In the winter of 2015, when I started writing my book Modern Women, I felt sure of my parameters. The plan was to write profiles of 50 or more women who had created the modern age by expanding women’s possibilities, whether by breaking barriers of race, class, age, disability, gender or sexuality; challenging the biological determinism that says a woman’s reproductive capabilities are her destiny; or doing something as simple as wearing trousers when this was considered radical (hats off to Katharine Hepburn).
Katie Sandwina, for instance, the suffragette circus strongwoman whose posters in the 1910s showed her standing on a plinth emblazoned with the words, “The wonder of female strength,” and holding three men on a bicycle above her head. At 210lb, with 14in biceps, Sandwina was venerated for her beauty, described as “a perfect woman by all the accepted standards”.
I wrote about Frida Kahlo, with her confronting, brutal portraits of childbirth and miscarriage; Jan Morris, who became a journalistic sensation by covering the first successful attempt to summit Everest, and was then lauded as one of the greatest of all post-war authors; Virginia Woolf, with her passport into female consciousness and her exploration of its epic possibilities; and Maya Angelou, who excelled not only as a poet, memoir writer, actor, singer and documentary maker, but also came to represent the moral conscience of her country.
While profiling women, from the 17th-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi through to writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and film director Gurinder Chadha today, there was a sense of forward motion, of conditions improving for women and men. But as 2016 unfolded, the world began to seem less progressive. Politics was becoming more populist, nationalist and visibly dominated by authoritarian strongmen; the rhetoric used about refugees grew more divisive; there was a rise in hate crimes after Britain voted to leave the EU; and a concurrent backlash against feminism, summed up in the battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, which promised a significant step forward in women’s representation – and delivered the opposite.
This backlash has been greeted with protest, most notably in the Women’s March, the day after Trump’s inauguration, in which an estimated 4.5 million women and men marched on all seven continents, in nearly 700 separate demonstrations. It has been suggested we’re now entering an age of resistance, and, in that spirit, here are seven role models for the struggle ahead – each one an extraordinarily modern woman.
Jayaben Desai (1933-2010), strike leader
When Desai walked out of the Grunwick film processing plant in north London in August 1976, she began a two-year strike over pay and conditions which changed the perception of women in general, and Asian women in particular; any stereotype of subservience was impossible to maintain in the face of her tenacity, wit and courage. “What you are running here is not a factory – it is a zoo,” she told her manager, as she downed tools. “But in a zoo, there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your fingertips; others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager.”
Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon (1921-2008 and 1924- ), lesbian activists
It wasn’t easy to be gay in the US in 1955, when Martin and Lyon co-founded the country’s first lesbian organisation, the Daughters of Bilitis. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch-hunt had been broadened to target gay people, and the climate was such that, for instance, the women’s army corps began using a verbal test for recruits, to weed out lesbians. It included the question: “Do you envision sucking a woman’s breast?”
Martin and Lyon were undeterred; they fell in love in the early 50s, and spent a lifetime organising against discrimination. Perhaps their most famous activism came in their 80s, when they were plaintiffs in a series of lawsuits that led to the ban on same-sex marriage being overturned. Two months before Martin’s death, in June 2008, when Lyon was 83 and Martin was 87, they married in one of the happiest embodiments of the feminist slogan that the personal is political.
Ida B Wells (1862-1931), activist and journalist
Others had campaigned against lynching before Wells, but no one had done so with such power, analysis and determination. Her campaign led to an angry mob threatening her with death, and trashing the offices of the newspaper she part-owned and edited in Memphis. She made for New York, packing a pistol for protection, before taking her message to the UK, where supporters set up the British Anti-Lynching Committee. Wells faced severe discrimination – the New York Times called her “a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress”. But she was never cowed. Her refusal to be deferential is a lesson for all women.
Miriam Makeba (1932-2008), singer
Makeba spent the first six months of her life in a prison cell with her mother, who had been jailed for making beer; the racist laws in 30s South Africa decreed that black people were not civilised enough to drink. Makeba’s hits, including irresistible dance number Pata Pata, went on to make her one of Africa’s first international superstars, and after travelling to the US to perform in late 1959, she was barred from returning to her home country. This only made her speak out more determinedly against apartheid. Her exile finally ended in 1990, after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Following her death in 2008, he remarked she had been “a mother to our struggle”. Her superlative use of her voice – in song and in politics – is a reminder of the necessity of speaking up, even (especially) when the circumstances seem impossible.
Sophie Scholl (1921-1943), anti-Nazi activist
On 18 February 1943, Scholl and her brother, Hans, headed to the University of Munich to distribute their latest leaflet. They were both part of a small resistance group, the White Rose, whose members had caught the Gestapo’s attention by travelling around the country, posting leaflets from cities all over Germany, giving the impression of a large, organised, potentially very troublesome network. As the pair distributed leaflets in the university building that day, a caretaker spotted them, and the local Gestapo chief was summoned. Under interrogation, Scholl was pressured to betray her brother and to say she supported Hitler. She refused. On trial days later, the 21-year-old student interrupted the notorious Nazi judge Roland Freisler more than once. “What we said and wrote are what many people are thinking,” she said. “They just don’t say it out loud!” She and Hans were beheaded by guillotine on 22 February – all six members of the White Rose were executed that year. In mid-1943, Allied forces printed thousands of their leaflets and dropped them from planes all over Germany.
Harriet Tubman (1822-1913), abolitionist
In September 1849, Tubman escaped slavery in Maryland, making a 90-mile journey to Philadelphia on foot, with the help of the underground railroad – a group of people who assisted fugitive slaves by providing hiding places and guiding them to the next safe spot. This was an era in which fugitive slaves were hunted with bloodhounds, and some slave owners cut the achilles tendons of unsuccessful escapees. Tubman could have been expected to simply enjoy her liberation, and stay away from slave states for ever. Instead, she returned to Maryland, the first of 13 missions in eight years, leading about 70 people to freedom, including her own parents. She also worked as a nurse and a spy during the American civil war, and guided troops in a raid along the Combahee river which led to more than 750 people being freed from slavery.
Modern Women by Kira Cochrane is published by Frances Lincoln on 2 March (£20). To order a copy for £17, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
