Mae West

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to a prizefighter and a corset model in 1893, Mae West started entertaining people at five-years-old and climbed onto the Vaudeville stage at fourteen. Then, she hit Broadway only a few years later in a show that folded almost immediately, but not before West was "discovered" by the New York Times. Developing a theatrical personna is a complicated matter, but West took her vampish walk from female impersonators and parlayed a show she wrote herself entitled simply "Sex" into a career booster by promptly getting arrested for "corrupting the morals of youth."

Continuing to write plays with titles like "The Drag," "The Pleasure Man," and "The Constant Sinner," West finally achieved success on Broadway when she wrote and performed in "Diamond Lil." But it was Hollywood that made her famous around the world for her in-your-face attitude. In her film debut (at nearly forty!) with already established movie star George Raft, West's scenes were small, but she put herself on the map instantly when a hat check girl in one scene said the line, "Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!" and West added a line by responding in her own inimitable fashion, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie."

In her subsequent film career, West saved Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy with "She Done Him Wrong" and followed that up with such classics as "I'm No Angel" and "Klondike Annie," so that by 1935, West was the second-highest paid person in the United States (behind William Randolph Hearst). But religious indignation hounded her throughout her career and got her thrown off radio during the 1940's, not so much for what she said as how she said it.

Still performing into her seventies, West had a whole string of lovers in her life and was just as unapologetic about them as she was about everything else. When her landlord refused to allow her to entertain African-American boxer William "Gorilla" Jones, for example, she simply bought the building so he could come and go whenever he pleased. Some in-your-face women keep a low profile on occasion. Mae West was not one of them.

Linda Wertheimer

According to Linda Wertheimer, getting a scholarship to go to Wellesley College, where all the students were women,"gave me the sense that women could run things...And I just never thought that it made sense to give that up." After an internship at the British Broadcasting Corporation, she was turned down by NBC because she was a woman, which turned out eventually to be a very bad decision on their part, when she joined National Public Radio where ten million listeners made her one of the most respected news anchors in modern media.

Her coverage of Watergate, the Iran/Contra Scandal, the attacks on 9/11, no less than twelve different election nights, and her development of the hugely famous news and features show, "All Things Considered," marks the career of an in-your-face woman who dives into complicated issues without a second glance. Still, she doesn't find any of it remarkable. In fact, she once observed, "Any working woman my age can probably tell you the times she was first woman to do something in her workplace: make partner, work through pregnancy, become chief of surgery, curator of painting, the first woman in a newsroom, the first woman hired...and there are still some big firsts out there I'm hoping someone will crack." Any takers?

Ida Barnett Wells

As a young teacher in the late 1800’s, Ida B. Wells refused to move from the first class railway car she was riding in to the “Jim Crow” car -- earmarked for African-Americans and without first class accommodations. When the conductor tried to remove her bodily, she bit the back of his hand and was forcibly ejected from the train. Not willing to leave it there, Wells sued and originally won her case in court, but ultimately lost on appeal.

Some years later, after a friend of hers was lynched by a White mob for trying to prevent them from destroying his store, Wells used her newspaper to kick off an aggressive campaign against the practice of lynching. Though an angry mob retaliated by destroying her newspaper office and sending out the word that her life was in danger, she just moved to New York City and continued her highly militant campaign from there.  You can't stop an in-your-face woman by running her out of town.

Alice Stebbins Wells

Alice Stebbins Wells started out as a minister in Kansas, but by the time she arrived in Los Angeles, California, in her thirties, she had decided she wanted to be a police officer. In-your-face women had been hired as private detectives. In-your-face women had been hired to take care of women prisoners. But Wells wanted to wear a badge and hit the streets like uniformed men officers who enforced and upheld the law.

She had to petition the mayor, the police commissioner, and the Los Angeles City Council, but she finally pulled it off, being sworn in on September 12, 1910, and equipped with a badge, a police officer's telephone call box, and a rule book. She was so effective that, in no time at all, the order went out that female suspects could only be questioned by a woman (which would have to be Wells, of course, until a few more women were added to the roll).

Other police departments in the U.S. and in other countries soon followed Los Angeles' example, so that, by the time Wells retired thirty years later, she had established an International Policewoman's Association, as well as the Women's Peace Officers Association of California. A movie about her life was produced in 1914. And when she died in 1957, high ranking members of the LAPD attended her funeral, at which ten women officers formed an honor guard in Wells' memory. In-your-face women don't necessarily want to join everything, but when they do want to join, it's very difficult to keep them out of the club.

