I have noticed you haven't got any princesses for Australia yet. Maybe you could do the aboriginal woman Barangaroo (2nd Wife of Benelong). She was rather savage and has an incredibly funny story. P.s. Love the blog
This is definitely an area of the world that I’ve struggled to find good candidates for. As of this writing, out of the 917 potential women on my master list, only 8 are from Australia or New Zealand - and one of those is dingo-flinging cannibalistic sun goddess Bila, who I’m just gonna admit at this point is never getting an entry.
So, what criteria do I go by? It’s loose, it’s evolved over time, and it continues to change, but generally I look for three things:
Agency. (do they do what they want?)
Conflict. (do they have trouble doing what they want?)
Personality. (do they approach their goals with character?)
This is more difficult to find than you might think.
Ancient poets and queens definitely had agency, but it’s often hard to find personality or conflict.
Historical headstrong women had conflict and personality, but often not much agency. This makes for a lot of tragic endings, which aren’t much fun to write (or read) about.
Many intellectuals had agency, but usually, due to being born into privilege (thus being able to become an intellectual), didn’t have much conflict. The conflict I find regularly is institutional (woman vs church, woman vs man’s world, etc) - which is both tricky to illustrate (draw her shaking a fist at a building, I guess?) and difficult to write about in an interesting, upbeat way.
This is one reason why I tend towards warrior women in the entries — they usually fit all three criteria, and, as a bonus, often come out as victorious. But obviously, none of this is set in stone. Neither Etain or Corn Maiden, for example, had much agency. I’ve written on plenty of women with tragic endings. Bottom line, interesting stories trump everything.
On top of that (and various language/access difficulties in research), I’m trying to save the best entries for the book, so the print edition has wide-ranging representation. So when I do find someone super-awesome for a hitherto-unrepresented part of the world, I often squirrel them away.
Anyway. Just a general FYI of where my head’s at. :) Believe me, I look at the blank spots on the map too, and think about what I can do to fill them in.
(two small disclaimers: 1) obviously, I’m talking about my own subjective takes on these peoples’ lives; your mileage may vary. 2) I haven’t done a huge amount of research into most of the example women I linked to above, so it’s possible some hit those criteria and I just haven’t dug deep enough yet)
