Ella Flagg Young

Despite the fact that she had almost no formal education as a child, Ella Flagg Young took the examination for teacher certification in 1865 and passed it at the age of fifteen only to be told she was too young to be a teacher. Nobody she knew (not even her parents) believed she could or should continue her efforts in that direction. But Young was an in-your-face woman who paid them no mind whatsoever. So she graduated from the Chicago Normal School at seventeen and was subsequently married and then widowed within a decade.

Freed of the conventions of respectable responsibility as a married woman in the 1800's, Young turned her attentions to her career in education. By 1887, she had become the Superintendent of Schools in Chicago. By 1899, she was a professor of Education in the University of Chicago, receiving her Ph.D. from that institution the following year. She served on the Board of Education for the State of Illinois from 1888 to 1913. And the National Education Association elected her President in 1910.

Young was not, however, just a theoretical and administratively-oriented educator. She pushed the development of critical thinking and discussion for both boys and girls, appointed deans to counsel youth, and even introduced sex hygiene programs in school -- the first anywhere. Needless to say, Young was also strongly committed to the struggle of women to gain the right to vote. An in-your-face woman doesn't stop because others tell her she should. She doesn't follow the roads most travelled. And the result, which is hardly surprising, is that others follow her.

Louise Yim

Born in Korea in 1899, five years after the Japanese assassinated the Korean queen and took over her country, Louise Yim was only a young girl when she was accused of having "wild blood" because she didn't want to marry before she even reached her teens. As the Japanese continued to establish and wield their power, Yim and tens of thousands of other Koreans responded by organizing the March 1st Movement in 1919. The Japanese took brutal retaliatory action, using beatings, torture, imprisonment, and public executions to put down the rebellion and maintain their domination until 1945.

Yim -- who was tortured herself and called by some "Korea's Joan of Arc" -- eventually wrote a book entitled My Forty Year Fight for Korea. She didn't just fight to free her country, however. She also fought to free the women of her country from Korean traditional norms, such as child marriage and the refusal to allow women and girls to be educated.

Earning her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Southern California, Yim served in the Republic of Korea National Assembly for several years after the Korean War and then served as the South Korean delegate to the United Nations, as well. "It has always been a great mystery to me why men think that women are different from them intellectually," Yim wrote as the in-your-face woman she has been since a child. "[B]esides certain physical differences and the ability of a woman to bear children, a women thinks of all the things a man does. Just because she allows herself to be exiled in the kitchen doesn't mean she gives up her feelings as an individual."

Zofi Yamaika

Unlike many in the 1930's, Zofia Yamaika -- barely a teenager, though already in-your-face -- recognized the dangers of the fascist ideology sweeping Europe and joined Spartacus, a communist club at school dedicated to fighting the movement. Then, when the Germans occupied Poland, Yamaika quit school and revived the now banned club to print and distribute anti-fascist posters and leaflets throughout Warsaw, despite the obvious dangers involved.

In 1940, when the Germans rounded up and forced more than 400,000 Jews behind the walls of an area not much more than a mile square, Yamaika trained with a pistol, but she was afraid to take further action for fear of repercussions descending on her parents. When they were all deported for parts unknown, however, Yamaika escaped and joined a band of resistance fighters near Radom.

On February 9, 1943, three hundred German soldiers suddenly descended on a group of fifty resisters. Yamaika and two others volunteered to engage the Germans while their comrades could get away. Yamaika -- in-your-face to the end -- saved her bullets until the enemy was within eight feet of her before opening fire with her machine gun. She died protecting the backs of her fleeing unit. In-your-face women are never more alive than at the moment of their deaths.

Rosalyn Yalow

Born in 1921, even though she was destined to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine some years later, in-your-face woman Rosalyn Yalow had to use her typing skills and learn how to take dictation to get through college working as a secretary. Then, she caught a break. World War II sent so many men into war that graduate schools let women in just to stay open. And Yalow was one of those women.

By the end of the war, Yalow had graduated with her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the only woman in a class of 400. Taking a position at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital, she collaborated with Solomon Berson to develop a radioisotope tracing technique that allowed tiny quantities of substance in human blood (or other aqueous solutions) to be measured. This made it possible to measure hormones, viruses, drugs, insulin and other substances too small to see under a microscope. The technique could have made Yalow and Berson very, very rich, but they refused to patent it, believing that it should be available to help humans in general, rather than just the ones who could afford to pay through the nose for it.

In 1975, Yalow was awarded the American Medical Association Scientific Achievement Award. In 1976, she received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. And in 1977, she was awarded the Nobel Prize. Imagine what the human race would have lost if she had just stayed a secretary working for other scientists after she graduated from college in New York. Or if war hadn't opened up one slot for her to study at the University of Illinois. Or if she had prioritized her husband and two children and the kosher home she kept over her work in the laboratory.

