Women Out of Bounds : The Lives and Work of History's Career Women

From Artemisia of Halicarnassus—a fifth century (b.c.) merchant, pirate, and naval commander—to the freelance World War I correspondent Lady Sarah Wilson, this engaging and entertaining social history chronicles the uncommon achievements of more than 100 remarkable women who over the past twenty-five centuries flouted cultural conventions. Raising the eyebrows of their ancient, medieval, seventeenth-century, Victorian, or American contemporaries, these women defied the expectations of their times and independently molded their own dynamic, often highly idiosyncratic lives. With illustrations and colorful, historically documented, and long-ignored or half-forgotten stories of women pirates, bone-setters, gold prospectors, secret agents, soldiers-in-disguise, and human cannonballs—not to mention that mistress of reinvention Lola Montez or Victoria Woodhull, the stockbroker who ran for president of the United States, or the outlaw Belle Starr, or America's first self-made woman millionaire, Sarah Breedlove Walker—this book applauds their accomplishments, their daring, their defiance, their responses to necessity, their names.