A century ago, Jackson, Wyoming, a small frontier town of around 300, was a poster child for what economists call a tragedy of the commons. With laws going unenforced and taxes and fines unpaid, the town’s coffers were drying up while its streets were swimming in mud and garbage. In need of a Wyatt Earp figure who could put a stop to the lawlessness and decline, the errant town stumbled on a radical but extremely successful solution to its problems: female rule. 

The death toll in the British concentration camps during the Second Boer War in South Africa would have been much higher if not for the fearless work of Emily Hobhouse. When she heard about the horrible conditions of the camps, which housed Boer women and children, she began raising money and traveled to South Africa to visit the sites. After her visit, she delivered a report to Parliament, which resulted in improved conditions at the camps saving thousands of lives.

Not all political or social revolutions start with the firing of shots, with a formal declaration, or even taking to the streets. Sometimes they start ... with a strongly worded letter. On May 21, 1954, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College wrote such a letter to the mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, an act that precipitated one of the most remarkable protests in history.

Living openly as a lesbian in the 1920s is one thing, but Natalie Clifford Barney also ruled the literary scene in Paris. She wrote a book of romantic poems called Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes, making her the first woman since the ancient Greek poet Sappho to write candidly about loving women — especially wild women. She lived as she pleased, hosted literary salons for 60 years and founded a women’s academy. And she became a champion of gay and women’s rights, simply by her refusal to do one thing…

Julie d’Aubigny once defeated three men in a duel after kissing a woman on the dance floor — all while dressed as a man. This opera star and famously rebellious romancer seduced numerous women and lived an incredibly modern life for someone alive in the 17th century. Intrigued?

Mary Elizabeth Braddon didn’t just go for the sensational in her work — though she did pioneer the “sensation novel” with Lady Audley’s Secret, a wildly popular Victorian novel of murder and mayhem in polite society. She also led a sensational life, marked by a decades-long affair with her publisher … who was already married. Lady Audley’s Secret, the Fifty Shades of its day, went straight for the jugular of Victorian mores with its tale of murder, bigamy and illegitimacy.

Most Americans can’t remember a Thanksgiving that did not begin with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. The parade has become synonymous with the department store chain, but what really made Macy’s reputation as the “World’s Largest Store” was not an it, but a she. Before Margaret Getchell first showed up as a cashier, R.H. Macy & Co. mostly sold ribbons, lace and related accessories; under her visionary influence, it would become a full-fledged modern department store, the first of its kind in America. 

To found and run a business as a woman in early 19th-century Europe was to defy some serious odds. To run an alcohol business required a rare audacity. At a time when Portugal’s wine industry was on the brink of extinction, Antónia Ferreira learned all there was to know about the sector and rebuilt it, helping drive a wave of regeneration that salvaged the entire region’s economy.

In 1888, a young German woman, Bertha Benz, prepared to embark on a historic drive. Benz’s husband, Carl, was a skilled mechanic, not to mention the father of the modern automobile, but it was Bertha’s moral and financial support that were essential to his cars hitting the road. Carl was a perfectionist and didn’t believe his car-in-progress could yet cover long distances, so Benz decided she would test that assumption by driving 65 miles to visit her mother in a remarkable journey that changed the course of automotive history.

Joan Clarke was a brilliant logic and mathematics talent whose name would have been lost to history if it wasn’t for World War II. She worked alongside Alan Turing to find the solution that cracked the Enigma Nazi code that broke open the war in the Allies’ favor, giving them direct operational access to over-the-air communications. More people now know the name of Joan Clarke after Keira Knightley portrayed her in the movie The Imitation Game but her amazing life and contribution to peace around the world deserves more than 120 minutes of our time.

If you thought self-isolating in your apartment or house was bad, try being stuck alone on Wrangel Island, north of Siberia. Cook and seamstress Ada Blackjack was the sole survivor of an attempt to claim the island for the British Empire. After three of her expedition partners abandoned the island in an effort to reach Siberia, she was left to care for the last member of their group, who was sick with scurvy. He died six months later, and she survived for two more months, with no one but a cat for company, before she was rescued.

The first Black woman to earn a medical degree in America, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler published A Book of Medical Discourses: In Two Parts, a text that democratized medical care, making knowledge accessible to doctors and caregivers alike. Her treatise was the product of years of work treating recently freed former slaves and disadvantaged women in the wake of the Civil War.