In 1817, Frenchwoman Rose de Freycinet disguised herself as a man in order to travel the world aboard a ship. She wrote in her journal, “LIFE IS TOO SHORT! I wanted to brighten it up as much as possible, and I shall never regret the decision which I took. Whereas had I acted differently, I would have nothing but regret.”

As the region changes apace, so does an ancient style of painting.

Wartime rationing and women’s suffrage helped popularize the brigadeiro.

Nelli’s “Last Supper,” completed around 1568, is remarkable for two key reasons: first, unlike frescoes, which were painted directly onto wet plaster and nearly impossible to move, this painting was painted on a canvas that had moved several times over the centuries. More strikingly, this was the first-known depiction of the Last Supper by a woman worldwide

Madame Sherri made a name for herself designing elaborate costumes for Broadway productions, most notably the Ziegfeld Follies. The glamorous eccentric threw fabulous parties at her “castle” in the middle of the forest, and drove around the town in a custom-made cream Packard car, with a monkey perched on her shoulder.

A century before the women’s liberation movement, she argued that women should be able to support themselves and receive equal pay for equal work.

Elizabeth Cushee’s cartographic creativity places her among a smattering of women who have charted the Earth and helped make sense of the heavens—often with little earthly fanfare.

Jane’s father encouraged her to study the numerous species of plants that grew on the family’s 3,000 acres of wilderness. “I thought that botany is an amusement which may be made agreeable for the ladies who are often at a loss to fill up their time,” her father once wrote. Under her father’s tutelage, Jane soon became an expert on Linnaean botany.

The history of sexual harassment in waitressing goes deeper than tipping. Since the days of colonial taverns, women who serve have often been considered—by government officials, customers, and even courts—sexually available. For some servers, unwanted sexual attention was an unfortunate reality of the workplace. For others, like the waitresses who offered both liquor and sexual services in Gilded Age saloons, sex work was part of the job description.

Taller Leñateros is Mexico’s first and only Tzotzil Maya book- and papermaking collective. Founded in 1975 by the Mexican-American poet Ambar Past, the workshop is dedicated to documenting and disseminating the endangered Tzotzil language, culture, and oral history. And it does so environmentally, using only recycled materials (leñateros alludes to those who get their firewood from deadwood, rather than felled trees).

Over the last century and a half, their names have also been borrowed from places and saints, wives and girlfriends, and disliked public figures. For a while, until changes in the 1980s, they were only named after women. But before that, there was also one named after Clement Wragge, the father of naming storms himself.