Mary Brent Wehrli

Sometimes, an in-your-face woman's life has chapters like a book. Mary Brent Wehrli is one such woman. The chapter in the 1990's involved her serving as a Social Welfare professor at UCLA, where she established, among other things, a program for all first year students working toward a Masters degree in Social Work to spend at least one full day on Los Angeles' skid row. During that same chapter, she helped to organize grassroots coalitions to fight for a living wage law, to mobilize regional service agencies in response to the needs of the poor, and to move Los Angeles in the direction of declaring itself a sanctuary for Central American refugees. And in the process, she was named California's Social Welfare Practitioner of the Year in 1999.

The chapter before that, though, was even more lively because that was the decade during which Wehrli served as Executive Director of the Southern California Ecumenical Council's Interfaith Task Force on Central America, a body committed to educate and urge the religious community to oppose the U.S. government's interventionist foreign policies. One of her most in-your-face moments in that chapter was when Wehrli somehow finessed her way into a fundraising dinner for George Herbert Walker Bush, who was then campaigning for the U.S. Presidency. Standing up at an opportune moment, Wehrli loudly asked, "Will you do everything you can to end the bloodshed in Central America by withdrawing support for the repressive regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala?" All hell and a cadre of secret service agents broke loose immediately, with one of the agents grabbing Wehrli's blouse in such a way that it laid bare her shoulder (and part of her bra) for all the world to see.

Her current chapter is as a retired person, a position she has certainly earned, but it's doubtful such an in-your-face woman could lay all action and influence aside after getting used to having so much fun in the past.

Beatrice Webb

That Beatrice Webb was completely self-taught is only of passing interest. Many women born and raised in Great Britain in the 1800's missed the benefits of a formal education. But when you consider that she went on to be one of the founders of the Fabian Society, a group of socialist intellectuals that strongly influenced the Labor Party in their country, as well as one of the founders of the London School of Economics and Political Science, it becomes somewhat more apparent the degree to which Webb was an in-your-face woman. And a smart one at that.

Espousing the idea of cooperatives as a way for workers to maintain control over their own labor and the profits thereof, Webb wrote The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain in 1891 after doing extensive research on the topic. And a few years after that, she co-wrote a history of trade unionism with her husband as the first in a whole series of books they wrote together. Lest we imagine that her husband carried the weight, however, we need to note that it was Webb herself who coined the term "collective bargaining," a practice by which workers unite to more effectively negotiate with their bosses.

By 1919, she was publishing on other topics, such as Men and Women's Wages: Should They Be Equal? And as she aged, having not borne biological offspring, Webb was quoted as saying that she considered the London School of Economics and a highly successful periodical entitled The New Statesman as her symbolic children. Sometimes, an in-your-face woman socially reproduces herself as a way of leaving her mark on the future. Beatrice Webb was satisfied with that.

Jessica Watson

At age twelve, Jessica Watson decided she wanted to sail around the world -- unassisted and alone. At age sixteen, she did it. A citizen of both New Zealand and Australia, Watson grew up with her mom and dad and three siblings living and being home schooled on sailboats and in a double-decker bus. So she's more than comfortable on the water and in small spaces. But even for her, the seven-month voyage she took from October 18, 2009, until May 15, 2010 (three days before her seventeenth birthday), was a test of true spirit, which is actually the title of the book she wrote about her feat. "I hated being judged by my appearance and other people's expectations of what a 'little girl' is capable of," she explained after arriving triumphant back to her home port in Sydney.

Facing forty-foot waves and 80 mile per hour winds, having to repair virtually everything on her boat at one point or another, and spending hour after interminable hour alone, Watson traveled a total of 23,000 nautical miles in 210 days crossing the equator and all meridians of longitude without touching land or any other boat and without anyone giving her anything. Yet her route, her management, and her unwillingness to accept "advice" from the powers that be telling her she should attempt shorter trips to work up to her monumental accomplishment has been criticized by the mainstream male power structure that regulates who gets recognized and who does not.

Robbed of her "official" standing in the record books, Jessica knows that an in-your-face woman -- however young -- is liable to meet resistance. But she also knows who she is (as demonstrated by a whole raft of accolades and awards), as well as what she can do. And so do the 75,000 people that met her at the dock on her return. Nothing and no one can change that.

