Historical female characters

I make it a point to collect interesting stories about women from history, not ever having learned about too many of them who weren't queens.

Here is my latest haul.

Molly Ockett was a Native American healer of the Wabanaki people (part of the Algonquian alliance) of Maine and New Hampshire. She is remembered for her singular sense of humor and her ethics. The story I like best about her is that one day she went and gathered berries and brought them to a white friend of hers, a minister's wife. The minister's wife chided her for working on the sabbath. Molly Ockett rebuked her by saying that she had taken joy from gathering the berries as a gift, and that that was her way of being closest to God. Annoyingly, there is not a historical biography of Molly Ockett, just some amateur biographies collecting all the primary sources about her without any critical analysis and cultural context. One author, Bunny McBride, has written an interesting series of biographies of Native American women of the northeast. Partner and I were pretty bummed that basically the only information about Native Americans in Maine was in the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, which is lovely, but small.

Mary Kingsley was a Victorian British ethnographer and solo explorer of West Africa. She benefited from her status as a woman to gain anthropological insights her male colleagues could not.

Phyllis Greenacre was an early American pscyhiatrist, a student of Henry Cotton, one of those mad scientists they make horror movies about. She believed in his field, "surgical bacteriology", until she did a study on the patients who were being tortured and butchered and discovered that in fact this did not help them. Her teacher buried her work and expelled her from the clinic. Happily, she became a well-respected scientist in her field, with many publications.

Deborah Moody was the first woman to lead a European colony in the Americas. An Anabaptist, she abandoned Britain due to religious persecution and sought refuge at the Puritans' colony. Like Anne Hutchinson, though, she was horrified by the Puritans' puritanism. She left with a bunch of her followers and set up an independent colony, Gravesend, in Long Island where complete religious freedom was practiced. It eventually became a Quaker stronghold.

Anne Lister was a privileged British tomboy intent on finding a wife. Her lesbian marriage was eventually performed by a clergyman in England in 1834.