Infinite Women

Historian and audio producer Catherine Freyne is co-curator of an exhibition at the State Library of NSW called Pride (R)evolution (https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/pride-revolution; see the exhibition's "Sporty Lesbians and Fit Feminists" digital map at https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/2b49515c1ccc97c68b83ce4c05f11c5a/the-sporting-lesbian/index.html). She joins us to ta...

Born into a prominent Muslim family in Granada in 1485, Sayyida fled the Spanish Reconquista in 1492. Her family resettled in northwest Morocco; she was highly educated and at 16 was married to her father’s friend, a man 30 years her senior. The Moroccan sultan had granted her husband the opportunity to rebuild the ruins of Tetouan, which had been destroyed by the Spanish. Sayyida served as a de f...

Thanks to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, every American child grows up hearing about the midnight ride of Paul Revere. Imagine if, instead, he’d chosen to immortalise the story of American Revolutionary heroine Sybil Ludington.  Her nighttime ride was the more impressive feat, to be sure - she was 16, to Revere's 41, when she rode 40 miles, compared to Revere's 12.5 miles. Her mission was to...

Standing by your man isn’t always easy, but Gaby Bloch and Mary Ann Bugg went above and beyond to break their partners out of prison. While both demonstrated loyalty and ingenuity, that may be where the similarities end. Mary Ann was a bushranger, a type of 1800s Australian bandit, while Gaby was a member of the French Resistance during World War II. Let’s start with Mary Ann. Born in 1834, she gr...

Read about "La Pola" on our website: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/policarpa-salavarrieta/ Policarpa Salavarrieta was a revolutionary spy in what is now Colombia. For almost a decade after the Colombian declaration of independence in 1810, freedom fighters battled the Spanish in what was then referred to as “new Grenada”. As a seamstress, she offered her services to the wives and daughters...

Read interview transcript This week we're joined by the fabulous Jess Harper, an Australian operatic soprano who dropped by for a chat about the even more fabulous Australian operatic soprano, the great Dame Nellie Melba. In addition to being an alumna of the Melba Opera Trust's scholarship program, Jess performed as Nellie in the biographical stage production Melba: A New Musical, with Ha...

Mileva Marić was a brilliant physicist and mathematician, but we’ll never know what all she could have accomplished because a classmate knocked her up out of wedlock and she had to give up her career to care for their children. That classmate, named Albert Einstein, later divorced her after he decided he’d rather marry his cousin, though he did pay child support, including the money when he won th...

Possibly the most successful pirate of all time was Ching Shih ( https://www.infinite-women.com/women/ ching-shih / ) In 1801, the woman who would be known as Ching Shih was a young prostitute who married a pirate lord, Ching I. It’s said that she demanded an equal share and command before she would marry him, which he agreed to. Six years later when her husband died, Ching Shih took command of th...