TODAY IS INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY, and in honor of the event, we want to show off one particularly awesome Facebook and Instagram page. It’s called “Women Adventurers Worldwide,” and it’s run by Matador’s own Ailsa Ross. The page focuses on “history’s trailblazers, from surfer princesses to mountain climbing opera singers,” and the women it shows off are true badasses. Here are some of our favorites.
Meet History's Most Badass Woman Adventurers
People call them the diving grandmas of Jeju Island, but to each other they’re just haenyeo — sea women. No oxygen tanks for these Koreans, the oldest of whom are over 80 years old and have been heading into the ocean for more than six decades. Dodging storms, stinging jellyfish, and sharks in search of octopus, oysters, urchins, seaweed, and abalone to sell, these women represent a tradition that transformed the jelly bean-shaped island into a semi-matriarchal society more than 300 years ago. Diving didn’t make men much money back in the 18th century, so they didn’t do it unless they really had to supplement their farming income. But women didn’t have to pay taxes, so they could make big profits digging for sea creatures on the ocean floor. Tens of thousands of female divers created an industry that saw gender roles reversed, the women becoming breadwinners as the men took on the bulk of shopping and childcare duties. In an interview with Lucky Peach, modern haenyeo Mun Yeon Ok said “Jeju women are tough and burly. Most Koreans, when they are old, they are dependent on their children for an allowance. But haenyo, even if we are eighty, we earn our own money and we don’t have to be dependent on anyone.” Asked about the future of haenyeo, she said “I don’t know. The ocean is polluted and nothing grows in it.” Image via Baraka50 on Flickr. #diver #womandiver #jeju #history
In 19th-century Boston, working-class women were expected to center their lives around their family and eschew having dreams and ambitions of their own. Annie Cohen Kopchovsky (1870–1947) was not your average woman. A Jewish Latvian immigrant and young mother to three children, Kopchovsky decided she was going to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world by bike, and she was going to make a ton of money while doing it. Learning to cycle just a few days before she set off on June 27, 1894, she left home with nothing more than a change of clothes and a pearl-handled revolver. A master saleswoman, her main income came from turning her body and bike into a mobile billboard that bore signs and ribbons advertising everything from perfume to bicycle tires. She sold promotional photos of herself as well as souvenir pins and autographs. She even changed her last name to ‘Londonderry’ in exchange for $100 from the Londonderry Spring Water Company. She told wildly exaggerated stories about hunting tigers and going to prison to packed lecture halls, and in doing so largely created her own myth, becoming a figure onto which men and women could project their hopes and fears about changing gender roles. Londonderry’s trip was described at the time as “the Most Extraordinary Journey Ever Undertaken by a Woman” but she died in obscurity. #history #women #feminism #girlswhobike #womenshistory
You can follow Women Adventurers Worldwide on Instagram here, and Facebook here. 