of her trade made crowds go from screaming to breathless. At the finish of her last performance, Cintron very dramatically threw down her sword -- refusing to kill her last “opponent” (which was against both law and tradition) -- proving once again that in-your-face women make up their own rules.