Mad Women

Recognizing heroic women in history continues today with a look at two ladies that were born centuries apart who made an impact. A fifteenth-century French woman known as Joan of Arc began to hear voices. To her, God had a message of insider military information, instructing her to drive the English out of France. She dressed for battle and showed up for war, and by her convictions (others called it madness) she rallied the troops and achieved a long-sought victory of a key occupied city in just nine days. French King Charles VII, his own lineage rife with frequent bouts of insanity, dubbed her and her family nobility. A year later she was captured by the English, tried for heresy by the clergy of the Inquisition, and burned at the stake at age nineteen in 1431. Charles VII made no effort to free her. Five hundred years later she was canonized as a saint. Few women choose their hero path via exploration. One notable exception was May French-Sheldon, a wealthy American woman who became known as the first woman explorer of Africa. In the 1890s, with an entourage of 130 Zanzibarian men, she explored East Africa and the Congo. The press at the time called her a raging madwoman, but she didn’t care. She went on to lecture for many years about her travels, stressing-way before it was fashionable-that a “woman could do anything a man could.” She died of pneumonia in 1936 at age eighty-nine.