Dora Tamana

South African Dora Tamana lost three children to starvation and a husband to alcohol, but she never abdicated her responsibilities as a mother (to her own and her sister's children) and as a member of her community. When she heard that the Communists in Russia provided childcare for working mothers, for example, she was so impressed with the idea that she immediately organized childcare where she lived.

For a time afterward, she served the Communist Party in various capacities, but eventually, she decided that she must dedicate her energy to fighting the government's attempts to wipe out her community. It was all she and her neighbors had, ramshackle as it was. Rather than tearing the neighborhood down, they argued, conditions should be improved and the government should lead the efforts to accomplish that improvement.

When World War II caused severe food shortages on top of everything else, Tamana joined the African National Congress. If the White-controlled government would not be responsive to the needs of all South Africans, reasoned ANC members, then the government should be replaced. Over the next decade, Tamana marched, organized, protested and refused to cooperate when the government told her to move or not to leave her house.

In 1954, Tamana helped to organize the first Conference of the Federation of South African Women and she was elected to the organization's national executive committee. This gave her the opportunity to spend time in Switzerland, China and Russia, but that just drew further negative repercussions from the government, including two stints in prison, which debilitated her health. Still, whenever she could, Tamana continued her work, adding to everything else visiting and meeting the needs of political prisoners, one of whom was her son.

When the United Women's Organization was formed in 1981, Tamana -- eighty years old, blind and in a wheel chair -- gave the opening speech: "We must share the problems so that we can solve them together. We must free ourselves. Men and women must share housework...must work together in the home and out in the world. Women must unite to fight for...rights. We have opened the way for you. We must go forward!"

Mary Ann Talbot

Mary Anne Talbot's mother died giving birth to her in 1778. Fortunately, despite the fact that her father was undeclared, there was a bit of money following Talbot around from guardian to guardian and boarding school to boarding school for some time. It could certainly have been much worse.

At fourteen, however, Talbot was smuggled onto a ship by the ship's captain to serve, we must assume, as his mistress. She was listed as a footboy under the name "John Taylor," and so began Talbot's adventures in men's clothing.

After the captain was killed in battle in the Napoleonic wars, Talbot was wounded while serving as a drummer, but managed to keep her identity a secret. So, when she discovered that her inheritance had been squandered by the man who was supposedly looking out for her interests, Talbot decided to just keep up her ruse.

Going from ship to ship, Talbot served as a cabin boy and a powder monkey (keeping shooters supplied with gun powder during battles) until she was captured by the French and held in a dungeon for eighteen months. Having nearly lost her leg her last time out at sea forced Talbot to give up life on the ocean, after which she puttered around from one menial job to another and spent a time in debtor's prison.

When she died at the age of thirty, Talbot was acting as a houseservant for a publisher who promptly celebrated her death by publishing The Life and Surprising Adventures of Mary Anne Talbot. Sometimes in-your-face women boldly make unexpected choices or belligerently demand to do only what they want to do and, sometimes, they just play the hand they're dealt. Two hundred years later, we can't always know which it was.

Violette Szabo

By the time she was twenty-one years old, Violette Szabo had married, given birth to a daughter, been widowed when her husband died in battle, and volunteered to be an undercover agent in Nazi-occupied France. After being trained in navigation, evasion and escape, unarmed combat, the use of explosives and weaponry, and everything else she might need for the job, she parachuted into France in April of 1944.

On arrival, Szabo immediately helped to organize a new French Resistance group and went about the business of sabotaging roads, railway bridges and communication lines while sending back information to the Allies on the best targets for bombing. Then, after a month of intense activity, she returned to England for re-assignment.

When Szabo re-entered occupied France in June to help prepare for D-Day (the U.S. entry into the war), an unexpected Nazi roadblock resulting in a shoot-out put her in the hands of Nazi SS interrogators. After two months of imprisonment and torture, she was transferred to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp in Germany where she was executed in February of 1945, only three months before the war's end, in a flurry of killing intended to keep secret -- to the extent possible -- the scope and severity of Nazi war crimes.

A book written by Szabo's daughter Tania is entitled Young, Brave and Beautiful. The dramatized film version of her life is entitled Carve Her Name With Pride. And the video game Velvet Assassin, released in 2009, was inspired by Szabo and her missions in World War II. In-your-face women's bodies are sometimes murdered, but their spirits live on and on.

Kathy Switzer

The first modern day marathon -- a footrace of just over 26 miles -- was held at the Summer Olympics in 1896. The following year, a marathon was run in Boston and it's been run on the third Monday of April ever since. The only problem is that, until 1972, women couldn't compete in it. Not even against each other. It was a boys' club, pure and simple. No girls allowed.

