Login with PatreonWell-behaved women seldom make history.
Rejected Princesses celebrates those who did. Part art project, part standup routine, part book report, this site imagines what if we made animated musicals about the women of history and myth who refused to behave.Volume Two Now On Sale
A Lavishly-Illustrated Book Celebrating History's Toughest Moms
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Collection: Samurai >
Masako Hojo
When her shogun husband cheated on her, she raised an army and destroyed the other woman's house. Later she deposed her incompetent son to become the first nun to rule Japan.
Sutematsu Oyama
The first Japanese woman to go to college didn't have a choice. But the experience changed her - and she changed Japan in return.
Tsuruhime Ohori
When invaders threatened her island home, she declared herself a living god, raised an army, and fought them tooth, nail, and occasional grenade.Collection: WW2 >
Mariya Oktyabrskaya
When her husband was killed in WW2, she sold all their belongings, bought a tank, named it Fighting Girlfriend, and started killing Nazis.
Virginia Hall
This "most dangerous of all spies" staged daring mountaintop escapes, prison breaks, and railway bombings -- all on her trusty wooden leg, codenamed "Cuthbert."
Noor Inayat Khan
Pacifist Indian princess who gave up everything of herself to hold the line in occupied Paris during World War 2.Modern-Day Women
Esther Morris
50 years before women got the federal right to vote, Esther Morris became America's first female justice of the peace. A contemporary newspaper called her “the terror of all rogues” and said she offered “infinite delight to all lovers of peace and virtue."
Lee Meng
When Singaporean guerrillas tried overthrowing British rule, they turned to this gangster to run their communications. The cat-and-mouse game in which she was caught by a female police officer is riveting stuff.
Gertrude Jeannette
New York's first licensed female cabbie didn't let racism, sexism, or a speech impediment slow her down.
Maureen Mancuso
Without training, this 13-year-old shattered world records for running in 1967 -- unfortunately, it happened shortly after Kathrine Switzer's headline-making Boston marathon entry, and Mancuso's feat was all but forgotten.
Tammie Jo Shults
One of the US Navy's first female fighter pilots took a job with a commercial airline - and then saved the day when an engine exploded mid-flight.
Regina Anderson
Her apartment, which she dubbed Dream Haven, was a “who’s-who of the Harlem Renaissance: artists, poets, writers, songwriters, intellectuals, and activists” - everyone from Zora Neale Hurston to Langston Hughes to W.E.B. Du Bois.
Beate Klarsfeld
Together with her husband Serge, this woman has spent her life tracking down war criminals and bringing them to justice.
Millie Veasey
Part of a WW2 unit that untangled a logistics nightmare, she lived to a hundred and helped run a chapter of the NAACP.
Well-behaved women seldom make history.
Rejected Princesses celebrates those who did. Part art project, part standup routine, part book report, this site imagines what if we made animated musicals about the women of history and myth who refused to behave.