Epic Women in Epic Times

[Weatherman2020]

A much greater example for young women and girls than what's in the news today.

A major figure in the French Resistance during WWII, Andrée Peel, was one of the most highly decorated woman to survive the war. Known as "Agent Rose," she helped save countless lives, including over 100 British and American pilots shot down over France.

When France was occupied in 1940, Andrée Virot, as she was known then, was running a beauty salon in Brest and joined the resistance movement after the city was occupied. In her role as Agent Rose, she began circulating an underground newspaper, passed on information to the Allies on German shipping and troop movements, and guided Allied planes to secret nighttime landing strips by torchlight. She is most famously remembered for running an under-section of the resistance that rescued 102 Allied pilots over a three year period, ferrying them through a series of safe houses to isolated Brest beaches for transport to England.

When the Gestapo learned of her involvement with the resistance, she fled to Paris but was arrested shortly after D-Day on June 6, 1944. She was sent to the Ravensbrück and Buchenwald concentration camps where she was tortured (she is pictured here with camp uniform -- the red triangle signifies enemy spy or POW). In her most harrowing moment, she narrowly escaped death when American troops arrived to liberate Buchenwald just as Peel was being lined up to be shot by a Nazi firing squad.

In discussing her wartime experience, Peel stated, "I was born with courage. I did not allow cruel people to find in me a person they could torture. I saved 102 pilots before being arrested, interrogated and tortured. I suffer still from that. I still have the pain... At that time we were all putting our lives in danger but we did it because we were fighting for freedom... It was a terrible time but looking back I am so proud of what I did and I'm glad to have helped defend the freedom of our future generations."

Following the war, Peel received many commendations including the Croix de Guerre (with palm), the Croix de Guerre (silver star), the Cross of the Voluntary Fighter, the Medal of the Resistance, the Liberation Cross – all French awards, as well as the Medal of Freedom by the United States and the King’s Commendation for Brave Conduct by Britain. At age 99, she was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, France's highest honor. She eventually married Englishman, John Peel, and settled in Bristol, England. In 2010, the heroic "Agent Rose" passed away at the age of 105.

Andrée Peel is one of 26 incredible women featured in the excellent book for ages 13 and up, "Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance, and Rescue" at Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance, and Rescue

Adult readers may also enjoy the dramatic fictionalized account of a young woman who rescues downed Allied pilots in France during WWII, "The Nightingale," at http://amzn.to/1nLcOuO

For two highly recommended novels, both for ages 13 and up, about women resistance fighters of WWII, check out "Code Name Verity" (Code Name Verity) and "Rose Under Fire" (Rose Under Fire).

And, for many books for children and teens about girls and women who lived during the Holocaust period, including stories of other heroic resisters and rescuers, visit our blog post for Holocaust Remembrance Week at Yom HaShoah / Days of Remembrance: 30 Mighty Girl Books About The Holocaust

 

[koshergrl]

Sixteen year old Sybil rode 40 miles in a night (twice what Paul Revere did) to warn the countryside of advancing, drunken, murderous, thieving, and state funded British troops, who were in the area to school the despised provincials.

Her father sent her, he was a colonel whose troops were on furlough. He had a very high estimation of the girl's courage and ability to ride like a bat out of hell while skirting armed, rampaging hostiles. There is no question what her fate would have been had she been captured, and there was definitely a significant chance of it.

Sybil Ludington

 

[koshergrl]

Omg, Sybil is pictured SIDESADDLE in that picture...I bet it's accurate, too!

 

[Weatherman2020]

Omg, Sybil is pictured SIDESADDLE in that picture...I bet it's accurate, too!

No lady would straddle a horse!

 

[koshergrl]

Omg, Sybil is pictured SIDESADDLE in that picture...I bet it's accurate, too!

No lady would straddle a horse!

I bet she cheated in the stretches in between

 

[koshergrl]

Then there's this one:

Nobody really knows what happened to Boudica or her daughters, which makes it even more fascinating.
She led the Celtic tribes of what is now England against Rome...and left a scar on the land in three cities, including London, that is still there today.

The Romans came to her village, where she lived as queen of the Iceni, to collect slaves (or "volunteers"). When Boudica said no, they flogged her and soldiers raped her daughters, in public.

