This episode is generously sponsored by The Science Ambassador Scholarship, who fund a full  tuition scholarship for a woman seeking an undergraduate degree in science, engineering, or math.

Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History explored the lives and accomplishments of fascinating women who defied gender stereotypes, but often found themselves pushed to the sidelines or erased from history books that weren’t ready to acknowledge them. This series was made possible by generous donations to our Seed & Spark crowdfunding campaign for the project.

As we reflect back on the incredibly rich lives of the women we profile in this series, we would be remiss not to express our profound gratitude for the support of everyone who helped us bring these stories to life. From all the team at Feminist Frequency, and all of the creative minds who worked to make this labor of love a reality.

Feminist Frequency has big things in store for 2017 — we hope that you will join us!

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Transcript

If you’ve ever used a computer, smartphone, or a gaming system at any point in your life, then you owe a debt of gratitude to Ada Lovelace. Born in Victorian England during the time of the telegraph and the steam engine, she was the architect of the very first computer program, the predecessor to the programs running inside in the device where you’re watching this video right now.

Her father was the famous and often scandalous poet Lord Byron, a man once described as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” by one of his many lovers. He married a well-to-do young woman named Annabella, but the honeymoon didn’t last long thanks to Byron’s reputation for affairs with both men and women.

Tired of his misbehavior, Lady Byron left him only a month after their daughter was born, stealing away with the baby as he slept. Ada would never see her father again. News of the scandal traveled quickly through London’s high society, making her something of a celebrity, even as aN infant.

It was rare for girls in Victorian England to receive advanced schooling, since most people believed women were intellectually inferior to men and destined only for marriage and children. But Lady Byron was an unusually well-educated woman, whose love of mathematics had once inspired her husband to call her the “princess of parallelograms.” She encouraged her daughter to pursue math and science but frowned on poetry, imagination, or really anything that reminded her of her “wayward husband.”

At the age of 17, Lovelace met the mathematician Charles Babbage for the first time. A brilliant but eccentric man whose passion for math and science matched her own, he was eager to share his plans for an ingenious machine that could compute and print tables of mathematical information. Although he hadn’t actually built the device, he invited Lovelace and her mother to view an early prototype. Ada was immediately intrigued by the inventor, the invention, and the beautiful mathematics contained within its gears. Despite a 25-year age difference, she and Babbage started exchanging letters and quickly struck up a close, lifelong friendship. Although she ultimately married a nobleman, her correspondence with Babbage continued, and grew so intimate that some wonder whether there was a secret romance between them as well.

Soon, Babbage conceived of an idea for a new and more sophisticated calculation device that he called the Analytical Engine. It could make more complex calculations, and also contained two components that he called the “store” and the “mill,” or what later computer scientists would call “the memory” and “the CPU.”

Lovelace saw the incredible potential of the device, and wanted more people to know about it. So in 1843, she translated an academic paper about the Analytical Engine from French to English. In the process, she not only discovered a serious error in Babbage’s calculations and helped him fix it, she also annotated the document with her own insights into the machine.

These notes ended up being three times longer than the original article, and turned what could have been a simple translation into one of the most important documents in computer history. In what would be called “Note G,” Lovelace made a profound conceptual leap whose implications would not be fully understood for almost a hundred years.

In her notes on the engine, Ada created an algorithm to demonstrate exactly how it could be used to compute a complex number sequence. Although neither she nor Babbage realized it at the time, this was something far more important than an academic reflection on the potential of the engine. It was the first computer program. And she’d written it.

While Babbage viewed his invention as little more than an elaborate calculator, Lovelace saw something more: a revolutionary machine that could weave information the way a loom might weave an intricate pattern and create a new science unto itself.

Her descriptions of the device not only foresaw the development of computer graphics and digital music but include surprisingly philosophical mentions of truth and beauty. Despite her mother’s efforts to stifle her sense of poetry, she saw the possibilities of the Analytical Engine in visionary, metaphorical terms and it opened a door into the future.

The paper, along with her copious notes, was published in 1843 and Lovelace signed it with the initials “A.A.L.,” hoping to conceal both her famous name and her gender. In the same year, one of her letters to Babbage mentions feeling “very ill.” She had suffered from poor health throughout her life, which male doctors insisted was the result of scientific work that was just too taxing for the weak feminine intellect. They insisted she was sick because of her “intellectual overexertion.” Needless to say, they were wrong. At the age of 36, she was diagnosed with cancer and died soon afterwards.

