defiance
People who were told no and heard it as a dare.
Mary Mallon Keeps Cooking
She gave her word, in 1910, that she would never cook again.
No to Edison
What do you do when the man who twice tried to take your patent in court turns around and offers you a job?
The Abbess Who Hid the Grave
What does a twelfth-century abbess do when an archbishop orders her to exhume a body she has decided to keep?
The Hatchery Sessions
What does a composer do when the bulldozers show up before the last take is finished?
The Toothbrush at Holloway
She trained Emmeline Pankhurst to throw rocks under a fir tree at twilight, and the first one flew backwards.
The Woman Who Drew Sound
She quit the BBC Radiophonic Workshop within months of founding it, because the hearing-protection rule was applied only to her.
The Tweed Jacket in Nuristan
What does a man who crossed the Empty Quarter twice on a camel pack for a Himalayan winter?
The Valet
How does a disguise that fooled 116 French sailors for sixteen months collapse the instant its wearer steps onto a Tahitian beach?
The Queen's Poet
What do you do when a voice in your head orders you to write, the verse is catastrophic, and the Queen's polite rejection reads, to you, like a coronation?
The Surgeon Who Wouldn't Give It Back
She was exchanged man-for-man for a Confederate major, and that wasn't even the strangest thing about her wedding.
The Woman Who Wouldn't Look Up
She rode on crusade, got hauled out of Antioch in the dead of night, was caught fleeing in men's clothes at fifty, ran England at sixty-seven — and then she designed her own tomb.
The Woman Who Stole the Car
Why did a woman in 1888 push an automobile down an alley at dawn while her husband slept upstairs?