Florence Simpson came to the WAAC having worked with the Women’s Legion, an Army-sanctioned women’s volunteer unit tasked with cooking for the troops. By the end of 1915, the 41-year-old Simpson had risen to Commandant of Cooks for the Legion and was hard at work establishing business-like practices.
Prior to volunteering for the U.S. Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps at age 45 in 1942, Frances Keegan Marquis had been an active suffragist who managed the Franklin Square House, a residential hotel in Boston offering housing and social services for around 700 women students and wage earners.
Blanche Charlet was an influential gallery owner in Brussels after World War I. Known as Agent Japonica and Ventriloquist, Charlet was recruited by the SOE in 1941 and became a courier for the French resistance during WWII.
WWII French resistance member Marie-Louise Dissard, code name Françoise or Victoire, was in her 60s when she took over the escape network known as the Pat O’Leary Line.
Marie-Thérèse Le Chêne was the oldest woman the SOE sent to France—age 52 when she was served as a courier and distributed anti-Nazi materials from November 1942 to August 1943.
In July 1917, Mona Chalmers Watson was named the first Chief Controller of Britain’s Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) when it was formed. The thousands of WAACs worked as cooks and waitresses, clerks, communications operators, drivers, and more. She was already noteworthy as a suffragist, physician, and the first woman to receive her MD from the University of Edinburgh.
Philippine revolutionary who joined the revolutionary nationalist army Katipunan in 1895 to fight for her country’s independence from Spanish colonizers.
Born in 1730, Rani Velu Nachiyar was the first Indian queen to actively oppose the British, though she would be far from the last.
The woman known as Ya Mo (Grandma Mo) was the wife of a government official in Nakhon Ratchasima, and was in her mid-50s in 1826 when King Anouvong of Vientiane invaded and seized the city while the governor was away.
When her adult son was a local government official who was executed by the governor, ostensibly for a minor crime, Lü Mǔ planned and executed an uprising, part of the Red Eyebrows uprising that started in 22 CE