Frances Watkins

Frances Watkins was born free and Black in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1825. She got a good education and many opportunities to read and write. In fact, she got so good at writing that her poems were being published while she was still in her teens. But rather than just resting on her laurels, Watkins continually expanded her interests and her influence.

She was paid to deliver lectures on the abolition of slavery and the rights of women. She boldly assisted slaves to escape on the Underground Railroad. She reached out to and supported John Brown and his wife when he was arrested for his attack on the armory at Harper's Ferry. And she worked to get women the vote, reminding her White sisters that Black women needed to be included in their actions, as well.

"Talk as you will of woman's deep capacity for loving," Watkins preached, "I do not deny it; but will the mere possession of any human love fully satisfy all the demands of her whole being?...Woman -- if you would render her happy -- needs...her conscience [to] be enlightened, her faith in the true and right established, and scope given to her...God-given faculties." In-your-face women want more out of life than a husband and children to serve.

Kate Warne

Everyone's heard of the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency that started in the 1850's and still exists today. But few may realize that one of its earliest operatives was a young woman named Kate Warne. She talked her way into a job in 1856 and, within a couple of years, had distinguished herself as one of their most trustworthy and clever detectives.

Warne helped to recover $39,000 embezzled from the Adams Express Company. She became a one-woman spy bureau during the Civil War. And she finagled a bank robber's wife into admitting where he had hidden $130,000 in stolen money. But her most famous case involved being instrumental in foiling a carefully planned assassination attempt on the life of Abraham Lincoln when he was on his way to be inaugurated President of the United States.

Warne's adept investigation while she was pretending to be a rich Southern belle flirting her way through Baltimore uncovered the plot in the first place and once her information was corroborated, Allan Pinkerton himself joined Warne with several others to make sure the President would make it safely to Washington. It has been said that the way Warne stayed up all night while Lincoln slept on the train is what gave Pinkerton the idea for his agency's motto: "We never sleep."

Unfortunately, Kate Warne died of pneumonia at only thirty-five years of age, but not before establishing the fact that women make great detectives. They're smart, courageous, sometimes sneaky and ultimately, very in-your-face.

Vera Dawn Walker

Called the "Tiny Texan" because she was only 4'11" and weighed 97 pounds, Vera Dawn Walker was so short, she had to sit on pillows so she could reach the rudder pedals on the airplanes she loved to fly in the late 1920's.  And when flying alone didn't provide enough excitement, Walker just climbed out onto the wings and walked up and down while the plane was in the air!

Fascinated by birds swooping from tree to tree when she was a child, Walker grew up longing to do what they were doing. So, when a reporter asked her as an adult, "Why do you fly?" she shot back simply, "I want to!"

When she contracted tuberculosis after a flight to Guatemala in 1931, instead of retiring to a sanitorium to recuperate, Walker pitched a tent south of Tucson, Arizona, and spent four years placer mining. Nothing like a nice pile of gold nuggets to make an in-your-face woman forget her blues.

Mary Walker

Born in Oswego, New York, in 1832, Mary Walker grew up on a farm, spent a few years as a teacher and then graduated from medical school in time to offer to be a battlefield surgeon during the Civil War. Unfortunately, women doctors weren't taken very seriously at the time, so her initial practice, which she set up with her husband -- also a doctor -- didn't build the way it would have if she'd been a man, and the U.S. Army would only hire her as a civilian nurse.

Eventually, of course, as the war progressed and needs became more crucial, the Army made her an Assistant Surgeon, after which she traveled back and forth across the front lines to treat civilians caught in the cross fire. Her freedom of access got her arrested as a spy by the Confederate forces in 1864, but she was released in a prisoner exchange. And her service to her country resulted in her being awarded the Medal of Honor.

Subsequent stints as the supervisor of a women's prison and a children's orphanage suggest that she worked her way up some kind of ladder, but Walker had one idiosyncrasy that caused her continued problems. She insisted on wearing clothing usually reserved for men, including a top hat. When she became well known in the women's suffrage movement, her commitment to her clothing choice marginalized her greatly and she was, in fact, arrested on several occasions for "impersonating a man." In-your-face women don't see why they shouldn't become what they want to become, serve where and how they want to serve (or not), and wear exactly what they want to wear. Seems reasonable.