I’m shaping up my next Kick-Ass Woman from History post. I think it’s going to be at LEAST as inspiring as my last one.

Camile Paglia: The reason there is no female Mozart is the same as the reason there’s no female Jack the Ripper.

Women: Hold our beer.

Weirdly I’ve never developed the napping habit. If I try to nap I wake up feeling worse than when I started off. My SO knows that if I’m voluntarily napping that something is badly wrong with me.

Mine’s lightning-struck jujube tree. It allows me to fly safely in thunderstorms.

Hello, fellow hag!

So which broomstick do you favour!? 😄

🤣 I’m 59! 🤣

I just have the heart of a child. (Insert Stephen King’s joke here.)

I started lifting in October '23 after a former student of mine opened a small gym and invited me to train with him. I entered it thinking “my sport involves lifting heavy objects and putting them back down again” and now think “wow, there’s so much technique and knowledge needed to do this effectively and safely”.

And I can squat and deadlift about 60% more than my body weight (as my trainer put it: I was gifted with “sturdy peasant legs”, the bastard!) I can do rows of various forms with about 60% of my body weight (thought I hate my life for a few days after back day), but I can’t crack 80% of my body weight with bench presses. 😥 I’m at about where I want to comfortably be so now I just maintain, not build.

So if you’re lifting, good on you. It’s one of those things you can do to look and feel better both that doesn’t take a huge amount of time compared to doing cardio (which by definition needs huge chunks of time: I hate cardio day!).

Partially because I stopped smearing industrial chemicals on my skin willy-nilly, I like the fact that I can pass as being in my late 40s.

A cop helps a gang commit crimes until it all blows up in the gang leader’s face.

A murdered father sparks family drama that results in two childhood friends of the protagonist being executed off-screen.

Yep. Good catch!

Two Nazis get murdered, an act which causes a woman to offer infidelity to an old flame. The old flame, after he feigns interest, turns her down and instead walks off with a police captain.

Back to the Future

Go ahead. :)

Yep. And since the division was doing well, he could do whatever he liked. And there wasn’t enough evidence for a court case.

The worst was a woman who refused the advances of her manager and her performance reviews went from sterling to inadequate, leading her to be let go eventually.

HR?

Yeah, they work for the company, not for us.

I’m glad people are enjoying this one. Lozen and Zheng Yi Sao are two of my favourite kick-ass women from history because they entered a “male” field and absolutely dominated it. They’re both people that should be inspiring women around the world.

There is a pseudo-scientific bullshit theory (that even has software tools available for it!) that purports that women and men communicate differently and thus can be identified by their writing style.

Masculine: Common stereotypes suggest that “masculine” writing is direct, assertive, action-focused, and uses more articles and concrete nouns.

Feminine: “Feminine” writing is said to be more personal, relational, emotional, and uses more pronouns and social words.

These ideas have deep roots in Western linguistic and literary criticism. Early 20th-century linguists like Otto Jespersen claimed women’s writing was less logical or innovative. Later studies found some statistical differences (sentence length, pronoun use), but these are small and often over-interpreted.

Basically it’s sexist, non-scientific bullshit based on the typical problems of social “science” studies: too-small sample sets, often within a single culture and, indeed, a very specific small sub-culture (to wit: middle-class white American university students). Real studies by competent practitioners note that people can write in different voices depending on context, and that most “gendered” writing is cultural performance and conformance to norms around them. The notion of writing “like a woman” or “like a man” is mostly just a product of cultural stereotypes (and I’d go so far as to say white supremacist stereotypes) and, historically, pseudo-scientific thinking, all rooted in Western (or more specifically American) norms. While some statistical linguistic differences do actually exist, they are minor, context-dependent, and not inherently tied to gender.

The proper conclusion the data supports is that writing style is flexible, shaped by audience, purpose, and social context-not by biology or any essential “masculine” or “feminine” essence.

I’ve selected my next one. We’re going to the Americas for this one. You’ll have no idea who she is until I’m finished with the story. Then you’ll wonder WHY you had no idea because she’s AWESOME!

The “ones not many people have heard of” thing is very deliberate. Everybody knows Cleopatra (even if only by that horrifically ahistorical film). Many have heard of Nefertiti (even if only because of that famous bust that shows her gorgeous face).

Yet probably the most influential woman in Egyptian history, Hapshetsup, is a name most people haven’t even heard, not to mention know anything of. She’s way more interesting (to me at any rate) than Cleopatra or Nefertiti (though both may show up in later entries because both of them have some intriguing bits to their stories) and more of an inspiration as well. Nefertiti, though influential, got all of her influence from her husband. Cleopatra is more defined by the men in her life than by her own agency. But Hapshetsup? She ruled. Both literally and figuratively.

You knew there was another “Kick-Ass Women” thread coming, right?

Just some general questions:

• Are these history dumps welcomed?
• Are there any women from history you’d like seen covered?