Yennenga
A legendary figure in West Africa, Yennenga has come to symbolise the epitome of the female warrior, a free and independent woman.
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Vida Jowett
Vida Eliza Jowett OBE helped create the New Zealand’s civilian Women’s War Service Auxiliary in 1940. This led to the formation of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps, to free up men for active service overseas or for essential industries. Jowett was appointed Chief Commander of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in 1942.
She and her family also lived in Western Samoa during the devastating influenza epidemic that killed over 20 per cent of the population. After they returned to New Zealand in 1919, Jowett became involved in the Royal New Zealand Society for the Health of Women and Children (Plunket). She helped establish the Eastbourne sub-branch in 1922 and later became its president; becoming president of the Wellington branch in 1935 and overseeing the work of local sub-branches. She also became a member of the dominion council.
In 1940 Jowett helped organise the Women’s War Service Auxiliary, a civilian organisation with official status to liaise between women’s organisations and government departments. It recruited women to work as drivers, radio operators and signallers and in welfare and clerical sections. Some WAACs trained for coastal and anti-aircraft defence work and were part of artillery units. Of the 5,000 women who served in the WAACs during the war, 920 were sent overseas; at least 10 died while serving overseas. Jowett was known for treating problems with understanding and tact, and was known to fight with the military authorities for the welfare and future of the WAACs, even threatening to resign.
After the war ended, an official report stated: ‘It is generally acknowledged that during the war, the WAAC proved its worth. Apart from their value in replacing men, it was found that in certain tasks, women were superior to men’. The WAACs were made a permanent part of the army in 1948, and became the New Zealand Women’s Army Corps.
In recognition of her work in the WAACs, Jowett was appointed an OBE in 1944. She resigned from her full-time appointment in 1947, but retained the honorary position of commandant in the Territorials until her retirement in 1953. In 1977, the WRAC was dissolved when women were integrated into the regular army; final parades were held across New Zealand, at which a message from Jowett was read out to all servicewomen.
Lise de Baissac
Lise Marie Jeanette de Baissac MBE was an agent of the United Kingdom’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) clandestine organization in France during World War II. The SOE carried out espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in countries occupied by the Axis powers, especially Nazi Germany. SOE agents worked with resistance groups and supplied them with weapons and equipment parachuted in from Britain. Because the presence of young, able-bodied men would raise suspicions, many SOE agents were women.
As soon as the SOE began recruiting women, de Baissac applied and was accepted for training in May 1942. Female agents were trained as couriers or wireless operators, working for male “organisers,” but de Baissac was identified as having the skills needed to head her own network. Her training took place at Beaulieu, Hampshire, where the commandant wrote that De Baissac was “quite imperturbable and would remain cool and collected in any situation… [s]he was very much ahead of her fellow students.”
On the night of 24 September 1942, de Baissac and Andrée Borrel were the first female SOE agents to parachute into France (Yvonne Rudellat had arrived by boat two months earlier). De Baissac worked a courier – bicycling 100 kilometres or more daily to deliver messages – and liaison officer for her brother Claude’s network in Bordeaux, codenamed Scientist, communicating with networks in Paris and Tours. Her mission as a one-woman network was “to form a new circuit and to provide a centre where agents could go with complete security for material help and information on local details” and to organise the pick-up of arms drops from the UK to assist the French resistance. During her 11 months Poitiers, she received and briefed 13 newly arrived agents and organized departures of agents, resistance leaders, and others traveling to England. She collected air-dropped containers of weapons and supplies, transporting them to safe houses. She also built her own resistance network of recruits.
In September 1944, the de Baissac siblings returned to France, now liberated from German control, as part of the Judex mission to locate lost and captured SOE agents and the French people who had aided them.
Her obituary in The Guardian described her as a “grande dame of the old school: fiercely independent, courageous, elegant and modest.” One British officer stated, “The role she played in aiding the maquis and the resistance in France will never be over-praised and she did much to enable to maquis and resistance’s preparations before the American breakthrough in Mayenne.” Her SOE dossier reads “[S]he was the inspiring-force for the groups in the Orne, and through her initiatives she inflicted heavy losses on the Germans thanks to anti-tyre devices scattered on the roads near Saint-Aubin-du-Désert, Saint-Mars-du-Désert, and even as far as Laval, Le Mans and Rennes. She also took part in armed attacks on enemy columns.”
Begum Samru
Joanna Nobilis Sombre began her career as a Nautch (dancing) girl in 1700s India, and eventually became the ruler of Sardhana, a small principality near Meerut.
Lorelle Henderson Corbin
When World War II began in 1939, the Women’s Royal Naval Service (New Zealand) was formed, becoming the Women’s Royal New Zealand Naval Service (WRNZNS) in 1942. Lorelle joined the Wrens’ first Auckland intake as a clerk–typist, as was rapidly promoted. In September 1943, as fourth officer, she helped oversee the 200 women then serving in the Auckland area. She was a strict disciplinarian who held those who served under her to her own high standards – though most of them endured spartan conditions in the Devonport barracks while Fourth Officer Corbin enjoyed the comfort of her parents’ Remuera home.
