Lucretia Mott

When Lucretia Mott graduated from school and began her own teaching career, she was fine until she realized that men teachers were being paid three times as much as women teachers (such as herself). And then she wasn't fine anymore.

As a Quaker, she wasn't fine with slavery either. In fact, she refused to use cotton cloth, cane sugar or anything else produced by slave labor. And she helped to found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society with both Black and White members, an uncommon thing to do before the Civil War.

She was also known to speak before Black congregations and, again, this was far from common practice at a time when women speaking in public at all was deemed by many -- even many Quakers -- as against Bible teaching, let alone the audience was made up of both men and women (called "promiscuous" by those with the power to define). So Mott got as many attacks as she got support, but she kept on keepin' on anyway. On one occasion, when a crowd of nearly twenty thousand threatened violence against a group of women Mott had organized to discuss boycotting slave-produced goods, Mott (at barely five feet tall and weighing less than one hundred pounds) had each Black woman leave the hall and walk to safety arm in arm with a White woman.

When a General Anti-Slavery Convention was convened in London, England, in 1840, Mott and the other women delegates were forced to sit in a separate area, segregated from the men. Despite this fact, however, one reporter still called her "the Lioness of the Convention." She advocated for world peace, racial justice, women's rights, and compassion for the poor and imprisoned. And in 1848, when she met at Seneca Falls, New York, with other women to talk about women's rights, they signed a Declaration stating, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal," and further demanding "all the rights and privileges which belong to [women] as citizens of the United States." One can only wonder what an in-your-face woman like Lucretia Mott would think of the fact that, more than one hundred fifty years later, we're still waiting.

Pat Morris

Most people in the United States and many outside it are aware of the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After all, it was founded in 1909 by individuals (both Black and White) who wanted to see everyone born in the U.S. treated as full citizens.

Through the decades since then, members of the NAACP have helped to change life in the U.S.A., one example being the famous Brown v. the Board of Education legal case that (ostensibly) integrated the public schools nationally in 1957. While it has become increasingly obvious that many schools -- especially many poverty-stricken schools -- remain racially segregated for the most part, few stand to call this practice into question.

In a rural, half Black parish in the belly of Louisiana, however, an in-your-face woman named Pat Morris not so quietly chips away at the feet of clay under the monument of White Supremacy. Not only did she -- as President of her local NAACP branch -- successfully get her parish's School Board dragged back into federal court in 2007 for not living up to the court's order to de-segregate the parish schools back in 1977 (already more than twenty years after Brown v. Board and now thirty years ago!), but she has stayed on their tails constantly since then, forcing them at every turn to do what is legal and right for the future of the parish's children.

Her decision to take on a power structure that has been in place for generations cost her economic security while she was blackballed by every employer in the parish for the first four years of the fight. During that time, it also cost her access to employer-provided health insurance to cover the stress-related health issues created by her commitment to social change. And it's resulted in a constant on-going barrage of insults, name-calling, and other people's fears that to be perceived as close to Morris is to risk their own well-being.

Worse, however, it's cost her many nights of sleep, interrupted by muffled death threats on her personal telephone. And these are not idle threats. Her car motor has already been destroyed twice by vandalism and on one occasion, all her tire lug nuts were found to have been loosened by someone who knew full well how much time she spends on the highway.

How does she handle death threats on the phone in the middle of the night, knowing they come from people more than willing to do the deed if they can get away with it? She tells them she'll meet them anywhere they say anytime, lay down her life, and then haunt their every waking moment until their miserable days on earth are done. Apparently, they believe her. And they know an in-your-face woman when they see one.

Robin Morgan

Not even in-your-face women usually have their own hit radio show at the age of five, but Robin Morgan did and it was even called "The Robin Morgan Show." Then she spent the rest of her childhood playing roles on popular television shows during the 1950's.

The 1960's launched not only her writing career (she was a published poet at seventeen), but also her personna as a radical political activist. She walked away from the Youth International Party (the "Yippies") because its leadership was sexist. She organized the first public protest of the Miss America Pageant. She performed street theater to draw attention to the oppression of women. She even came up with the most widely used feminist symbol in the world: a fist in the middle of the symbol for "woman." When Grove Press fired her and a bunch of other folks for trying to unionize the company, Morgan led eight of her colleagues (all in-your-face women) to take over and occupy the offices in protest, though they knew they would be arrested.