Although Lovelace is now widely credited as a pioneer of computer science, her legacy is not uncontroversial. Lovelace spent most of her life being undervalued and condescended to by men, and her work has sadly faced the same issues in the modern era as well. Although there’s some academic debate about whether her algorithm was truly the first “computer program” in the modern sense of the word, other critics have tried to dismiss her accomplishments entirely. They suggest that she simply “did not have the knowledge” to write a program, or that Babbage wrote the notes himself and she just put her name on them. One particularly uncharitable historian went so far as to call her “mad as a hatter” and claim that she contributed little to Babbage’s work “except trouble.”

Babbage, a genius in his own right, had very different words to say about the fellow scientist he knew and respected so well. In a letter to a friend, he called Lovelace an “enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of sciences and grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects could have exerted.” After reading her notes on his work, he was astonished, and wrote back in admiration saying “All this was impossible for you to know by intuition, and the more I read your notes, the more surprised I am at them, and regret not having earlier explored so rich a vein of the noblest metal.”

In the end, Babbage never actually built a complete version of his Analytical Engine, though he is still widely credited as the inventor of the first computer. But in Lovelace we find not just the first programmer but the first person to foresee the digital future. And despite the best efforts of her naysayers, she remains something truly remarkable: a person who looked at a calculator and saw the computer age.

This episode is generously sponsored by The Harnisch Foundation, an organization whose mission it is to create a more fair and equitable world by investing in gender and racial diversity.

Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History explores the lives and accomplishments of fascinating women who defied gender stereotypes, but often found themselves pushed to the sidelines or erased from history books that weren’t ready to acknowledge them. This series is made possible by generous donations to our Seed & Spark crowdfunding campaign for the project.

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Transcript

There’s something irresistible about underdog stories, where remarkable people rise from humble beginnings to do incredible things against all the odds. But few stories are as dramatic as that of of Ida B. Wells, a woman who was born a slave in Mississippi in the midst of the Civil War, and became a daring investigative reporter and civil rights crusader who would one day be called the “loudest and most persistent voice for truth” in an era of injustice.

From an early age, Wells carried exceptional burdens with exceptional courage. She became the head of her household at the age of 16, when both of her parents died suddenly from yellow fever. In order to support her five brothers and sisters, she curtailed her education and started working as a schoolteacher in rural Mississippi.

When was she was 21 years old, Wells boarded a train to Memphis and seated herself in the first class ladies car, only to be told that black women were restricted to second class. Not only did she bite the conductor who tried to remove her, she soon filed a discrimination lawsuit against the railroad company. She won the initial case, and while it was overturned on appeal, an article she wrote about the experience helped launch her career as a journalist.

Wells’s life changed forever in 1892, when her friend Thomas Moss was murdered by a white mob in Memphis along with two other black men. Their brutal killings inspired Wells to speak out against the horrors of lynching, an increasingly common tool of terror used against black people in the decades after the Civil War.

Black men were often falsely accused of rape in order to justify their murders, but in a series of widely-read articles and pamphlets, Wells argued that lynching had little to do with protecting the honor of women and everything to do with protecting the power of southern white men. Like so many civil rights leaders who would follow in her footsteps — including the civil rights leaders of today — her criticisms were powerful because they took aim not just at the misdeeds of individuals, but at the unexamined institutions of racism and power behind them.

Her groundbreaking analysis changed the national conversation around lynching and even her future mentor Frederick Douglass called his own writing on the subject “feeble in comparison.”

Wells was the co-owner and editor of a black newspaper in Memphis. After one of her anti-lynching articles “displeased” the white community, an angry mob stormed the office of the paper and destroyed it. Faced with death threats, Wells started carrying a pistol in her purse, but refused to back down from her anti-lynching campaign. She said it was better to “die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap.”

After that she relocated to New York, where she began to publish investigative journalism for an even larger audience, including pamphlets that collected statistical documentation of lynching in the South. Her popular anti-lynching speeches eventually took her to Britain where white audiences seemed far more outraged than many of their American counterparts. Her overseas speaking tour inspired international condemnation of lynching,particularly from British newspapers and politicians, and elevated Wells to the most visible national leader in the anti-lynching movement.

