Reply To: Trekkie’s World

[Herr D]

You won’t get much from history on the subject of what people “did” unless they had people praising them or being their biographer. Or wrote journals. For example, journalists in newspapers around the time of Jack the Ripper occasionally pandered to the public, declaring that women were far too ‘delicate’ to do things that their contemporaries in law enforcement knew better than believe. Polite society would frequently claim women couldn’t do things that were, [ahem] done by women in alleys seven blocks away.

So–if the woman failed or died in her last effort, she might have done anything at all. In the pioneer days, women survived however they did without telling anyone. As long as no one KNEW, no insecure males or overzealous females felt the need to put them in their place. The frontier was, therefore, perfect for the more capable woman and horrible for the historian.

So, make a situ where a woman HAD to do something that no one would’ve found out about, and write your story.