I’m glad Pixar is finally working on a movie with a girl as the title character (it’s only their thirteenth movie), but did they really have to make her a princess? She sounds like a kick-ass princess, but nonetheless: princess. We’re plenty well covered in that department, thanks.
I got myself plenty worked up about this while I was cleaning up after supper (irony!), and started listing all of the famous women I could think of who did amazing things who were neither princesses nor queens. Here are a few:
- Sacajawea, lead Lewis & Clark across the country
- Nellie Bly (she seems like a natural to make a movie of), journalist
- Amelia Earhart, aviator
- Gertrude Ederle, swam the English Channel
- Beryl Markham, aviator (if you can get your hands on a copy of Straight on Till Morning
, I highly recommend it)
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh, aviator
- Sally Ride, astronaut
- Marie Curie, chemist
- Georgia O’Keeffe, painter
- Sappho, poet
- Elsa Schiapparelli, surrealist fashion designer
- Jane Goodall, primatologist
- Margaret Mead, anthropologist
- Florence Nightingale, nurse and statistician
- Julia Child, chef
- Ada Lovelace, mathemetician
(While looking up some of those links, I stumbled across a link to the Society of Women Adventurers, who last year gave a grant to a 17-year-old; she used it to climb Everest and become the youngest person to climb the highest peak on each of the 7 continents. I like these people.)
Who would you add to the list?
