Time to highlight five of my favorite women from history who don't get enough recognition.
All these women have inspired my stories and my personal life, reminding me to push forward even when the odds are against me.
Victoria Woodhull

The first woman to run for president, and the first woman stock broker on Wall Street.
Pretty amazing for a girl with only three years of education who spent her childhood years working as a fortune teller in her family's traveling show.
After a troubled first marriage, she had two kids to support and worked as a clairvoyant. She was hired by Cornelius Vanderbilt: She contacted his dead wife, and he gave her financial advice. The result? She made a giant sum of money and began her own financial firm. She then produced a newspaper about women's rights, suffrage, free love, and exposing nefarious men.
Mileva Merić Einstein

Mileva was born in Serbia. Her wealthy father petitioned for her to attend boys-only physics lectures. She was admitted to college in Zurich, where she made top marks and met Albert. On their final exam, the professor gave passing grades to the 4 men, but not Mileva.
She didn't earn her degree, even when she sat for the exam a second time.
Albert's family didn't approve of the intellectual girl who wasn't Jewish and walked with a limp, but that didn't stop them. She worked on their thesis, completing math calculations where he struggled. They collaborated on special relativity, and agreed that she would not co-author the findings because a woman's name on research was not taken seriously.
Many of Albert's lecture notes are in her handwriting.
He left her for his cousin while she took care of their sons, one of which had schizophrenia. He promised her his Nobel winnings, yet never followed through.
Julie D'aubigny

This seventeenth century opera singer played by her own rules. An accomplished swordsman, she competed in illegal duels while on the run from police.
Julie grew up at Versailles, but was not a member of the court. Her father worked as a secretary to the keeper of the king's stables.
Julie was wild from the get-go. As a teen, she had an affair with her father's boss, prompting her father to arrange a marriage with an acceptable suitor. After taking the royal's name/title, she managed to send him away and live freely. Julie would go on to have romances with both men and women as she lived on the run from authorities. She nearly killed a man in one duel, then took him as her lover. While working as an opera singer in Paris, she fell in love with a merchant's daughter. When the woman was sent away to a convent, Julie broke in, set a fire and staged a body, and escaped with her girlfriend.
Irene Gut Opdyke

Irene was an 18 year-old nursing student when Russia invaded Poland.
Soldiers captured her, raping and beating her unconscious, then putting her to work at a munitions factory. She caught the eye of a German commander, who moved her to the kitchen, a preferable position.
The major took her on as a housekeeper in his villa, where she befriended twelve Jewish people working in a ghetto laundry. To save them, she hid them in the major's basement, keeping them a secret right under his nose! One was pregnant, and she had to find a way to save the baby.
When he discovered them, he agreed to keep them secret, if she would be his lover. She suffered for months, eventually escaping with the twelve Jews into the forest until the war ended. That baby was born into freedom, but she was captured by Russians. She managed to escape prison, eventually landing in the US. One day on a New York street, she met a Jewish boy who remembered her giving him shoes in the forest.
Caresse Crosby

Heiress, inventor, publisher, and overall eccentric, Caresse spent her 78 years reinventing herself. As a young woman frustrated with her whalebone corset, she created something new, and was awarded the first patent of the modern bra.
Marrying young and having two children was too quiet a life. She divorced (a scandal in Boston at the time), and fled to Paris with her children and her new husband. She rowed him to work on the Seine every day in a red canoe and partied with the likes of Hemingway, Picasso, and Salvador Dali. She once arrived to a party topless, wearing a turquoise wig, and riding an elephant. The couple believed in free love and extravagance. After her husband's death from a suicide pact with his lover, she opened a printing press which featured Ezra Pound, Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, and William Faulkner, and taught Henry Miller how to write erotica. In her later years, she retired to Rome, lived in a castle, and created a commune and center for world peace.Â
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