Boudica: Celtic War Queen Who Challenged Rome | HistoryNet

 

[Weatherman2020]

Margaret Corbin. She was married with a member of the colonists troops. When her husband got killed on Fort Washington on Manhattan Island, New York on 1776; during the war, she took up a cannon. She gave all she had to contribute to win the war. She got seriously wounded when her arm was almost severed and her breast was lacerated by grapeshot. She lived until about 1800 after receiving charity payments from the Invalid Regiment and later became the first woman to receive a small pension from Congress for military service.

 

[koshergrl]

"Disgusted by the rumors of mass slaughter on the Eastern Front and the deaths of an ever-growing number of her countrymen, Sophie — only 21 at the time — her brother Hans, and their friend Christoph Probst began distributing leaflets at the University of Munich denouncing the Nazis and calling for resistance among the German people. Their flyers eventually spread around Germany to the University of Hamburg and beyond, and into one of the few genuine flare-ups of internal political resistance against Hitler during the war.

"Unfortunately, the Nazis, as you may have heard, were known for being a tad tough on dissent.

"Sophie, Hans, and Probst were eventually captured by the Gestapo, tried, and executed for treason. Her last words were: "What does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?"

She stood up to a corrupt and tyrannical regime, and died for it. She was 21 years old.

It's amazing how people forget how the public approved of this sort of shit in Nazi Germany. Of course the same people who forget are the ones who applaud when our illegal federal agencies execute and imprison those who say "this is wrong, this needs to stop".

15 badass women of World War II you didn't learn about in history class.

 

[koshergrl]

Veronica Lake is famous for changing her hairstyle lolol....To encourage women working industrial jobs while men were away fighting, to cut their hair.

 

[whitehall]

Iva Toguri aka "Tokyo Rose" was a Japanese American stranded in Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor. According to conflicting testimony she was either compelled by the Bushido regime to give propaganda radio broadcasts to American G.I's or she was a willing participant in Japan's propaganda war. At any rate it seems that her radio broadcasts had the opposite effect on American morale in the Pacific than the Japanese thought. Tokyo Rose broadcasted pop music that the G.I.'s loved and added ridiculous propaganda chatter that the G.I's also enjoyed. After the war was over media pressure from high profile personalities like Walter Winchell caused Ms. Toguri to be tried and convicted of treason. She was imprisoned for about ten years and was pardoned by President Ford.

 

[Weatherman2020]

She may never (inexplicably) be in your child's history books, but Dr. Mildred Jefferson made history that should never be forgotten. The first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, earn 28 honorary degrees, counter the vile racism and elitism of #PlannedParenthood, and helped found the National Right to Life, Dr. Jefferson declared passionately: "I became a physician in order to help save lives. I am at once a physician, a citizen, and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live.” This isn't #BlackHistory. This is American History.

 

[Book of Jeremiah]

Corrie ten Boom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In May 1940, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. Among their restrictions was banning a club which Ten Boom had run for young girls.[1][page needed] In May 1942 a well-dressed woman came to the Ten Booms' with a suitcase in hand and told them that she was a Jew, her husband had been arrested several months before, her son had gone into hiding, and Occupation authorities had recently visited her, so she was afraid to go back. She had heard that the Ten Booms had helped their Jewish neighbors, the Weils, and asked if they might help her too. Casper ten Boom readily agreed that she could stay with them. A devoted reader of the Old Testament, he believed that the Jews were the 'chosen people', and he told the woman, "In this household, God's people are always welcome."[2] The family then became very active in the Dutch underground hiding refugees; they honored the Jewish Sabbath.[3]

Thus the Ten Booms began "the hiding place", or "de schuilplaats", as it was known in Dutch (also known as "de Béjé", pronounced in Dutch as 'bayay', an abbreviation of their street address, the Barteljorisstraat). Corrie and Betsie opened their home to refugees — both Jews and others who were members of the resistance movement — being sought by the Gestapo and its Dutch counterpart. They had plenty of room, although wartime shortages meant that food was scarce. Every non-Jewish Dutch person had received a ration card, the requirement for obtaining weekly food coupons. Through her charitable work, Ten Boom knew many people in Haarlem and remembered a couple who had a disabled daughter. The father was a civil servant who by then was in charge of the local ration-card office. She went to his house one evening, and when he asked how many ration cards she needed, "I opened my mouth to say, 'Five,'" Ten Boom wrote in The Hiding Place. "But the number that unexpectedly and astonishingly came out instead was: 'One hundred.'"[4] He gave them to her and she provided cards to every Jew she met.