What is Yalow's message to the in-your-face women of the present world, who stand on the brink of their own futures? "We still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and wants to belong exclusively in the home; that a woman should not aspire to achieve more than her male counterparts and particularly not more than her husband...The world cannot afford the loss of the talents of half its people if we are to solve the many problems which beset us." Listen up!

Yael

According to scholars, one of the oldest stories in the Hebrew Bible is the story of Yael. The subject of many paintings throughout history, this in-your-face woman distinguished herself when the Israeli armies of Deborah (led by Barak) met the Canaanite armies of Jabin (led by Sisera).

The Canaanites were routed and Sisera had run for his life right into the arms of Yael, who greeted him with apparent hospitality and a big bowl of milk. After Sisera drank the milk and fell asleep, Yael came to where he lay and drove a tent peg through his temple with a mallet, making her a hero of her people for all time. One account of the incident (by Pseudo-Philo in the Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum) has Yael saying to Sisera as he dies: "Go, boast before your father in hell and tell him that you have fallen into the hands of a woman." An in-your-face woman, that is.

Wu Zeitian

Wu Mei (meaning "pretty" in classical Chinese) refused to do needlework like the other little girls in 635, preferring instead to read. And when her parents traveled, she rushed to tag along, learning firsthand all that existed in her native China.

Tapped to be an imperial concubine at thirteen, Wu spent several years at the palace and, at the Emperor's death, she was sent to a Buddhist convent as was expected at the time. However events unfolded over the next few years, Wu wound up back in the palace and, in truth, some accounts suggest that she never left. In any case, she wound up in the bed of her step son, became his consort, had two sons and a daughter by him, took over as Empress, got rid of all those who opposed her power, and took over the throne as Emperor herself at her step son's death.

Some thought Wu killed her husband. The symptoms of his degenerating health could have been high blood pressure, but they might have been the results of slow poisoning over a period of time, as well. Either way, he died in 683, leaving all that unattended power right in front of Wu, who was more than up to the challenge of ensuring that no one -- not even her sons -- would get in her way of wielding it. By 690, she was officially Wu Zeitian (as she was known once she took position as Emperor).

During her fifteen years in absolute power, Taoism, Buddhism, architecture, education and literature all flourished. She expanded the Chinese empire deep into central Asia. She attended to the needs of the common people. And she increased gender equality during her reign. Her willingness to connive, manipulate, and murder to consolidate and protect her power has been criticized, of course, but in this, she was not vastly different from most men obsessed with power. A woman willing to do what is necessary to amass and maintain power in highly complicated social settings and dramatic times is really just demonstrating -- and being criticized for -- her in-your-facedness. Ho hum.

Susanna Wright

Susanna Wright's Quaker family immigrated to Pennsylvania from England in 1714 at a time when women were barely more than furniture, servants or breeding cows. But she didn't care a whit. She was an in-your-face woman and didn't give the norms a second thought.

Physician Benjamin Rush (one of the forefathers of the United States) called Wright: "a lady who has been celebrated above half a century for her wit, good sense and valuable improvements of mind." From her house at Wright's Ferry on the edge of the frontier (see above), she counseled such luminaries of the time as Benjamin Franklin (who talked her into contributing to his pamphlet on the massacre of the Conestoga Indians) and James Logan, the Mayor of Philadelphia.

In addition to her much sought after counsel, Wright -- who never took the time or inclination to marry -- engaged in scientific study (about the uses of medicinal herbs, for one thing), raised silkworms, and helped her neighbors make sense of official matters, all of which made her the hub of a wheel of much influence in colonial America. But it was her poetry that resonates with in-your-face women still.

Wright encouraged other women to do as she had done, using reason to call into question male privilege protected by law. She wrote: "But womankind call reason to their aid and question when or where that law was made, that law divine (a plausible pretense) oft urged with none and oft with little sense." It didn't do much to change the status quo in the 1700's and the situation hasn't changed a great deal since beyond the superficial, but it tells us in-your-face women not only existed at that time, but were hard at the work of challenging the system.

Muriel Wright

Muriel Wright was born in 1889 to a Choctaw physician and a Presbyterian missionary who came to the reservation as a teacher. Rather than being a source of limitation and shame, however, her bi-racial heritage was a source of great pride for her. On one hand, a couple of her ancestors arriving on the Mayflower got her a membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. On the other hand, she was deeply committed to nurturing her Choctaw roots.