Then, in 1967, Kathy Switzer registered under the name "K.V. Switzer," ran in, and completed the race. She knew she could do it. She and her boyfriend were both marathon runners. And she was used to presenting herself as K.V. Switzer as a journalist for her college newspaper. But they certainly knew what they were doing when she registered for the race and received the numbered sign all official participants wear.

It's not that women didn't participate, you understand. In fact, Kathy Switzer finished nearly an hour behind Bobbi Gibb, who just ran without being registered. But Switzer registered (illegally) and completed the race (thanks to her boyfriend, who intervened when a race official yelled "Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!" while trying to drag her off the course). The Amateur Athletic Union subsequently ruled that any woman who competed against men athletically would be barred from further competition in sanctioned athletic events. But five years later, women were -- finally -- allowed to register and run in the Boston Marathon.

For her single act of courage, Swtizer was subsequently inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and named Female Runner of the Decade (1967-1977). Why did the in-your-face woman run down the road? Because it was there.

Anne Sullivan

Anne Sullivan was eight years old when her mother died and she and her younger brother were sent to an orphanage in 1874. By the time she left the orphanage four years later, untreated eye infections had left her virtually blind, so she was sent to the Perkins School for the Blind, where she learned sign language and how to function generally in daily life.

One might have expected that, after graduation, she would just spend the rest of her life trying to recuperate from her awful childhood, but while it was not immediately recognizable, Sullivan's struggles had made her an in-your-face woman. So when a family named Keller in Tuscumbia, Alabama, contacted the Director of the Perkins School about needing a teacher for their out-of-control blind and deaf daughter, Helen, Sullivan agreed to pick up and go.

Moving from the Boston, Massachusetts, area to a small town in Alabama as a blind twenty-year-old -- after all her other ordeals -- was daunting, indeed. For one thing, the rampant racism and sexism so embedded in local tradition horrified Sullivan. And Keller showed no signs whatsoever of being teachable. Nevertheless, Sullivan hunkered down and refused to walk away. So, in time, she broke through to her young charge and a forty-nine year relationship was forged.

The story -- entitled The Miracle Worker -- appeared on television, then moved to Broadway, and ultimately was produced as an Oscar-winning feature-length film. A book about her first month with Keller (from Sullivan's perspective) was published in 2007 under the title Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller. And the play was back on Broadway as recently as 2010. Even when in-your-face women's lives are primarily private, the way they live them often finds its way into the public eye. How could it be otherwise?

Mai Sukhan

Little is known about Mai Sukhan, an in-your-face Sikh woman who distinguished herself for her courage and military prowess in the early 1800's in the Punjab region connecting India and Pakistan. When her husband died, leaving her in charge of the land they ruled, the Sikh Emperor from Lahore decided to move on the city of Amritsar, which is sacred to the Sikh, but Sukhan begged to differ.

Instead of giving up the famous Zamzama gun made of copper and brass as the Emperor had demanded that she do, Sukhan sealed the city and posted her warriors in strategic positions for a brutal military battle. While she did not win, the Emperor was forced to realize that Sukhan was a contender worth considering and ultimately gave her five or six villages rather than disrespecting her by offering no concessions.

In-your-face women win even when they don't win. And even when they don't win at all, they go down swinging.

Irene Stuber

In 1995, Irene Stuber -- a retired newspaper journalist in her sixties -- noticed that women's interests, women's accomplishments, and women's history were non-existent in the media, even the internet, which supposedly had everything for everybody. So she suggested to the National Organization for Women that they do something about it. When they didn't, she did. And so Catt's Claws (named after in-your-face woman Carrie Chapman Catt) came into being.

Her family wasn't happy. According to Stuber, they told her she "should be sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair instead of in front of a computer screen raising hell with the status quo." But she didn't listen (one of the marks of a true in-your-face woman when she's on a mission). And women ever since have been glad she didn't.

Catt's Claws started out as a commentary blog on what was going on in the world and lasted until 2001, but over time, Stuber collected, published and archived an impressive mountain of information on women's contributions to life on earth. Today, it's a permanent part of the women's and families' resources available at The Liz Library, a website belonging to lawyer Elizabeth J. Kates. Irene Stuber's work (augmented by the work of thousands of women whose daily emails not only added to her information, but convinced her of its need and importance to other women) has become a monument to "herstory." In-your-face women almost always leave a legacy.

Ann Stringer

When her husband (who was also a reporter) was killed in action in France just before the U.S. got involved in World War II, in-your-face woman Ann Stringer showed up at Army Headquarters and demanded to be allowed to serve as a war correspondent herself. At first, she was denied, but ultimately, she was accredited and sent into France four days after D-Day.

Initially, Stringer and other women correspondents were prevented from going to the front lines, but that denial didn't last either and eventually, she sent back articles from the front in France, Holland, Belgium and Germany. In fact, Stringer was with the troops when they liberated Buchenwald and Dachau Concentration Camps and she covered the Nuremberg trials, as well.

