The Suppressed Histories Archives is an international women's history project seeking to uncover
the realities of female lives, and of peoples free, conquered, enslaved, decimated and resurgent.

Women’s Power: Study Guide

Women who were leaders, defenders and liberators of their peoples are among the most remembered
--the ones whose names managed to penetrate the heavy curtain that screens out female achievements.
But textbooks and the media seldom mention them, so few people have heard of:

Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, sisters who galvanized the Vietnamese resistance to Chinese domination in 60 CE

Boudicca of the Iceni and Veleda of the Bructerii, who led tribal European insurrections against Roman rule

Gudit Isat (Judith the Fire), charismatic Ethiopian religious leader who felled the Axumite dynasty

Wetamu of Pocasset and Anne of Pamunkey, female leaders in the resistence to English invasion of eastern North America

Queen Nanny of the Maroons, the Ashanti woman who led Africans out of slavery into the Jamaican highlands

María Candelaria, Maya priestess and leader of a rebellion against Spanish rule in Chiapas, 1712

Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, who led a revolt against the British empire in India

Nehanda Nyakasikana, a Shona diviner and leader of resistance to Rhodesian colonization of Zimbabwe

Qiu Jen, Chinese women's rights activist executed for sedition by the Manchu dynasty in 1911

Niuta Teitelboim, Jewish partisan of the Warsaw Ghetto and mastermind of daring actions against the Nazis

 

The Suppressed Histories Slide Series also draws attention to entire groups of women whose names have not survived, though their creative and technological achievements endure:

the inventors of agriculture --not only in western Asia, which is what you usually read about, but also in southeast Asia, the African Sahel, Peru and Mexico

the potters of Thailand, Rumania, Iraq, Manchuria, New Mexico, Algeria, and the Amazon basin

the weavers of Indonesia, Arabia, Bosnia, Arizona, Latvia, and northwestern America

the makers of felt cloth (Turkestan); Kasai velvets (Congo); bark cloth (Tonga, Samoa, Indonesia, central and eastern Africa); porcupine quill embroidery (North America)

women who invented food preservation techniques -- drying, smoking, salting, potting, and fermentation -- and discovered the biochemical technologies used to make leavened breads, cheese, butter, yogurt, kefir, beer, wine, kumiss and chicha.

the leatherworkers of Niger, Siberia, Canada, Namibia, and the Dakotas

the designers and makers of Bedouin tents, Mongol yurts, Pueblo adobes, North American tipis, wigwams, wickiups; and the mural-painted houses found across vast stretches of Africa

the market women of Nigeria, Burma, Indonesia, Mexico, Ireland, Papua, and Bolivia


Suppressed Histories Archives: real women, global vision

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