Although Wells often criticized herself for being stubborn and hot-tempered, those same qualities made her a fiery orator and a relentless crusader against injustice. Faced with death threats from southern whites and criticisms from moderate black reformers who considered her too radical, Wells refused to compromise her ideals for the sake of comfort, convenience or even personal safety.

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them,” wrote Wells, who never failed to speak unpleasant truths, even when it cost her friends or potential allies. Although surrounded by hostility and threats from people who wanted to punish her outspokenness because of her race and her gender, she refused to be silenced.

Although she fought for women’s rights Wells was often disappointed by white suffragists who considered racial issues a distraction from the fight against sexism. Some even endorsed segregation. During the famous women’s suffrage parade of 1913, when black women were told to walk at the back, Wells simply waited till the march started and defiantly joined her state’s delegation. Similarly, she was frustrated by those in the black community who saw women’s rights as unimportant to the fight against racism. Caught between the struggles of her race and her gender, Wells often felt like she fought alone.

Although she had many suitors, and withstood enormous social pressure to marry, Wells remained single throughout her twenties. In her early thirties, she finally met her match in Ferdinand Barnett, a black lawyer who was equally passionate about social justice, and a man who wholeheartedly supported her career. They married and had four children together, and while Wells would eventually step down from her full-time position as a newspaper editor, she continued her work as a reformer until the day she died.

When she passed away in 1931 at the age of 69, Ida B. Wells had profoundly changed the way people looked at race, gender and violence in America, and transformed herself from a slave who was regarded as property to someone once described as a woman who “walked as if she owned the world.”

Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History explores the lives and accomplishments of fascinating women who defied gender stereotypes but often found themselves pushed to the sidelines or erased from history books that weren’t ready to acknowledge them. This series is made possible by generous donations to our Seed & Spark crowdfunding campaign for the project.

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When most people think of pirates, they imagine hulking, fearsome men with names like Blackbeard or Long John Silver. Although the vast majority of pirates throughout history have been male, one of the most famous and feared pirates who ever lived was Ching Shih, a young Cantonese woman who became the ruler of one of the largest pirate fleets in history, and the mastermind behind a floating criminal empire so powerful that even the Chinese military couldn’t stop it.

We don’t know much about her early life, except that at one point, she worked at a brothel in Canton. In 1801, Ching Shih married a pirate commander named Cheng I and soon ruled by his side as he expanded his empire, unifying countless small scattered crews of pirates into an organized and increasingly powerful coalition. When her husband died suddenly in 1807, Ching Shih knew exactly what to do. She stepped in to claim the leadership for herself, taking control of somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 pirates.

Their acceptance of a woman as their commander remains a remarkable testament to both her political skill and the respect she must have earned from the crew. She soon appointed her adopted son, Chang Pao, as the commander of her most powerful fleet, and eventually married him. It was a little creepy, but the two became a formidable team whose raids were feared through the South China Sea.

We don’t know exactly what Ching looked like, although some historians have assumed she caught the eye of her pirate husband through good looks rather than her considerable intelligence. While there are flamboyant but dubious accounts invented by Western writers of a gorgeous “goddess” wielding swords and wearing glittering battle gear covered in golden dragons, more reliable texts describe Ching Shih as “a good military strategist,” a “strict disciplinarian” and “an excellent businesswoman.” This much was true.

Although she rejected many traditional ideas about what women could and couldn’t do, other rules were extremely important—namely those enforced on her ships. With the help of a code of conduct drawn up by Chang Pao, she helped establish clear rules for the behavior, finances and power structure of the fleet, as well as the draconian punishments that awaited anyone who dared to disobey or cheat her. Her rule was unquestionably harsh, not only for the victims of her raids, but for anyone in her fleet who dared to step out of line.

All plunder had to be registered, with 80 percent of the loot paid into a general fund. Somewhat ironically, stealing from the fund was one of the worst crimes a pirate could commit, and the punishment was death. As one observer noted, Ching Shih’s strict and often lethal reaction to misbehavior kept the crew very honest, and the pirates under her command “took great care to behave themselves well.”

Through careful and ruthless management, Ching Shih made the bloody and chaotic work of piracy into a highly organized business, and business was good — making her a very wealthy woman.