What she's best known for, however, is that at one point, while the male reporters were all ignoring her and focusing only on their competition with each other, Stringer jumped on a C-47 cargo plane to Paris. Looking out the window, she noticed unusual activity in a village below and talked the pilot into landing in a field. Which is how Stringer came to know that the Russian troops and the U.S. troops had finally linked up in Germany -- major news around the world! In-your-face women can't seem to help staying one step ahead of everybody else. It's just who they are.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe went to a girls' school in the early 1800's, but the education she got there was the same set of topics males were typically taught (including languages and math). So it should have surprised no one that she wound up being able to think and quick to question everything.

When she married an abolitionist, it was only a matter of time before they became part of the Underground Railroad, hiding escaped slaves and helping them along their path to freedom. And after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850, making it against the law to do what they were doing, it took Stowe barely a year to respond by publishing the first segment of her book Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was only a novel about life as an African slave in the southern United States, but it sold more than 300,000 copies in less than a year, was turned into a play in New York City, and resulted in hundreds of babies in Boston alone being named after one of the principle characters. There's no way to be sure, of course, but it is often said that Uncle Tom's Cabin and Stowe's other works on slavery in the 1850's helped to start the Civil War. And that's a lot of in-your-faceness!

Toni Stone

Marcenia Stone took the name "Toni" while she was going to school in the 1920's and 1930's because it sounded like "tomboy." "I loved my trousers," she told a reporter later. "I loved cars. Most of all, I loved riding horses with no saddles. I wasn't classified. People weren't ready for me."

But that wasn't all Stone loved. By the time she was fifteen (having started in the Midget Leagues at ten), Stone was playing baseball for the St. Paul Giants, a men's semi-professional team. And after she graduated high school, she played for a whole string of professional teams in the Negro League: the San Francisco Sea Lions, the New Orleans Creoles, and the Indianapolis Clowns (similar to the Harlem Globetrotters of basketball fame).

Stone is one of the few ever to snag a hit off the legendary pitcher Satchel Paige. Still -- and maybe because of how well she played -- she was continually shunned, humiliated, and even, on one occasion, purposely spiked by an opposing player, to encourage her to give up being an in-your-face woman and get back to where she belonged. At the end of her career, the Kansas City Monarchs made her ride the bench till she quit. "It was hell," Stone remembered.

Nevertheless, Stone is now in four different Halls of Fame, has a ball diamond named after her, and, in 1990, St. Paul declared March 6th "Toni Stone Day." Being an in-your-face woman is never easy, but it's always an option.

Lucy Stone

In-your-face women Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton have gone down in history as two of the firebrands supporting women's rights in the 1800's, but who got them on the bandwagon? According to Stanton, it was Lucy Stone, about whom Stanton once wrote: "Lucy Stone was the first person by whom the heart of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question."

And where did Stone get her ideas? From watching her mother scrape and beg to take care of her nine children while Stone's father drank, raged, and quoted the Bible about how women are supposed to be submissive to men. Stone's take on those Biblical exhortations (even as a child) was that if she learned Greek and Hebrew and read the original documents, she was sure they didn't actually say what the translators had written.

So Stone -- encouraged by the writings of the in-your-face women Grimke sisters -- studied one way or the other until she was nearly thirty. When her first teaching position (at the age of sixteen) offered her only half what a male teacher would make, she protested and received a raise, but not to equal wages. And she made it a practice all her life to counter every social demand that tried to reduce her.

Later, when the Congregationalist church, to which Stone's whole family belonged, sent out an edict that slavery abolitionists -- and most particularly those who were women -- should not be allowed to speak from Congregationalist pulpits, Stone determined to speak as often and anywhere as she saw fit. Even at Oberlin College in Ohio, the first U.S. institution of higher education that admitted both women and African-Americans, women in rhetoric class were supposed to learn by watching the men debate. So Stone and other women so inclined went out into the woods and debated loud and long among themselves to hone their skills for the future.

After her graduation from Oberlin in 1847, Stone proceeded to live the life of a lecturer on abolition and women's rights, though her family had strongly counseled her not to do it and ultimately asked her to at least stay out of Massachusetts where they were. Needless to say, she spoke anyway and headed straight for Massachusetts to boot. She shortened her skirts and wore bloomer-style pants for the freedom. After a year of marriage, during which she struggled with the issue, she officially refused to take her husband's name. And for her belligerence (both public and private), she had ice water, rotten fruit, eggs and even Bibles thrown at her pretty much everywhere she went.

Still, she said, "We want to be something more than the appendages of Society; we want that Woman should be the coequal...of Man in all the...perils and enjoyments of human life. We want that she should attain to the development of her nature and womanhood; we want that when she dies, it may not be written on her gravestone that she was [only] the [widow] of somebody [else]."