Ethel Walker

When Ethel Walker's physician father died in 1884, her British mother fairly quickly married another man and moved to Washington, D.C. with her new husband. How ever and why it worked out that way, Ethel -- barely an adolescent -- wound up first in Connecticut and then in Pennsylvania, separated from both her mother and her beloved older sister and largely responsible for her own financial well-being.

This hardship, coming so soon on the heels of the loss of her father as well as the loss of her brother (who died a year before her father did), could well have collapsed the resolve of a less strong and independent soul. But with aplomb that would characterize her all her life, Walker finished high school and then college, with a bachelor's degree in history and economics from Bryn Mawr.

Spending the next couple of decades teaching and serving in various administrative posts, despite her lack of resources and business experience, Walker began to get the itch to start her own college preparatory girls' school. "I learned to teach by teaching," she later said, "and secretarial work by doing it, and I took a chance that I might learn how to manage a school from having one."

So, in 1911, at thirty-nine-years of age, she opened The Ethel Walker School with ten students utterly committed to a highly rigorous regimen of academic study, athletic achievement, and unfailingly demanding discipline. The first five years, the school survived only on a wing and a prayer. But by her death in the 1960's, Walker had watched her school -- her dream -- take root and grow capable of facing the challenges that marked the second half of its first century.

Some in-your-face women march into battle. Some rob banks. But some in-your-face women -- like Ethel Walker -- put off marriage to focus on their work, turn a dream into a reality with little more than determination, and so, are instrumental in producing generation after generation of other in-your-face women. Not a bad legacy, is it?

Lillian Wald

When Vassar College turned down her application for admittance in the late 1800's because she was only sixteen, Lillian Wald just went to nurse's training instead. It was a life changing and even historical decision. Undaunted by any challenge, Wald's work with the children at an orphanage convinced her that she needed to start providing services -- medical and otherwise -- for immigrants in New York City, most of whom were living in abject poverty.

She taught nutrition and cooking, sewing and emergency medical procedures. She provided recreational activities for the children. And she even moved into the neighborhood to be more accessible, coining the term "public health nurse." Over time, she got so much attention for her work that philanthropists started throwing money at her and by 1913, Wald was supervising a team of ninety-two people.

Writing a pair of books about her work helped to publicize its importance and effectiveness and further helped her to fund it, as well as her other interest: organizing around labor rights and child labor issues. She lobbied for children to go to school rather than work. She lobbied for rights for African-Americans and racially integrated all classes at her Henry Street Settlement House. She helped to organize the women's suffrage movement in New York City, marched against entering World War I, and helped to establish both the NAACP and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. No wonder The New York Times named her one of the twelve greatest living American women in 1922, but getting her to stand still long enough to accept the award must have been quite a trick!

Rosetta Wakeman

Even though Rosetta Wakeman was only five feet tall and in her late teens, with no offer of marriage and her family in poverty, she decided in 1862 that her best bet to help out was to dress like a man and take a job building a canal. It worked. She was able to take care of herself and send money home. But when she found out that men enlisting in the Union Army received a sign-on bonus of $152, she couldn't resist such a windfall. So she marched on down to her friendly neighborhood recruiter, told him her name was Lyons Wakeman and left for war.

An initial stint protecting the White House may have given Wakeman a false sense of security about surviving the situation, but in February of 1864, her regiment was shipped to Louisiana to participate in the Red River Campaign. Marching for hundreds of miles through the backwater swamps didn't kill her and neither did the battles, some of which lasted all night. But contaminated water resulted in chronic diarrhea and she died in New Orleans and was buried under the name Private Lyons Wakeman in the Chalmette National Cemetary.

We know all this today because she wrote letters to her family throughout her two years in the army. In one of them, sent from Washington, D.C., Wakeman wrote: "I don't know how long before I shall have to go into the field of battle. For my part, I don't care. I don't feel afraid to go." Said like a true in-your-face woman who's just trying to make a living.

Nancy Wake

Born in New Zealand in 1912 and raised in Australia, Nancy Wake set out to seek her fortune when she was sixteen and, after touching base in New York and London, she found it in Paris in the person of a wealthy French industrialist who she promptly married. When the Nazis occupied France, she immediately became a courier for the French Resistance and began to work with those who aided Allied soldiers and others to escape the country.

By 1943, Wake (called "The White Mouse" by the Germans because she was so good at eluding capture) was the Gestapo's most sought resistance fighter, with a 5-million franc bounty on her head. Still, she was so in-your-face that she'd pass through the German checkpoints winking flirtatiously and say, "Do you want to search me?"

When it became obvious that she needed to bolt for safety, Wake crossed the Pyrenees into Spain and on to Britain, where she joined the British Special Operations Executive and parachuted right back into France. A "good and fast shot" with a great attitude under duress, she had soon helped to recruit, train, and organize a resistance force of 7,500 guerilla fighters in the hills around Montlucon.