In July 1945 she was one of two Wrens appointed to train for service overseas with the British Pacific flee; to their great disappointment, they were no longer needed after Japan’s surrender the following month. Instead, she was transferred to Wellington to serve as secretary to the chief of naval staff. Shortly afterwards, she was promoted to third officer, with the ranking backdated to March 1945. The Wrens were retained for another year to help process the discharge of naval personnel, during which time Lorelle and 11 other New Zealand Wrens were selected to participate in the Victory Parade in London. She was demobilised in September 1946, and the WRNZNS was disbanded that December.
Ching Shih
Considered by many to be the most successful pirate in history, Ching Shih led the Red Flag Fleet of 80,000 pirates and more than 1,800 ships, ruled the Chinese seas for two decades, and managed to retire happily – after extorting a very agreeable pension from the Chinese government.
After working as a prostitute in her early life, Ching Shih married into a pirate family in 1801, becoming an equal partner to her husband, Zheng Yi. Together, they built a massive coalition by unifying small groups of pirates into a federation of 70,000 pirates and 400 junk ships, and by 1804, they led one of the most powerful pirate fleets in all of China. After her husband died in 1807, Ching Shih navigated the politics of such a large force to become sole leader, and by 1809, she commanded over 800 large junks and 1,000 smaller ships. The fleet dominated the coast from Macau to Canton; it is reported that in the coastal Sanshan village, they beheaded 80 men and abducted the women and children and held them for ransom until they were sold in slavery.
The code of laws in the Red Flag Fleet was merciless. Insubordination was punished by immediate beheading. Withholding any goods taken held a severe whipping for a first-time offence, with the death penalty for large amounts, and no stealing was tolerated from either the public fund or villagers who supplied the pirates. Ching Shih’s code had unusual rules for female captives. In general, the pirates made their most beautiful captives their concubines or wives, and if a pirate took a wife he had to be faithful to her. Those deemed unattractive were released and any others were ransomed. Pirates who raped female captives were put to death and if pirates had consensual sex with captives, the pirate was beheaded and the woman he was with had cannonballs attached to her legs and was thrown over the side of the boat. Other violations of different parts of the code were punishable by flogging, clapping in irons, or quartering. Deserters or those who had left without official permission had their ears chopped off and were then paraded around their squadron.
In January 1808, the Chinese government tried to destroy her fleet in a series of fierce battles, but after defeats in which Ching Shih captured and comandeered several of their ships, the government had to revert to using fishing vessels for battle. At the same time, Ching Shih faced a bigger threat from other pirate fleets, including O-po-tae, a former ally who began working with the Qing government. The government also hired European bounty hunters, who were also defeated. She also challenged European power when she captured the East India Company merchantman The Marquis of Ely in 1809.
In September and November 1809, the fleet suffered a series of defeats from the Portuguese Navy at the Battle of the Tiger’s Mouth. In their final battle at Chek Lap Kok in 1810, Ching Shih surrendered to the Portuguese Navy on 21 January. The amnesty agreement the fleet accepted from the Qing Imperial government applied to all pirates who agreed to surrender, ending their career and allowed to keep the loot. It meant that only 60 pirates were banished, 151 exiled, and only 126 put to death out of her whole fleet of 17,318 pirates. The remaining pirates only had to surrender their weapons.
Ching Shih negotiated for Cheung Po, her second husband and second-in-command, to retain several ships, including approximately 120 to be used for employment on the salt trade. She also arranged for many of her pirates in the fleets to be given positions in the Chinese bureaucracy; Cheung Po became a captain in the Qing’s Guangdong navy. Ching Shih was also able to secure official government recognition her as Cheung Po’s wife, despite the restrictions against widows remarrying.
After Cheung Po died at sea in 1822, Ching Shih moved with their children to Macau and opened a gambling house; she was also involved in the salt trade there. In her 60s, she served as an advisor to head of state Lin Zexu during the First Opium War (1839-1842). In 1844, she died in bed surrounded by her family in Macau, at the age of 69.
Grace Banker
Grace D. Banker served during World War I (1917–1918) as chief operator of mobile telephone communications for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. She led 33 women telephone operators, popularly known as Hello Girls. From New York, they were assigned to travel to France to operate telephone switch boards at the war front in Paris, and at Chaumont, Haute-Marne. The women also operated the telephone switch boards at First Army headquarters at Ligny-en-Barrois and later during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. After returning to civilian life, Banker and her team members were treated as citizen volunteers and were not initially given recognition as members of the military. In 1919, Banker was honoured with the Distinguished Service Medal for her services with the First Army headquarters during the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne Offensives and received a commendation.
Ada Armytage
Ada’s photographs and her sisters’ diaries, letters and journals make up the Armytage family archive, which preserves the significant moment in history.
Irena Sawicka
Irena Scheur-Sawicka was a Polish archaeologist, ethnographer, and educational and communist activist who joined joined the Polish Workers’ Party during World War II.
Irena Iłłakowicz
Irena Morzycka-Iłłakowicz was a intelligence agent and second lieutenant of Poland’s National Armed Forces, which fought against Nazi Germany and communist partisans during World War II.