Margaret Mead

Anthropologist Margaret Mead had a lot to do with the "sexual revolution" in the 1960's. For starters, her research in Samoa suggested that we'd all be a lot healthier and more rational, not to mention happier, if we just "went with the flow" as sexual beings rather than "saving ourselves for marriage," as we were being taught to do (but all too often, didn't).

Married three times herself and in at least two long-standing lesbian relationships, as well, Mead was suspect, at best, in elitist academic circles. Worse, however, was the fact that her work further challenged our perceptions and practices of gender and sexuality in Western societies. She convinced Dr. Benjamin Spock, for example, that it's better to breastfeed babies when they're hungry rather than according to a schedule. Countering the idea that men are "by nature" aggressive and women are "by nature" submissive, she published research demonstrating that there are cultures wherein both genders are aggressive, cultures wherein both genders are not aggressive and even cultures wherein the women are practical and the men "primp." And she suggested that societal pressures cause adolescent angst and rebellion!

Needless to say, the criticisms came hard and fast -- once she was dead -- but they were ultimately nit-picking or debunked. And, in fact, U.S. President Jimmy Carter awarded her a Presidential Medal of Freedom a year after her death in 1978. The citation reads: "Intrepid, independent, plain spoken, fearless, [Margaret Mead] remains a model for the young and a teacher from whom all may learn."

Her instruction to those who listen to in-your-face women? "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Patricia McCormick

Born in St Louis, Missouri in 1930, Patricia McCormick wanted to be a bullfighter from the first time she saw one in Mexico City when she was seven-years-old. Looking back, she later said, "To go into that kind of precarious work, there has to be an obsession."

So, despite the fact that she eventually became an art student at Texas Western in El Paso, she was drawn repeatedly to the bullfights just over the border in Ciudad Juarez. Everybody told her that she didn't have the money or the contacts or the Latin blood to get herself into the arena, let alone taken seriously. Nevertheless, McCormick took her shy self back to Ciudad Juarez again and again until she talked Alejandro del Hierro into accepting her as his student and, ultimately, his prodigy.

The tall, blonde Yanqui woman was soon the talk of Mexico. Allowed to join the Bullfighter's Union in 1951, McCormick killed 1000 bulls in the decade that followed and suffered six brutal gorings, one of which resulted in her receiving the last rites.

Today, McCormick lives quietly with her cat, but her website reminds us still that even a shy woman can be in-your-face when she wants to be.

Matuschka

Matuschka has had a roller coaster of a life. Orphaned at thirteen, she ran away to New York City the following year, only to be returned to foster care in New Jersey the year after that. Because she demonstrated strong talent as an artist, she got multiple opportunities to develop her skills and, at nearly six feet tall, she bankrolled her art by being a model for artists and photographers (including herself) before she was even out of her teens.

Arriving back in New York City in the 1970's, she was instantly embraced by the Andy Warhol-Studio 54 kaleidoscope of nightlife featuring youth and beauty, art and music, sex and drugs, where she hobnobbed with the rich and infamous and was very much one of them.

For the next couple of decades, Matuschka kept busy (when she wasn't modeling) by writing songs for and singing in front of a rock band called "The Ruins," dressing Bergdorff Goodman's windows on Fifth Avenue, and building her own body of work, including not only photographic studies of herself, but a series of paintings of prostitutes she entitled "Whores Galore." Not surprisingly, her work sold quickly and at respectable prices.

Then, the super-glam world of the bigger-than-life Matuschka was invaded by the announcement that she had breast cancer and would lose her right breast. Rather than collapsing under the weight of this new challenge, however, she threw back her head and catapulted herself into worldwide recognition by creating an exhibit entitled "Beauty Out of Damage," displaying the naked scar where her right breast used to be. In 2003, one of the photos from that collection was named by Life Magazine as one of the 100 photographs that changed the world since the invention of the camera.

Since then, Matuschka has used her recognition and talent to raise questions about identity, race and gender. And her latest exhibit examines consumerism because, as this artist/photographer/model/singer/activist says, "You are what you bag." In-your-face women tell the truth -- about themselves, about reality, about life.

Beryl Markham

Born as an upper-class European and raised in Kenya by African workers while her father ran his farm and her mother lived in England, Beryl Markham was only allowed to hunt and skin animals because she was White. Kenyan women weren't permitted to participate in such "manly" processes. But this serves as a great example of how opposing forces can sometimes create strange and wonderful results.

She grew up barefoot. Her first language was Swahili. Her best friend was an African boy named Kibii.  She made sure she was always expelled from school so she could focus on the things she really cared about. And being left largely to her own devices, she was more or less "adopted" by the various African family groups around whom she spent virtually all her time. Eventually, she even moved into her own mud hut with a thatched roof. So, when her father's ranch went bust, Markham -- just eighteen -- refused to go to Peru with him, choosing instead to stay in Kenya alone as a horse trainer rather than to just play it safe.

