As we read today about the Taliban in Afghanistan which refuses to allow women to go to school or to work, we might note that US women’s status in the eighteenth century wasn’t too different.  The enlightenment ideals promoted during our War for Independence slowly spread to encompass education for women and abolition of slavery. The second pair in this book are Angelina Grimké, daughter of a slaveholder who refused to educate his daughters, and Harriet Jacob, a runaway slave.  Both became abolitionists who breached the barrier against women speaking in public.   

 

Susan B. Anthony and Mary Church Terrell are in the book, but not where you would expect them.  Susan is paired with Elizabeth Packard, whose husband put her into an insane asylum when she refused to obey him. It’s Terrell who carries the suffrage banner into the twentieth century.

 

The last two chapters depart from this pattern.

 

The chapter on the right to compete profiles two public figures. Phyllis Schlafly was a surprise, but not Muriel Siebert.  Born four years apart, they had much in common.  Schlafly certainly claimed to be a patriot, but disparaged feminists.  Cobbs describes her as “a classic anti-feminist feminist.”  Siebert broke a few glass ceilings even before she became the first woman to buy a seat on the NY Stock Exchange in 1967.  Both were Republicans who ran for the US Congress in their respective states.  Both lost.  Too bad they didn’t face each other in a debate.

 

Beyoncé is an unexpected ending, as she is primarily known as a talented entertainer who appeals to men’s sexual fantasies.  Cobbs says a major theme of her songs is female independence and self-actualization.  She isn’t paired, but contrasted with several women and girls who were sexually assaulted in various ways. (Think Olympics)

 

Most of her Fearless Women are conscious feminists, though not all.  Even when not, they believed that this land is their land, regardless of sex, and acted accordingly.  They were patriots, not patriarchs.