Audacious women who break the rules of patriarchy and empire: adventurers, radicals, heretics, freethinkers, visionaries, assorted lesbians and other non-conformists. Women who boldly stepped into all-male preserves, refusing the dictates of female silence, obedience, and passivity. Female pirates and swashbucklers, martial artists, doctors, philosophers, drummers, revolutionaries, cultural insurgents, fiery orators, and social justice activists across a wide swath of oppressions. In this global spectrum of valiant and defiant women, we meet a heretical female pope, a renegade Buddhist nun, and the runaway Afghan bride who became a Sufi master.
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Max Dashu founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970 to research and document women's history and heritages from the most ancient times to the present, globally. www.suppressedhistories.net She is internationally known for her expertise on iconography, matricultures and female spheres of power; medicine women, witches, and the witch hunts; and the interconnections between patriarchy, conquest, and systems of domination.
She is the author of Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Culture, 700-1100 (2016) and Women in Greek Mythography: Pythias, Melissae and Titanides (2023). Her unfolding open access book, Magna Mater, Paulianity, and the Imperial Church (2024-25) looks at the origins of church-state authoritarianism and persecution. Her videos include Woman Shaman: the Ancients (2013) and Women’s Power in Global Perspective (2008), along with an extensive videography at https://www.youtube.com/@maxdashu/videos
Max blogs daily on the Suppressed Histories Facebook page, followed by 254,000 people internationally. She teaches online courses and visual webcasts, and has guest-lectured at scores of universities and international conferences.