Leading attacks on Gestapo headquarters personally, Wake proved herself capable on many occasions of killing in cold blood. Later, during an interview, she remembered killing a sentry who spotted her. "They'd taught this judo-chop stuff with the flat of the hand at SOE, and I practised away at it. But this was the only time I used it -- whack -- and it killed him all right." Another mission required her to ride a bicycle 500 miles though multiple German checkpoints.

After the war, Wake received more than a dozen medals and acknowledgements. Unfortunately, it was only then she learned that her husband has been tortured to death by the Gestapo in their efforts to locate her. It can be dangerous to be an in-your-face woman. It can also be dangerous to be close to one.

Marguerite Vourc’h

After the German reich had taken over her village in France and her two brothers had run for their lives, fourteen-year-old Marguerite Vourc'h stepped forward without hesitation to gather and pass on information about German soldiers, boats, and the locations of mines.  Pretending to be just a schoolgirl on her bicycle, Vourc'h delivered fake identification cards to the Resistance and hid airmen waiting to leave France -- even while German troops were billeted at her family home! 

Day after day, she would peddle the streets with folders of military information bulging among her school books.  Later, she was quoted as saying, "I was aware of risking everything, but tried not to think about it. I wasn’t scared even though one of my brothers was shot by the Germans in Paris...We wanted to be of use...That was our aim, to help win the war. I would do it all again if I had to."  Apparently, some in-your-face women start out as in-your-face girls and never get over it.

Marga von Etzdorf

The daughter of a Royal Prussian military officer who left her orphaned when she was four, Marga von Etzdorf was remarkably athletic from a young age. In fact, she had mastered fencing, horseback riding, and hockey before she was out of her teens. So looking for new horizons, von Etzdorf decided to learn how to fly.

Satisfying all the criteria to complete a very rigorous licensure process, including 10,000 air miles, von Etzdorf was grilled by five examiners for three hours before they agreed that she passed, despite being self-taught since women weren't allowed to train at German flight schools. Over time, she added commercial flying, gliding, and aeronautics to her bag of tricks, and won momentary salutes for making a 12-day journey over Siberia to Japan.

But when a landing with the wind in Syria went bad, the twenty-five-year-old pilot went into a quiet room at the airport and shot herself. Very high achievers sometimes find themselves unable to accept falling short of perfection. An unattainable standard can bring down even an in-your-face woman.

Barbara Villiers

Barbara Villiers -- also known as Barbara Palmer  or Lady Castlemaine -- had so much influence as the mistress of King Charles II of England that she was often called "the uncrowned queen." Poor but drop dead gorgeous, Villiers married young and then more or less ignored her husband for the rest of his life, taking up with Charles and bearing him five children, which he unashamedly acknowledged as his.

Villiers was so powerful, she was appointed to the Queen's personal staff (against the Queen's wishes), despite the fact that she had chosen to settle in at one of the palaces and give birth to a second child by the King while he and his wife were on their honeymoon. And he routinely lavished gifts, including titles and estates, on Villiers, and provided for their children in public and permanent ways. Still, she was only one of thirteen of his mistresses, even if she was often the favorite.

Far from submissive, not only did Villiers dabble in politics, playing both ends against the middle if she thought it would benefit her to do so, but she dabbled in other lovers, as well, giving them extravagant gifts out of the largesse she herself received from Charles. When he finally tossed her aside, she retired to France for several years but found her way back to "say good-bye" the week before the King died.

One might have thought that Villiers' influence would have been left in the 1600's, but thanks to Charles' embrace of their children, some of this in-your-face woman's descendants have drawn their own share of attention.  They include, for example, Lady Diana Spencer (better recognized as Princess Di) and Sarah of York (better recognized as "Fergie"), both do-it-on-their-own-terms women in their own right. Villiers would probably be pleased.

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria of England began her historic 63-year reign in 1837. She was eighteen-years-old and throughout her life, she accepted the responsibilities of her position as gracefully as any probably have. Though she was only five feet tall and eventually, somewhat round, to boot, the way she carried herself made sure she was properly respected. Even her personal life was a model of virtue for her first forty years.

Falling madly in love with her first cousin, who she married three years after she took the throne, she bore four little princes and five little princesses while she was ruling her country. But when Albert died of typhoid fever, the good queen showed a different, more in-your-face side of herself.

Despite the fact that she wore widow's weeds for the rest of her life, only a couple of years passed before she found and hired a Scottish manservant named John Brown. She was in her early forties; he in his mid-thirties. And nature took its course.

The family (and some others) were more or less shocked, but Queen Victoria wasn't having it. Brown was moved into a special room and for the next twenty-two years, he was never far from her side. Some even called the queen "Mrs. Brown" behind her back. And in truth, when she died and her burial instructions were carried out, her husband's dressing gown was laid in the casket on her right, but in her left hand, covered by a bouquet of flowers, was a photo and lock of John Brown's hair and on the third finger of her right hand was Brown's mother's wedding ring.

