Meet the Women Who Ran the World in Bygone Badass Broads

Xi Ling Shi, Ana, Eustaquia, and Alice make their pioneering appearances in Bygone Badass Broads along with their complex, messy, and altogether memorable sisters, hailing from every era from BCE to modern day. The women profiled here represent the diversity of women’s history and experience—though, of course, it’s not a comprehensive look. Their stories pop up on nearly every continent, encompassing women of different races, ages, statuses, sexual orientations, attitudes, and behaviors.
Lee places special emphasis on that last one. Many of the impressive ladies whose profiles grace these pages have, let’s say, murky aspects to their personal histories. (With the exception of ingenuity, there’s not much else you necessarily want to emulate in Friederike “New York’s Queen of Thieves” Mandelbaum’s life story.) The term “badass” isn’t meant to endorse these women wholeheartedly, only to denote that they are undisputed in terms of gumption. Mochizuki Chiyome trained lady ninjas for crying out loud!
That the achievements run the gamut—don’t try piracy at home, kids, but do please invent more organizations like the Girl Scouts—is the crux of why Bygone Badass Broads is such important reading. The point of these stories is not merely to laud the women in them, but to demonstrate that, throughout history, ladies were not passive players in the grand story, fainting in and out of our collective consciousness. In fact, they were active agents, shaping the course of their societies and their cultures in ways our textbooks have been loath to recognize.
You might say, not everyone has to be a hero to change the world.
Women are complicated creatures, both capable of remarkable feats and overpowering flaws. The theme running through this collection of stories is seemingly obvious, but long neglected in our broader cultural narrative: It’s almost as if women are human.
That’s a far more empowering message than it seems like on the surface, and the breadth of accomplishments Lee outlines proves the point. There are inventors and pirates and scientists and artists and authors and even the unexpected lady who built the Brooklyn Bridge. Within these pages, their lives resound like a drumbeat for the #MeToo moment, overcoming the challenges (many of them men) that almost felled their ambitions.
The stories themselves wow, told in Lee’s conversational and charming style. But coupled with Petra Eriksson’s striking, colorful, buoyant illustrations, they start to knock your socks off. Seriously, every image screams to hang on your wall.
In many ways, Bygone Badass Broads is a love letter to women and a celebration of them, as Lee says, “warts and all.” Our final verdict: so good you’ll want to use it to smash the patriarchy. (But please don’t, because the book is too beautiful.)
Bygone Badass Broads is available now.