Arrest, detention, and release[edit]
On February 28, 1944, a Dutch informant named Jan Vogel told the Nazis about the ten Booms' work; at around 12:30 the Nazis arrested the entire ten Boom family. They were sent to Scheveningen prison; Nollie and Willem were released immediately along with Corrie's nephew Peter; Casper died 10 days later. The six people hidden by the ten Booms, among them both Jews and resistance workers, remained undiscovered. Several days after the raid resistance workers transferred them to other locations.

Altogether, the Gestapo arrested some 30 people in the ten Boom family home that day. [5]

Corrie and Betsie were sent from Scheveningen to Herzogenbusch political concentration camp (also known as Kamp Vught), and finally to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, a women's labor camp in Germany.

There they held worship services, after the hard days at work, using a Bible that they had managed to sneak in. After her health continued to recede, Betsie died on December 16, 1944 with a smile on her lips. Before she died, she told Corrie, "There is no pit so deep that He [God] is not deeper still."[6]

Life after the war[edit]
After the war, Ten Boom returned to The Netherlands to set up a rehabilitation center. The refugee houses consisted of concentration-camp survivors and sheltered the jobless Dutch who previously collaborated with Germans during the Occupation. She returned to Germany in 1946, and traveled the world as a public speaker, appearing in more than 60 countries. She wrote many books during this time.[7]

Ten Boom told the story of her family members and their World War II work in her best-selling book, The Hiding Place (1971), which was made into a World Wide Pictures film in 1975, starring Jeannette Clift as Corrie and Julie Harris as Betsie. In 1977, 85-year-old Corrie emigrated to Placentia, California. In 1978, she suffered two strokes, the first rendering her unable to speak, and the second resulting in paralysis. She died on her 91st birthday, 15 April 1983, after a third stroke.

• Israel honored Ten Boom by naming her Righteous Among the Nations.

 

[namvet]

 

[Weatherman2020]

She is heroic for being a light in a world filled with famous people who are idiots who only care about themselves.

 

[Weatherman2020]

When Ayla Hutchinson was 13 years old, she saw her mother cut her finger with a hatchet while splitting kindling and became determined to find a safer way to cut firewood. This Mighty Girl from Taranaki, New Zealand took on that challenge as a science fair project -- the result was the Kindling Cracker, a cast iron tool that allows people to split kindling quickly and safely. Over the past three years, the 17-year-old entrepreneur has built her invention into a thriving business which now ships over 10,000 Kindling Crackers around the world each month!

After Ayla came up with the initial design of the Kindling Cracker for her 8th grade science fair project, her father, Vaughn Hutchinson, helped her build the original prototype. She had such a positive response to her school project that she decided to develop the idea further, stating that “it took a few months or so to get it to the final product." The cast-iron tool uses a built-in axe blade and a safety cage to prevent injuries; just put the wood into the cage and hit it with a hammer to split perfect kindling. Soon, Ayla was winning awards for her invention, including the Regional Finalist Award at the prestigious Google Science Fair.

While her company's growth is exciting, Ayla says that one of her favorite parts of her invention's success is that it's "making a really positive impact in many people’s lives... It makes it easier and safer for everyone to cut kindling which is great to have when you fire up a wood fire, pizza oven, brazier etc. It also gives people with disabilities or physical impairments the freedom to cut their own kindling again." Ayla has even started a company tradition of giving away "a bunch" of Kindling Crackers once a year to people with disabilities or impaired motor skills. On one of her favorite such outings, she and her father drove five hours to deliver a Kindling Cracker to an elderly widow who uses wood to heat her home. “I had heard she needed one,’’ said Ayla. “We sorted out a place for it to sit. She served tea and cookies. And now she doesn’t have to beg the neighbors to cut kindling. It was fun. ”

Ayla's Kindling Cracker is now available in the US on Amazon at http://amzn.to/1lHwcXJ

It's also just become available in the UK as well at http://amzn.to/2gpO0Fd

 

[Picaro]

Dang, a real History thread accidentally broke out here in the History Forum ... thanks for the stories, folks.

And re the 'side-saddle' thing, we have family pics going back to the late 1860's Daguerre tin type plates of our great great grandmothers and aunts and the like posing on horses and mules all the way to the present, and none of them are riding sidesaddle. It must have been a Yankee thing, or 'upper class' fashion or something. Many are also wearing chaps or those leather culotte style things, which are just pants with wide legs as far as I can tell.