However much she loved Albert and John Brown, though, when Brown died in 1883, leaving her bereft once more, the Queen hired a couple of Indian men as waitservants and in rapid order, Abdul Karim (in his mid-twenties to her sixty-eight!) moved into the room -- and apparently the position? -- John Brown had earlier occupied. Not only was he a commoner and a "foreigner," but a person of color, too. But being that Victoria Regina was Queen, nobody could do anything about it but wring their hands. And it was not a private affair. When the royal family met for special occasions, for example, and the servants ate elsewhere, Karim (to the family's horror) ate with them.

We might imagine that, with so much power, any queen would be an in-your-face woman, but history tells us this is not the case. Queens and Kings, in fact, have to satisfy long lists of rules and many, many people. Which is what some of them step down to avoid. But Queen Victoria made no bones about what she was going to do and dared anyone to try and stop her. And that's an in-your-face woman Queen!

Loreta Velazquez

It may be that every single fact in Loreta Velazquez' book is not necessarily exactly true, but even if just half of it is, that would put her over the line as an in-your-face woman, regardless. At six hundred pages, The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and Travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez, Otherwise Known As Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, Confederate States Army, tells so many stories with so many details, anybody who lived through a good portion of those situations would be hard put to remember all of them perfectly in any case.

Published in 1876, Velazquez' account has her born in Havana, Cuba, in 1842 and then educated at least partly in New Orleans. When her first fiance signed up to fight in the Civil War, in spite of his objections, Velazquez found a couple of uniforms and enlisted as well, which was hardly difficult, if the many documented stories of women doing so are any indication. She writes about participating -- as Harry T. Buford -- in the first battle at Bull Run, the siege at Fort Donelson, and Shiloh. And more than once she was either discovered or nearly so, which will keep a woman thinking fast and moving quickly.

Velazquez claimed four husbands, all of which supposedly left her widowed, but whether she was actually legally married or not, we know for sure she gave birth to a son. And at least one newspaper article of the period refers to a  soldier being discovered to be a woman with a name Velazquez was known to use on occasion. So it's not hard to believe that, if she didn't do everything she said, she did enough to claim her status as an in-your-face woman. In fact, it's probably truer than not that she did some stuff she didn't write about. In-your-face women are like that.

Peggy van Lier

In her mid-twenties during World War II in Belgium, Peggy van Lier decided not to sit quietly by and just try to live through the Nazi occupation. So she joined in-your-face woman Dede de Jongh's Comet Line, a highly organized underground system that sheltered downed Allied pilots and smuggled them back to safety through Spain.

Pretending to be a worker with a Swedish Red Cross agency that provided food and clothing for children, van Lier actually helped to forge papers, organize hiding places, and supervise pilot escorts. Highly energetic, she inspired others to work harder and risk more and was so invaluable to the Line that she eventually received multiple national recognitions, including the Belgian Croix de Guerre with Palm and the Netherlands Resistance Cross.

On one occasion, she was taken and interrogated by what she later called "a fat, evil, rat-faced SS officer," but she remained so cool -- despite being told that they had just shot to death one of her co-workers -- that she fooled them into releasing her. Even though her identity was now badly compromised, van Lier still had to be ordered by her superior to escape to Great Britain before she would agree to stop her activities. And even in safety, she learned to parachute and kept up her training so she would be ready should they ever change their minds and decide to send her back in.

Peggy van Lier and the Comet Line saved more than 800 pilots, most of which would otherwise have unquestionably perished. But who was counting? Certainly not an in-your-face woman.

Elizabeth Van Lew

Elizabeth Van Lew was only twenty-five-years old when her father died, leaving his thriving hardware business in Richmond, Virginia, to her and her brother. She had been educated at a Quaker school and her abolitionist leanings were so strong that the first thing she did when she received her inheritance was to talk her brother into freeing the family's nine slaves. And the second was to spend the entire $10,000 in cash she also received to buy up and free as many as possible of the family's former slaves' relatives.

Then, as if that wasn't enough, when the Civil War began, Van Lew became active in earnest. Allowed to visit the Union Army prisoners at the Libby Prison, she brought them food and clothes, but also information on how to escape and find their way safely home. They, of course, returned the favor by giving her information about Confederate troop movements which she then smuggled out to the Union military leaders in hollow eggs.

Not satisfied yet, however, Van Lew proceeded to set up a bonafide spy ring, gathering information from multiple sources, including in-your-face woman Mary Bowser, a former family slave Van Lew talked into a position as household help in the home of Confederate President Jeff Davis himself! One highly placed Union officer credited her with "the greater portion of our intelligence in 1864-1865."

When the war was over, Van Lew hoisted the first American flag in Richmond, which didn't exactly make her popular with her neighbors. And despite the fact that she was allowed to have personally (and hide) all the paperwork outlining her importance as a spy, everyone knew she was made Postmaster of Richmond as a reward for something. To this day, Van Lew is seen by many in the U.S. South as a traitor to the cause. But regardless of all that, she was and will be remembered also as an unapologetically in-your-face woman.