Her anthology entitled Sisterhood is Powerful, called one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th Century by the New York Library, covered such topics as female orgasm, radical lesbian relationships, the difficulties of being Black and female, and the nature of prostitution -- in 1970! For her subsequent book, Sisterhood is Global, Morgan sought out revolutionary women in more than seventy countries. And as if that wasn't enough, she spent a couple of decades editing Ms Magazine, just for good measure.

Still holding her own as an in-your-face woman and one of the "women men warned us about" (her line), Robin Morgan also once wrote: "Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible." So let's get to it, huh? Time's wasting!

Queen Esther Montour

Queen Esther Montour of the Seneca nation lived with a goodly group of her people at the junction of the Chemung and Susquehanna Rivers in Pennsylvania in 1790. The United States was barely an idea and the French, the English, the Yankees, and the Native Americans were still very much jockeying for their respective positions. The Europeans, of course, believed that they had a right to the land based on documents they brought with them from their respective "Old Countries." The Yankees fully intended to turn this "New World" into their own nation. The Native Americans, on the other hand, indigenous to the continent for thousands of years, didn't agree.

Sometimes they got along (more or less). Sometimes one group of European nationals would enlist the aid of the Natives against another group of Europeans. And the Natives didn't have a problem working both ends against the middle, since, as far as they were concerned, the Europeans were fighting each other over what didn't belong to them in the first place. So it was in this context that Queen Esther's son was shot to death in some battle or another.

Enraged and distraught, at her next opportunity ( a few days later), Queen Esther -- described as a "fury of a woman," tall and slender, walking very upright -- had her subjects gather up fourteen or fifteen Yankees and put them in a circle around a big rock. Wearing a breech cloth and black and white war paint, she then proceeded around the circle, singing while she used a club or tomahawk to relieve the prisoners of their brains one by one. Still not satisfied, she had her warriors put nine more Yankees around another rock and proceeded to go through the process again.

Today, the battle during which this event took place is known as the Wyoming (Pennsylvania) Massacre since, overall, 227 of 350 Yankee soldiers were killed and scalped. Interestingly enough, there are many historical accounts of Queen Esther protecting and treating Europeans kindly in various situations. She was, in fact, at least part French and wore a necklace of white beads from which a cross hung. Still, as evidenced at the Wyoming Massacre, one must never underestimate an in-your-face woman. It can be detrimental to your health.

Rita Levi Montalcini

When the Italians made Rita Levi Montalcini a Senator for life at the age of 92, they may have meant it as a symbolic gesture of respect. Certainly, we can imagine that they had rather specific (and reasonable?) expectations of her actual length and degree of service. After all, it would seem that even an in-your-face woman would start taking a day off once in a while when she reaches one hundred years old. But Montalcini, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1986, apparently has no such intention.

And it's not like she's had an easy time of it either. Shut out of university research settings by Benito Mussolini's anti-Jewish laws during World War II, Montalcini just stayed home -- and bull-headedly conducted her research in her bedroom there, moving it from time to time one step ahead of the brownshirts. It wasn't the first time she had bucked in the face of male power. In 1930, when she announced her decision to go to medical school and her father expressed his concerns that "a professional career would interfere with the duties of a wife and mother," she simply went anyway.

And she's still going. To speak her mind as the Senior Member of the Senate in Italy. To present ideas at academic gatherings around the world. To accept an award from some prestigious body.  Or to appear in public and the media in support of the left-wing candidates she belligerently works to elect -- a practice for which she is openly insulted to her face and on conservative right-wing blogs.

Montalcini's unconcerned with other people's criticism. In 2009, at her 100th birthday celebration, she said, "I have a mind that is superior -- thanks to experience -- than it was at 20." And nobody contradicted her. They knew you can't win an argument with an in-your-face woman.

Jerrie Mock

Geraldine "Jerrie" Mock, like many other in-your-face women, jumped outside the box at an early age when she went up in a Ford Tri-Motor as a child in 1931 and never got over it. But, of course, she had to grow up, get married, and have children, so even though she did become a pilot and open her own flight school and airplane rental service, she did it "on the side."