And of course, like so many male leaders conquerors and generals throughout history, her prosperity and success came at the cost of innocent lives. Her remarkable story is a reminder that, regardless of the limitations placed on them, women can be anything that men can be: brilliant and brutal, courageous and cruel, powerful and dreadful.

The Chinese government devoted considerable effort to crushing the pirates, but thanks in large part to Ching Shih’s strategic skill, her fleets became so powerful that the government eventually stopped trying to destroy them and started trying to negotiate with them, instead.

Ching Shih knew that piracy was not a wise long-time career, especially when the most common retirement plan was death. So in 1810, she stepped off a boat surrounded by the wives and children of her pirates and walked completely unarmed to the office of the local Governor-General to discuss amnesty.

With a fearsome floating army at her back, Ching Shih negotiated a very good deal: not only were she and any other pirates who surrendered completely pardoned by the government for their many, many, crimes, they got to keep all their ill-gotten plunder and even received jobs from the government if they wanted. Her husband was appointed a lieutenant in the Chinese navy, where he commanded a private fleet — made up of former pirates, of course.

Thanks to her exceptional cunning and bravery, Ching Shih ended her life of piracy not as a criminal behind bars or the casualty of a raid gone wrong, but rather by gathering her riches and retiring in comfort as a law-abiding citizen. Well, mostly law-abiding. She spent her later years running a gambling establishment back in Canton, where she reportedly lead a “peaceful life,” or at least as peaceful as she could manage while presiding over a notorious gambling den.

When she finally died in 1844 at 60 years old, she had transformed herself from a relatively powerless young woman into both the most powerful female pirate in history, and into something almost as rare: a pirate who died from old age.

Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History explores the lives and accomplishments of fascinating women who defied gender stereotypes but often found themselves pushed to the sidelines or erased from history books that weren’t ready to acknowledge them. This series is made possible by generous donations to our Seed & Spark crowdfunding campaign for the project.

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If you’ve ever fallen in love with a novel, you know the moment: you look at the clock, it’s one in the morning and you still can’t put the book down. You’ve been pulled into a world conjured from someone else’s imagination, where the thoughts and feelings of the people on the pages are as real as your own.

It’s hard to imagine a time before novels as we know them existed, but there was, in fact, a first novel. And if we want to understand how it came into being, we have to look more than a thousand years into the past, at the writing desk of one woman.

Her name was Murasaki Shikibu, or at least that’s the only name we can give her now. Born into an aristocratic Japanese family sometime in the 970s, she lived at a time when the names of women were rarely recorded. Instead, well-born women like Murasaki were given nicknames, usually related to the rank or position of a close male relative.

She lived in an intensely cloistered world where women were constantly shielded from public view by screens or curtains. Sometimes it was easier to identify an aristocratic woman by the distinctive pattern of a protruding sleeve than by her face.

Despite the often suffocating limitations on their lives, women like Murasaki were educated and expected to be highly literate. The granddaughter of a famous poet and the daughter of a scholar, Murasaki became conversant in Japanese and Chinese literature so quickly she was considered something of a literary prodigy.

In her diary, Murasaki recorded her father’s reaction when he realized exactly how talented she was. He said “Just my luck! What a pity she was not born a man!”

In her early twenties she married a man old enough to be her father who died only two years later– but not before they had a daughter. Instead of marrying again, the gifted young widow and mother began work on The Tale of Genji, an intricate saga of romance and intrigue in the life of an imperial prince.

The Tale of Genji is often considered the first modern novel because Murasaki offered readers not just a chronicle of events, but deep psychological insight into the characters and their inner lives. Her story made history because it was more than just a story: It was a complex literary portrait of what it means to be human.

Although the hero of the Tale of Genji is a man, named Prince Genji, Shikibu filled her novel with multifaceted female characters who provided a rare glimpse into how it felt to be a woman in her world. As Virginia Woolf later wrote, when Murasaki set out to illuminate the complicated life of the prince “she naturally chose the medium of other women’s minds.”

The Tale of Genji earned Murasaki a permanent place in literary history. It may also have helped her secure a position at the Imperial Court where she became an attendant and occasional tutor to the Empress Shoshi. Murasaki became quite close with the Empress and even secretly taught her Chinese — a language only men were supposed to learn.