Several husbands and several more unapologetic affairs later, she was introduced to flying and jumped from horses to planes without hesitation. She logged her hours and learned how to read a map, clean jets, and take apart an engine. And in short order, she had her commercial pilot's license. But that wasn't enough for her. Later, she would remark, "A life has to move or it stagnates. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday."

So it was completely in character for Markham to ultimately take on the challenge of crossing the Atlantic from Europe to North America, a particularly long and difficult flight that had been accomplished successfully only once before because it goes against the prevailing winds and had taken the lives of several other people who attempted it. Taking off from Abingdon, England, on September 4, 1936, in a driving rain, Markham battled violent weather for more than twenty-one hours before crashing to the ground in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Arriving in New York City wearing a bandage on her forehead, looking to all the world like an Englishwoman, but carrying an African spirit in her in-your-face woman's soul, she went down in history with her arms raised in the typical African greeting. Salaam!

Ella Maillart

When she died in 1997 at the age of 94, Ella Maillart's obituary in the New York Times said she'd been, among other things, an Olympic sailor, a competitive skier, a pioneer field hockey player, and a movie stuntwoman. But she was primarily known for traveling around taking photographs and writing about places few outsiders ever see and most would not be allowed to visit. Her motto was, "Nobody can go? Then I shall go." And she proved it over and over for decades.

At one point or another, she walked across the Caucasus Mountains, traveled through Russian Turkestan, spent time in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation, and crossed China under great hardship on train, horse, foot and camel back. Her photos and books invite us to come along on her journeys, which she saw as attempts to find and better understand herself. And still she calls to in-your-face women everywhere: "You can feel as brave as Columbus starting for the unknown the first time you enter a Chinese lane full of boys laughing at you, or when you risk climbing down in a Tibetan pub for a meal of rotten meat." Sounds exciting, huh? C'mon. Let's go.

Mukhtar Mai

In June of 2002, Mukhtar Mai was ordered by a Pakistani tribal council to be gang-raped as a punishment to her family for offending another family. She was expected to commit suicide afterward because, in her society, losing her virginity outside of marriage is thought to destroy a woman's worth. But Mai threw the council and the men who raped her an unexpected curve. Rather than kill herself, she sued the rapists in a court of law.

A stunned national media, unused to seeing such a situation brought boldly into the public eye by a woman (gasp!), picked up the story and soon it went international. A nine-year court battle ultimately acquitted the rapists (what a surprise!) and during the whole time period, Mai and her family, including the courageous man who chose to marry her despite her sexual "impurity," have been continually at risk.

Nevertheless, Mai established the Mukhtar Mai Women's Welfare Organization to support and educate Pakistani women and girls and subsequently won numerous international awards for her work. The Pakistani government and local feudal lords don't appreciate her refusal to back down. In fact, she walks through her days knowing that her in-your-face stance puts her life in danger. She has been illegally detained, brutally derided, and to the extent possible, cut off from the outside world. Yet she has built two schools for girls, a women's resource center, and a battered women's shelter in her region and her memoir has been published in twenty-three languages. Not being able to read and write doesn't keep an in-your-face woman quiet.

Madonna

As a young girl in school, Madonna Louise Ciccone made straight A's, but she also did cartwheels down the hallways between classes to shock whoever was watching by showing her underwear. A decade later, when she appeared on the first MTV Music Video Awards show performing her huge hit about a young woman refusing to feel apologetic for getting pregnant out of wedlock, she shocked millions by rolling on the floor in a wedding dress.

By the time her lacy tops, fishnet stockings and short, short skirts over capri pants had become the fashion statement of choice around the world, Playboy and Penthouse magazines had found and published some old nude photos of the rock star, but Madonna (as she has been known since becoming famous) didn't flinch. Then, when the Vatican freaked out over a song video she did featuring religious symbols and a scene where she made love to a saint, she didn't pay them any mind. In fact, she said simply, "I know that I'm not the best singer and I know that I'm not the best dancer. But, I can fucking push people's buttons and be as provocative as I want. [My] goal is to break useless taboos."

Followed everywhere she goes by controversy and criticism, Madonna is nonetheless recognized in the Guinness' Book of World Records as the top selling woman recording artist of all time.  Not only did she start out as an in-your-face woman early in her career, but she has continued to be an in-your-face woman year after year, changing her image, but never leaving her in-your-faceness behind. One newspaper wrote of her: "Madonna, whether you like her or not, started a revolution amongst women in music...Her attitudes and opinions on sex, nudity, style and sexuality forced the public to sit up and take notice." And that's what in-your-face women do.

Jackie “Moms” Mabley

Loretta Aiken had been raped and impregnated twice by the time she was fifteen. Her stepfather's solution was to marry her off to a much older man, who we can guess, was happy to help. But Loretta -- already an in-your-face woman -- wasn't having it. Instead, she ran off from her family home in North Carolina in 1912 to sing and entertain with a traveling minstrel show that was in Cleveland, Ohio, at the time.