Then, she got it into her head to fly around the world and see all those places she had only heard about. The next thing you knew, her basement was full of airways charts, financing was arranged from her hometown newspaper and a group of aviation equipment manufacturers, and her Cessna 180 -- nicknamed "Charlie" -- was modified with fancy avionics and enough super large tanks to carry 178 gallons of gas.

Taking off from the Port Columbus, Ohio, airport on March 19, 1964, Mock faced a 29-day 23,206 mile trip she had entirely planned herself to include nineteen stops. What it also included, however, was severe icing over the Atlantic, vicious wind fronts, a Sahara Desert sandstorm, faulty brakes that threw her plane into a series of 360 degree spins in Bermuda, and the discovery that a main antenna motor wire was disconnected and taped off (suggesting foul play)!

Nevertheless, Mock made the trip, touched down safely back in Columbus on April 25th, and even beat out another pilot -- also a woman -- who had tried at the last minute to complete a round-the-world loop herself before Mock could get it done. "I never wanted it to be a race," Mock said simply, "but once it became one, I decided to try and win it." Of course.

Joan Mitchell

Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell's father once told her "You can’t do anything as well as I because you are a woman." Mitchell didn't appreciate that. And she didn't appreciate having herself and her work pushed to the side throughout her career so that real (male) artists and their work could be more properly considered and respected. So she -- like many in-your-face women -- "acted out."

Depressed and alcoholic, she was known for her foul mouth, violent outbursts and general rudeness, not to mention her sexual escapades, none of which would have been given a second thought, of course, if she'd been a wildly talented artist -- and a man. But since she was female, her in-your-faced-ness was used as an excuse to further alienate her from the center of the art world where she probably belonged.

Poet John Asbury said Mitchell's work has "an energy that seem[s] to have other things in mind than the desire to please." And only days before her death from lung cancer, Mitchell could be seen drinking Chablis in the hospital corridor, surrounded by adoring young artists. A queen -- in-your-face -- to the end.

The Mirabal Sisters

In the 1950's, nobody in the Dominican Republic dared deny Rafael Trujillo (the country's dictator) anything. Except Minerva Mirabal who told him to take a hike when the notorious womanizer showed his "interest" in the beautiful and intelligent young woman thirty-five years his junior. His continued advances put great pressure on Mirabal's family and, as a further attempt to force her hand, when she became a lawyer, he saw to it that she wouldn't be able to get a license to practice her profession.

Mirabal's in-your-face response? She joined the movement to overthrow Trujillo, who had been in power for nearly thirty years -- most of it by military might and the moral will to kill as many as 50,000 people to maintain his position. She was hardly alone in hating him. Even two of her sisters, Patria and Maria Teresa, stood with her against "El Jefe" ("The Chief").

Despite the fact that the sisters eventually married and had children, Minerva and Maria Teresa went to prison and were tortured several times. In fact, because of the sisters' aggressive political activism, their families -- once quite wealthy -- lost everything: land, houses, and property. Nevertheless, they and their husbands helped to form the 14th of June Movement, named for the 1959 organized uprising against the Trujillo regime. And because Minerva's underground name was "Mariposa" (meaning "Butterfly") the revolutionary sisters became known affectionately and with great respect as "La Mariposas" and seen as the soul of the resistance.

When popular opinion and pressure from the Organization of American States and even the Catholic Church brought increased pressure on Trujillo to step down, "El Jefe" began to imagine that, if he could just get rid of "La Mariposas," his problems would go away. So, on a rainy night on November 25, 1960, as the Mirabal sisters returned from visiting their husbands in prison, they were stopped, taken into a sugar cane field by a team of Trujillo's most trusted henchmen and clubbed and strangled to death. They were thirty-six (Patria), thirty-four (Minerva) and twenty-four (Maria Teresa) at the time. Six months later, Trujillo was ambushed and shot to death on a public road just outside the capital. His body was riddled with bullets and had to be buried in Europe to keep it safe. In-your-face women follow their enemies to the grave.