Although it was a comfortable life Murasaki was often lonely and her literary fame made her the target of court gossips who called her pretentious, arrogant and unfriendly– complaints often heard about successful women even today.

No one is sure exactly when Murasaki died, but the legacy she left behind changed Japanese literature forever, and left a mark on the broader world of fiction that can never be erased. Throughout history, “great novels” have traditionally been considered the domain of male writers, while tales of romance — especially those written by women— are often dismissed as frivolous or inferior.

But history itself tells a very different story. Not only was the first novel a romance, but it was one of the greatest literary masterpieces in human history, and it was written by a woman. Because she dared to imagine the world in ways that no one had before, we can still hear her voice echoing through time more than a thousand years later, daring us to imagine worlds of our own.

Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History explores the lives and accomplishments of fascinating women who defied gender stereotypes but often found themselves pushed to the sidelines or erased from history books that weren’t ready to acknowledge them. This series is made possible by generous donations to our Seed & Spark crowdfunding campaign for the project.

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Transcript

Years before her critics dubbed her one of the most dangerous people in America, a young woman named Emma Goldman found herself at a dance. Although she was a political activist attending the event to gain support for her cause, she also just loved dancing — so much so that one of her allies took her aside to criticize her for being “frivolous” and “undignified.” After all, should a serious activist be seen having so much fun?

Furious at the interruption, Goldman told the young man to mind his own business, because the liberty she fought for was not about the “denial of life and joy.” Instead, she said, “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” For Goldman, a revolution without dancing was not a revolution worth having.

She was born in 1869 to Jewish parents in the Russian Empire and raised by a distant mother and an abusive father who tried to force her to marry at age 15. When she refused, he threw her French grammar book in the fire, saying, “Girls do not have to learn much! All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefüllte fish, cut noodles fine and give the man plenty of children.” There are few women of her era who would defy that idea of womanhood quite as much as Emma Goldman.

When she was 16, she escaped her father by emigrating to the United States, where she discovered her true calling: a political rebel and fiery orator who would spend her entire life calling for revolution.

She was horrified by the tragic story of several labor activists who were executed in Chicago, and found herself drawn to the labor movement and eventually to anarchism. Contrary to what the word might suggest, Goldman’s philosophy was not about disorder and chaos. It was about personal freedom and rejecting institutions she believed were repressive: government, religion, war, business interests, and even marriage.

Although she did end up marrying several times out of convenience or for citizenship, Goldman rejected traditional notions of marriage, and chose never to have to children.

Goldman quickly became one of the most famous radical figures in America, whose power with words was sometimes referred to as a “sledgehammer.” She traveled across the country speaking so passionately that the famed reporter Nellie Bly would dub her a “little Joan of Arc.”

Over the years Goldman was sent to prison for her ideas several times: once for promoting birth control; once for discouraging men from registering for the draft; and once for telling unemployed workers to “take bread” from the wealthy if they were deprived of work and food.

Despite her support for female independence, she often found herself at odds with suffragists, believing it less important to get women the vote in systems she viewed as oppressive than to dismantle them entirely.

Emma said “The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts,” she said. “It begins in woman’s soul.” She believed that women needed to reject the sexist rules of societies and governments and assert their rights to make decisions about their lives and their bodies. Only that, said Goldman, would truly set women free.

Although she was heterosexual, Goldman was one of the earliest American advocates for gay rights, as well as birth control and the sexual freedom of women. “I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases,” she wrote. “I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.” Many of her ideas about gender, sex and sexuality would be considered controversial even today — and in the late 1800s, they were positively shocking.

Goldman was a thorn in the side of American authorities for many years. In 1919, they finally declared her American citizenship invalid, and deported her back to Russia, which had recently had a people’s revolution of its own. But what she found in the aftermath was not the utopia of her dreams, but rather another repressive regime willing to crush the rights of its own citizens. After meeting with Lenin himself, she became deeply disillusioned with the new communist government.

So she traveled abroad, speaking out about the oppressiveness of the Soviets, which alienated many of her allies and got her ejected from both Sweden and Germany. When she finally returned to America in 1934 (with the permission of the Roosevelt administration) Goldman was a grandmotherly figure in her 60s, but just as stubborn and outspoken as she’d ever been. On her final U.S. speaking tour, her speeches railed against the fascism of Hitler’s Germany and the communism of Stalin’s Russia, angering people on the right and the left.

