Eleanor of Aquitaine
This 12th century queen's impressive resume reads like this:
Objective: Politically astute, ambitious, spirited, and intelligent medieval beauty seeks mutually beneficial alliances with feudal lords and emerging European royalty.
Education
Homeschooled by father William, a duke in southern France. Well-versed in Latin.
Enameled stone effigy at Eleanor of Aquitaine's tomb in Abbey of Fontevrand. Click for larger image. Library of Congress.
- Married Louis VII, King of France
- Bore two daughters: Marie and Alix
- Led legion of women to the Second Crusade
- Conducted inappropriate affair with Uncle Raymond
- Received annulment of first marriage, retained original lands
- Married Henry II, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou and future King of England
- Bore eight children: William, Henry, Matilda, Richard, Geoffrey, Eleanor, Joanna, and John
- Patronized arts, particularly love-song-singing troubadours
- Led rebellion with sons Henry, Richard, and Geoffrey against second husband
- Imprisoned for 16 years by husband King Henry II of England
- Raised ransom money to free son Richard (the Lionhearted) from a Viennese prison
- Died at ripe young age of 82
Legacy
Women's History
- Marriage to second husband Henry II meant that large swaths of French territory came under English rule. It would take hundreds of years—and the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453)—to sort out the land disputes between the French and the English.
- Youngest son, John, who rose to the English throne in 1199, signed the Magna Carta in 1215, which restricted the powers of the monarchy and laid the groundwork for English common law and the Constitution of the United States.
Mary Wollstonecraft. Library of Congress.
Had she just been the wife of the British political philosopher William Godwin, Wollstonecraft's
Wikipedia entry would be a mere few lines. Had she just been the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of the Gothic novel
Frankenstein, her entry might double.
The entry gets even longer if we include Wollstonecraft's travelogue Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), which details her journey through Scandinavia with the child of the man who rejected her. In Letters, her writing is so stark one can smell the effluvia of the salted herring, breathe in the clean, cool sea air, and sink into the homey chairs at the local inns. One can also feel her emotional pain.
But Wollstonecraft's Wikipedia entry is extensive because she advocated for equal rights for women and equal access to education. She wrote these crazy ideas down in the seminal feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). She is the reason women's activists descend like locusts on the Augusta Golf Club every year demanding to know when women are going to be admitted as members. She posited that everyone wins with a more educated populace. Her daughter's classic, Frankenstein, is proof of that.
Amelia Bloomer
If you're female and wearing pants right now, you can thank Amelia Bloomer. The eponymous Bloomer was not the first to wear the balloon-like trousers that cinched at the ankles, but she advocated wearing them, wrote about wearing them, and wore them herself. The press assigned these ridiculous firsts of the female pant world the name Bloomers.
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