Taking her stage name from an early boyfriend, who, she said, "took so much from her, she might as well take his name," she came out as a lesbian in 1924 while she was still in her twenties and, having done that, rapidly developed the nerve to start performing and recording the sexually-based comedy routines for which she became famous. Even though she was openly lesbian and wore androgynous clothing, Mabley eventually wound up with the nickname "Moms" because she mothered so many of the other young entertainers on the "Chitlin' Circuit," made up of African-American clubs that regularly hosted Black vaudeville shows.

So popular that she earned $10,000 per week while performing at the Apollo Theater in Harlem at the height of her career, she eventually became accepted by a wider White audience due to her appearances on television and was still performing in her late seventies. Switching from her earlier more mannish costumes to appear without her teeth in a house dress and floppy hat, "Moms" Mabley would crack jokes about her interest in young men and then tackle topics most comedians were still afraid of, including sex and racism. In one of her later routines, Mabley said, "Ol' men say, 'Times ain't like they used ta be.' I say, 'I'm damned glad of it!'" What she wasn't saying, but we know, is that in-your-face women like her are the reason times have changed.

Wangari Muta Maathai

Wangari Muta Maathai was a wife, mother, and respected professor of biology at the University of Nairobi (Kenya) in the 1970's when her husband walked into court, claiming that she was "too strong-minded for a woman" and that, for this reason, "he was unable to control her." The judge granted him a divorce and she called the judge something that got her locked up in jail.

Unrepentant, Maathai sent her children to live with their father and ran for and ultimately won the position of Chairperson of the National Council of Women of Kenya. Not busy enough pushing one envelope, however, Maathai simultaneously worked to establish what came to be called the Green Belt Movement to combat desertification, deforestation, water crisis, and rural hunger throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.

For whatever reason (because they were unable to control her?), the men in power in Kenya fought Maathai at every level, undercutting her funding, manipulating the courts, calling her "a crazy woman" in the media, and even threatening her life.  But Maathai was an in-your-face woman.  At one point, the police had to besiege her house for three days before they finally cut through the bars in her windows to arrest her and take her to jail. It was only after a whole group of international organizations and eight U.S. Senators called for her release that the government let her go.

Instead of making her act more like a "proper" woman in the African tradition, however, her incarceration resulted in her going on a public hunger strike at a place she called "Freedom Corner" to demand the release of other political prisoners. Four days after the hunger strike began, she was knocked unconscious and hospitalized, while the President of Kenya himself went to the press, calling her a "mad woman" who was a "threat to the order and security of the country."

Ultimately deciding that what was really needed in her homeland was a revolution, Maathai committed to no less than a complete democratization of her nation's governmental system.  Eventually, needless to say, the Powers-That-Be in Kenya lost and Wangari Muta Maathai won. The Nobel Peace Prize, to be exact.

Most folks don't believe that one person can accomplish much, but in-your-face women do. All the time. Whether they're known for it or not.

Tegla Loroupe

One of 24 children in her family in Kenya, Tegla Loroupe was raised as women often are in many cultures: as a beast of burden. Starting at age five, she carried water, she carried firewood, she carried babies on her back. Seen as "just a woman," Loroupe was not bought clothes or sent to school until her mother and older sister started pushing her to get an education. "If you own things of your own," they told her, "men won't own you."

She believes that the pain of her early life made it possible for her to be the Olympic champion runner she eventually became. And in 1994, Loroupe at only 4'11" and 82 pounds, won the New York City Marathon. Returning home, women in her Pokot ethnic group welcomed her, saying, "You showed that we are like the men. We can do things. We are not useless."

Loroupe has set world records, organized Peace Marathons in her homeland, and served to further diplomacy and peace around the world.  So, it was hardly surprising in June of 2011, when the International Olympic Committee honored six women (one from each continent and one from the world at large) for their athletic achievements and work promoting women's sports, Loroupe was awarded the world trophy. In-your-face women are in a category by themselves.

Audre Lorde

It is not by happenstance that world famous author and poet Audre Lorde put the word "warrior" before the word "poet" when referring to herself. Active in civil rights, anti-war, lesbian and womanist movements in the 1960's and beyond, Lorde was one of the first and most vehement of critics of early feminists for focusing primarily on the experiences of White middle-class women to the exclusion of women of color, whose lives were radically different.

Her essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" is considered by many to be a classic discussion of one of the most crucial concepts related to social change. Declaring without apology that White feminists who ignore the double burden of women of color (on both racial and gender lines) are "agents of oppression" just like White men, Lorde responded to their outrage by saying, "What you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering."

When arch-conservative and well-known racist Senator Jesse Helms attacked her work, Lorde wrote like the in-your-face woman she was: "Helms' objection to my work is not about obscenity...or even about sex. It is about revolution and change...[He] represents...white patriarchal power...[and he] knows that my writing is aimed at his destruction, and the destruction of every single thing he stands for."