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 nonstop 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.
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.
Experience
- 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
- 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
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.
Bloomers became popular because Bloomer and her friends (whom she had met at the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848) started wearing them. Bloomers were more practical than the fashion of the time: heavy skirts, petticoats and whalebone corsets. Also, it’s much easier to ride a bicycle and keep your modesty with pants underneath your multiple skirts.
Bloomer became known as an advocate for rational dress reform and is proof that fashion not only changes lives, it also changes history.
These women are a mere quintet who, by refusing to play by the rules that society handed to them, forever altered the course of history. Who else belongs on this list of daring rule-breakers?