In Your Face Women

Series produced by KSLU

Caption: Rebecca Hensley
Rebecca Hensley 

Profiles of strong women we never hear about... but should!

This is the audio accompaniment of a book project about women we never hear about: women who climbed mountains, scalped their kidnappers, and held off the Roman troops longer than anyone else ever!

Rebecca Hensley is "tired of living in a world where the slang term for being weak is a slang term for a woman's genitals. I'm not asking for respect anymore. I'm giving it. To myself."

Through this series, Hensley profiles "the women whose stories made me sit up at my computer in the middle of the night and cackle gleefully, 'Well, go ahead on, Louise (or Conchita or Tegla or Ng Miu)!' and I’m presenting them here for your entertainment."


55 Pieces

Order by: Newest First | Oldest First
Caption: Zora Neale Hurston
Zora was one of the shining lights of the Harlem Renaissance as a writer of novels, short stories, essays, articles, plays, folklore collections, a...

  • Added: Oct 05, 2012
  • Length: 02:21
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A profile of Anne Hutchinson - a maverick spiritual leader in Massachusetts during the early 1600's.

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:08
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Dolores Huerta left her teaching job as a young woman to commit herself to working in the struggle for equal rights

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:14
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After she became a lawyer, Kennedy missed no opportunity to push every envelope she could related to either race or gender.

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:18
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Jane Goodwin Austin became known as “Calamity Jane,” with the Mexican government placing a $1000 bounty on her head.

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 01:46
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Jennie Hodgers took the name Albert Cashier, put on a pair of pants and joined the Union army.

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:01
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In 1993, Julie Krone became the first woman to win the Belmont Stakes.

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:26
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And at twenty-eight years of age, having beaten every challenge life threw her, O'Neil climbed into the seat of a hydrogen peroxide powered rocket ...

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:16
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By the time she'd found a small school that would accept her in the Montmarte section of Paris, it was apparent to anyone who would listen that Mic...

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:35
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When Adolph Hitler sent his troops into Russia in 1941, Litvyak lied about her flying experience and signed up to serve her country.

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:04
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What does a woman do when her husband and four children all die of yellow fever and her dressmaking workshop burns to the ground? She becomes an in...

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:14
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During WWII Parsons dismissed all her servants and turned her house into a hiding place for downed British and American airmen.

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:22
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Mai threw a Pakistani tribal council and the men who raped her an unexpected curve. Rather than kill herself, she sued the rapists in a court of law.

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:16
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Kahn was flown into Nazi-occupied France where she became indispensable for her transmissions by wire from Paris.

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:18
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At nearly thirty years of age, she heard the call to leave her family behind and take her adventurous spirit on the road to Japan, where she joined...

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 01:56
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in 1790 the Yankees fully intended to turn this "New World" into their own nation. The Native Americans, on the other hand, indigenous to the conti...

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:36
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Shirley Muldowney was the first person to win two and then three National Hot Rod Association Top Fuel dragster championships.

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:19
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In 2011, when Tawakkol Karman became the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize ever.

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:48
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Maathai worked to establish what came to be called the Green Belt Movement to combat desertification, deforestation, water crisis, and rural hunger...

  • Added: Oct 08, 2012
  • Length: 02:58
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Nzingha formed an alliance with the Dutch and spent the rest of her days leading troops into battle against them.

  • Added: Nov 05, 2012
  • Length: 02:36