Lee Miller

In 1927, Lee Miller started out as a much sought after fashion model in the United States until a famous photographer sold a shot of her to the Kotex company to use in an advertisement for feminine hygiene products. The minute it appeared in magazines, the image produced such a scandal, it looked as if her career was over. But whenever a door shuts on an in-your-face woman, she just kicks open another door.

In Miller's case, she wangled an introduction to the well-known surrealist photographer Man Ray, who lived and worked in Paris. Modeling for Ray while she honed her craft as a surrealist photographer herself, Miller soon began to get noticed for something besides her beauty.

The beginning of World War II found Miller living in Great Britain and, ignoring U.S. Embassy orders for all Americans to return home immediately, she took a position as a freelance war photographer for Vogue Magazine. By the end of the war five years later, she had established herself as a serious photojournalist, having covered such difficult locations as the fighting in Luxembourg and Alsace, the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau, harrowing scenes of children dying in Vienna, and even the execution of Prime Minister Lazlo Bardossy. In the concentration camps, when the other photographers couldn't bring themselves to do anything but puke, Miller was doggedly snapping one shot after another.

Unfortunately, Miller's war time experiences left her struggling for the rest of her life with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Yet the work she forced herself to do during that time will stand as a record to chronicle all that horror so the victims will not have died in vain. Sometimes in-your-face women pay dearly for their refusal to turn away from the task that lies before them when they believe it's the right thing to do.

Louise Michel

Being born in France in the mid-1800's and trained to be a teacher, Louise Michel may have startled a few folks right at first when she refused to acknowledge Napoleon III, which meant she wouldn't be allowed to teach in public school. But by the time she'd found a small school that would accept her in the Montmarte section of Paris, it was apparent to anyone who would listen that Michel was an anarchist of the first order.

On the front lines, during the Commune of Paris, when the workers ran the government out of town and took over the city for a couple of months, Michel fought at the barricades, carried the injured to safety, recruited street people to join the struggle, wrote revolutionary poetry, and spent hours ranting passionate tirades against those with the power. Dragged into court and tried for attempting to overthrow the government by means of armed violence, Michel stared down the judge and said, "Since it seems that every heart that beats for freedom has no right to anything but a little slug of lead, I demand my share. If you let me live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance." Which got her deported to the South Pacific.

This might have discouraged some people, but Louise Michel was an in-your-face woman, so she just learned the indigenous language and started organizing the native islanders to fight for their own liberation from the French colonists. So they sent Michel back to France.

Back in France, of course, Michel picked up where she left off: organizing, teaching, writing, and speaking throughout France. Putting her in prison or jail for periods of up to several years at a time didn't even slow her down and certainly didn't stop her. So someone eventually got the idea to try putting her in a mental hospital, except that they couldn't even get her in the door before she escaped to England to continue her work there.

When Michel died at the age of seventy-five, she was in a hotel room in Marseilles preparing to give another revolutionary speech. Today, many schools, historical sites, a famous church courtyard in the Montmarte, and the Parisian metro station are all named for the woman who was referred to by one scholar as "the French grande dame of anarchy." The bottom line is that Louise Michel simply wouldn't shut her mouth about what she believed to be true, something that has been said about many in-your-face women.

Jane Digby el Mezrab

Born an English aristocrat in the early 1800's, Jane Digby must have been fairly easily bored. We can guess this because she took four husbands and many lovers, including King Ludwig I of Bavaria; his son, King Otto of Greece; and who knows how many statesmen and generals.

Divorced from her first husband -- the 2nd Baron of Ellenborough -- by an act of Parliament for her "scandalous life," Digby wrecked emotional havoc across Europe in her effort to keep herself occupied. Once, when she tired of royalty, she hooked up for a while with a Greek revolutionary, living with him in caves and hunting on horseback for their dinner.

When she was forty-six (and he was twenty-six!), she married a Syrian sheikh under Muslim law, added el Mezrab to her name, learned Arabic ( in addition to the eight languages she already knew), started dressing Arab style, and began living six months per year in a goat-hair tent in the desert. And the happy couple stayed together until she died nearly three decades later. An in-your-face woman can really get someone's attention. Even a sheikh. Half her age.