Even old age could not dampen her revolutionary spirit; at 67, she traveled to Barcelona to support workers and anarchists who had risen up against fascism during the Spanish Civil War. She called them a “shining example” to the rest of the world and told an audience of 10,000 that “your ideal has been my ideal for 45 years and it will remain to my last breath.”

At the end of her life, when the goals of her cause seemed more unpopular and further away from reality than ever, Goldman never wavered in her beliefs, even when the price was deportation, threats of violence, and prison terms. She hoped that her example could light the way for future generations as well. As she wrote to a friend and former lover years before her death, “someday, sometime long after we are gone, liberty may again raise its proud head. It is up to us to blaze its way—dim as our torch may seem today — it is still the one flame.”

Throughout her life, Goldman had a knack for infuriating both friends and foes, but would never compromise her convictions or the way she lived to please either of them. “A trail of bonfires marked Goldman’s rampage through life,” wrote one historian, and indeed, Goldman was willing to burn almost any bridge in the name of her truth.

As she once said (when a young man tried to stop her from dancing) she would never stop fighting for a world where liberty was the birthright of every human being, and where women could live, love, and dance as freely as they wanted.

Episode 1 premieres September 12, 2016!

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With just a few days left, Feminist Frequency needs your support to reach our crowdfunding goal. Forget the stereotypes: Women have always been leaders, innovators and rebels. Help us tell the stories of the women in history who proved it. Please donate here: https://www.seedandspark.com/studio/ordinary-women#story

Statistics referenced in the video:
Women in film comprise only 30% of speaking characters and 12% of protagonists. [Source: Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, 2015]

In prime-time TV, women make up only 14% of executives and 16% of characters with STEM careers. [Source: Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media]

58% of females characters are identified by the roles they have in their personal, lives such as wives or mothers. [Source: Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, 2015]

Female newsroom Staff: 36% [source: women’s media center, 2014]
Women in Congress – 20% [source: Center for American Women in Politics, 2015]
Female aircraft Pilots and Engineers: 7.2% [Department of Labor, 2014]
Female fortune 500 CEOs: 5% [source: PEW Research Center, 2014]

Top- Grossing Film teams – 16% are women [source: women’s media center, 2014]
Top Grossing Directors – 9% are women [source: Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, 2015]
Female founded startups – 18% are women [source: CrunchBase, 2015]

Cents on a white man’s dollar:
White women: 78
Black women: 64
Hispanic women: 54
[Source: U.S. Current Population Survey and the National Committee on Pay Equity; also Bureau of Labor Statistics: Weekly and Hourly Earnings Data from the Current Population Survey.]

Ordinary Women writer Laura Hudson talks about Murasaki Shikibu, the 10th century author who wrote the first modern novel at a time when women’s names were rarely written down. Support our project: https://www.seedandspark.com/studio/ordinary-women#story

Ordinary Women writer Laura Hudson talks about Ada Lovelace, and why the “controversy” around her reflects how we continue to undermine women’s accomplishments even today. Support our project: https://www.seedandspark.com/studio/ordinary-women#story

Take a peek into the making of Ordinary Women! Support the campaign here: https://www.seedandspark.com/studio/ordinary-women#story

Visit our campaign page for more information!

Rather than heroes, leaders and innovators, women are too often depicted—and treated—as secondary characters in history, objects of affections, damsels to be rescued, or merely the wives, mothers and assistants to the men who achieved important things. But a closer look back at history can tell a different story, one full of defiant, daring women who challenged stereotypes and refused to settle for the status quo.

Narrated by Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian, Ordinary Women will tell the stories of exceptional women from history: Murasaki Shikibu, the inventor of the modern novel; Ada Lovelace, the writer of the first computer program, Ching Shih, a pirate captain; Emma Goldman, a political revolutionary; and Ida B. Wells, a civil rights leader and journalist. Each episode will features an original score and original animation, with a distinct visual style inspired by its subject.

Their accomplishments are a reminder that the stories we tell about women too often reflect the limitations that have been placed upon them, rather the things they can do–and have already done. We hope that our project can help shift perceptions of what girls and women can do, not just in exceptional cases but in perfectly ordinary ones.

Learn more and support our campaign by visiting: https://www.seedandspark.com/studio/ordinary-women#story