Her grandfather (who named Oklahoma) was Chief of the Choctaw from 1866 to 1870 and her father was so respected that he was made the Choctaw delegate to Washington when Oklahoma was made a state in 1907. So Wright was not only comfortable on the reservation, she was fully capable in young adulthood of functioning equally comfortably among the most elite of the elite in political circles.

Like her mother and grandmother before her, Wright entered the field of education, where she was a jill of all trades: teacher of Latin and English, school principal, basketball coach, and even director of the senior play. But that was never enough for her, as she resolutely pressed in multiple ways and multiple settings for just recompense for Native American nations as the U.S. government increased their power over them. One doesn't necessarily have to shout to be very in-your-face.

Wright's continual vigilance and unswerving commitment to protecting and revering Native American heritage in the U.S. -- in such ways as helping to form the Choctaw Advisory Council in 1934 as a bargaining unit and spearheading the effort to place more than five hundred historical markers across the state of Oklahoma --  resulted in the North American Indian Women's Association naming her the Outstanding Indian Woman of the 20th Century. And "outstanding," as we know, can be just another word for "in-your-face."

Fanny Workman

Fanny Workman's father was Governor of Massachusetts in the mid-1800's and a very rich man, which she enjoyed so much that, when the time came, she married a very rich man, too. They left the U.S. to live and bike around Europe, which was fun, but not as much fun as climbing mountains, so they added that to their regular endeavors, being as they didn't have to work to support themselves and all.

Workman could have had children, of course, and some encouraged her to do so, but that would have infringed upon her traveling, exploring, lecturing, writing, biking, climbing, and map-making. So Workman just stayed busy doing what she loved and let others raise the future generation.

Aside from her wealth and her ability to force her way quite successfully into activities usually reserved for men, Workman was also known for her vigorous demands that she be recognized for whatever she did that she was proud of. It's not easy being an in-your-face woman. They want all the credit they so richly deserve and they won't be satisfied until they get it.

Barbara Wootton

Most people disagreed with Barbara Wootton about something because she held a number of divergent, controversial, and apparently contradictory views. In A Critical Woman: Barbara Wootten, Social Science and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century, Ann Oakley writes: "She was too radical and visionary, too far ahead of her time...[And] it wasn't just crime and justice or economics or social welfare. It was everything."

Born in Great Britain in 1897, when women's intelligence was still being disregarded, Wootten's economics exams at Girton College, Cambridge University, were declared to demonstrate "special distinction" (a recognition never before offered), but she still wasn't allowed to graduate because she was a woman. And when Wootten lectured at Cambridge anyway in 1921 (at the age of 24), the lectures were advertised to be delivered by a fictitious "Mr. Henderson" with only a footnote to indicate who the lecturer really was. No wonder she marched for women's suffrage!

Still, Wootten published books on economics, politics, social welfare and public policy from 1938 to 1974, while serving on royal commissions and committees related to worker's rights, the press, civil service, and the criminal justice system. Made one of the first Life Peers in the House of Lords in 1958 because she simply couldn't be ignored, she pushed through a bill abolishing capital punishment. She believed in doctor-assisted suicide. And she co-chaired a committee to produce The Wootten Report on Cannabis, making the argument (in 1968) that marijuana is safer than alcohol and should be just as legal.

It's not hard to see why Oakley suggests that, if Wootten had been a man, she would have been "lord chief justice or something similar." But that would have meant that she couldn't have been an in-your-face woman. And we wouldn't want that, would we?

Victoria Claflin Woodhull

To say Victoria Claflin Woodhull was ahead of her time is an understatement of fairly substantial proportions. She believed women should be able to marry, divorce, bear children, or even engage in prostitution when and with whom they chose. She made -- and lost -- a fortune as a "magnetic healer," made another fortune by opening a Wall Street brokerage house, and then established a weekly newspaper demanding equal rights for women and supporting union organizing in the U.S. in the late 1800's.

When she published an account of the adulterous affair of another candidate while she was running for the U.S. Presidency in 1872, Woodhull was arrested on obscenity charges since the authorities couldn't legally arrest her just for being an in-your-face woman. She was already twice divorced at the time and currently in a "relationship" with an anarchist (not to mention too young to serve, according to the Constitution), but she didn't see why any of that should keep her out of the White House in a country where men had always been allowed to ignore the traditional norms without repercussion. In a speech in New York City, she boldly announced, "Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please; and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere."

Other women -- even some other in-your-face women -- didn't immediately support Woodhull's perspectives and actions, considering her (and rightly so) something of a wild card. But when she testified before Congress that women's right to vote should be recognized as already covered by the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, she was just too in-your-face to keep out of the conversation. There's no such thing, apparently, as a woman being too in-your-face.