Heroines of Women's History

Rules fall into two major categories: written and unwritten. Written rules have secure homes in documents; unwritten rules are customs and mores, a way of doing things; they dwell in the intangible space of a society's culture. Unwritten rules don't even need to be spoken, they're just things that everybody, just, well, knows.

Sometimes unwritten rules keep us safe and civil: don't walk through that neighborhood at night; don't wear those holey jeans out to dinner; and do say please and thank you. But sometimes unwritten rules keep us down: Legos for the boys, dolls for the girls or that's not feminine (or masculine) behavior. But the most awful unwritten rule, the one that threatens progress and self-actualization, is: You can't do that because it's never been done before.

The five women below left legacies in their respective fields because they refused to play by this egregiously appalling rule. Instead of asking themselves, "Can I do that?" they asked themselves "How do I do that?" And then they went and did that in writing, aviation, politics, philosophy, and fashion.

Here's to breaking the rules.

Aphra Behn
When Behn sailed to Antwerp in 1666 to spy for King Charles II of England, he refused to pay her for services rendered, and she landed in debtors' prison. After her release, she eked out a living the only way she knew how: by writing.

For the next 20 years, Behn wrote and performed in plays on the bawdy English stage. Playwriting afforded Behn (rhymes with Dane) some fortune, some fame, and some infamy. Her plays gained notoriety as being too risqué. She became known as the Restoration's version of Jackie Collins.

Her most famous play, The Rover (1677), is still performed today and has handed posterity such wonderful lines as, "There is no sinner like a young saint." But Behn gave us more than staged 17th century sexually provocative themes and neat aphorisms; apart from the myriad of poems she wrote, she also produced what some consider to be the first English novel. English literature had been comprised of epic poems: Beowulf, Sir Gawain, and The Faerie Queen. Behn produced what some consider the first prose narrative—certainly it is one of the earliest English novels—in her groundbreaking work Oroonoko (1688), the tragic story of a slave in Surinam. She is believed to be the first woman to make a living solely as a writer. Two hundred and fifty years later, Virginia Woolf recognized the debt all women owed Ms. Behn: "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn … for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."

Beryl Markham
Markham's autobiography, West with the Night (1942), is more than just a story of being the first person to fly non-stop from England to North America. It's the story of a young British girl growing up in Kenya at the turn of the 20th century, a girl deeply connected to her adopted country. Chapter after mesmerizing chapter, we are delighted with stories of her escaping being mauled by a lion (oh my!), breeding winning racehorses, effortlessly landing her plane in the African bush on medical, postal, and safari expeditions, and eventually flying into the wind across the Atlantic Ocean. Markham writes with such vigor that you can see the beautiful horses she's training, marvel at the expanse of the African landscape, and fear the dark nights she's accustomed to flying in. In fact, her writing is so evocative that Papa Hemingway himself wrote of her: "She can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers."

Oh yeah, and she could fly, too.

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