 

[Picaro]

Iva Toguri aka "Tokyo Rose" was a Japanese American stranded in Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor. According to conflicting testimony she was either compelled by the Bushido regime to give propaganda radio broadcasts to American G.I's or she was a willing participant in Japan's propaganda war. At any rate it seems that her radio broadcasts had the opposite effect on American morale in the Pacific than the Japanese thought. Tokyo Rose broadcasted pop music that the G.I.'s loved and added ridiculous propaganda chatter that the G.I's also enjoyed. After the war was over media pressure from high profile personalities like Walter Winchell caused Ms. Toguri to be tried and convicted of treason. She was imprisoned for about ten years and was pardoned by President Ford.

My father and uncles heard some of those during the war. They always said it was obvious she was doing a parody of what the Japanese wanted her to say, just by her inflections and tone.

 

[Weatherman2020]

Born in Austria in 1914, the mathematically talented Lamarr moved to the US in 1937 to start a Hollywood career. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, she was considered one of cinema's leading ladies and made numerous films; however, her passion for engineering is far less known today. Her interest in inventing was such that she set up an engineering room in her house complete with a drafting table and wall of engineering reference books. With the outbreak of World War II, Lamarr wanted to apply her skills to helping the war effort and, motivated by reports of German U-boats sinking ships in the Atlantic, she began investigating ways to improve torpedo technology.

After Lamar met composer George Antheil, who had been experimenting with automated control of musical instruments, together they hit on the idea of "frequency hopping." At the time, radio-controlled torpedoes could easily be detected and jammed by broadcasting interference at the frequency of the control signal, thereby causing the torpedo to go off course. Frequency hopping essentially served to encrypt the control signal because it was impossible for a target to scan and jam all of the frequencies.

Lamarr and Antheil were granted a patent for their invention on August 11, 1942, but the US Navy wasn't interested in applying their groundbreaking technology until twenty years later when it was used on military ships during a blockade of Cuba in 1962. Lamarr and Antheil's frequency-hopping concept serves as a basis for the spread-spectrum communication technology used in GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices. Unfortunately, Lamarr's part in its development has been largely overlooked and her efforts weren't recognized until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave her an award for her technological contributions. Hedy Lamarr passed away in 2000 at the age of 85 and, in 2014, she was as long last inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her invention of a "Secret Communication System" many years ago.

 

[namvet]

Born in Austria in 1914, the mathematically talented Lamarr moved to the US in 1937 to start a Hollywood career. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, she was considered one of cinema's leading ladies and made numerous films; however, her passion for engineering is far less known today. Her interest in inventing was such that she set up an engineering room in her house complete with a drafting table and wall of engineering reference books. With the outbreak of World War II, Lamarr wanted to apply her skills to helping the war effort and, motivated by reports of German U-boats sinking ships in the Atlantic, she began investigating ways to improve torpedo technology.

After Lamar met composer George Antheil, who had been experimenting with automated control of musical instruments, together they hit on the idea of "frequency hopping." At the time, radio-controlled torpedoes could easily be detected and jammed by broadcasting interference at the frequency of the control signal, thereby causing the torpedo to go off course. Frequency hopping essentially served to encrypt the control signal because it was impossible for a target to scan and jam all of the frequencies.

Lamarr and Antheil were granted a patent for their invention on August 11, 1942, but the US Navy wasn't interested in applying their groundbreaking technology until twenty years later when it was used on military ships during a blockade of Cuba in 1962. Lamarr and Antheil's frequency-hopping concept serves as a basis for the spread-spectrum communication technology used in GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices. Unfortunately, Lamarr's part in its development has been largely overlooked and her efforts weren't recognized until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave her an award for her technological contributions. Hedy Lamarr passed away in 2000 at the age of 85 and, in 2014, she was as long last inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her invention of a "Secret Communication System" many years ago.

View attachment 113413

eventually they developed the acoustic torpedo that homed in on prop Cavitation the Uboats were doomed. the US started the war with a defective torpedo. taking over a year to diagnose and fix.

 

[namvet]

sex pot Marlene Dietrich. Hitler tried to get her to come back to Germany. she told him to shove it. more fun in America. and American men. such as...............

why did Wayne pass up on WW2?? maybe this story will finally answer that. and she had her eye on other US film stars to. whatever Marlene wanted Marlene got

story