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Brief Biographies of Badass Bitches: Women You Should Know More About But Probably Don't
You may know who this actor is, and yes, you may really love this musician. Or, hey, you may actually despise them.
But do you know about her contributions to civil rights causes?
Or to science?
Or what they've overcome just to survive in a world that saw them as lesser because of the body they were born with?
Did you know that the "Me too" movement was started by a Black woman years before we finally started seeing the social media hashtag #metoo when we loudly declared that was enough was enough?
Have you heard of this paleontologist who wasn't allowed in the Geological Society of London, where she made many unprecedented contributions to, simply because she was a woman?
Did you know that this television chef was, not only in the United States Navy, but held a top-secret clearance and created a shark repellant that is still used today?
Join me in discovering more about women you may have already heard of, and many more that you might not have.
But do you know about her contributions to civil rights causes?
Or to science?
Or what they've overcome just to survive in a world that saw them as lesser because of the body they were born with?
Did you know that the "Me too" movement was started by a Black woman years before we finally started seeing the social media hashtag #metoo when we loudly declared that was enough was enough?
Have you heard of this paleontologist who wasn't allowed in the Geological Society of London, where she made many unprecedented contributions to, simply because she was a woman?
Did you know that this television chef was, not only in the United States Navy, but held a top-secret clearance and created a shark repellant that is still used today?
Join me in discovering more about women you may have already heard of, and many more that you might not have.
323 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 4, 2023
59 people are currently reading
347 people want to read
About the author
Lisa Lee Curtis
2 books52 followersWriter, Eater, Comic, Addict, Lover, Lazy Anarchist, Accidental Porn Star, Artist, Drinker, Woman, Whiskey…neat.
Having worked every job from teacher’s assistant and logistics manager to phone sex operator and ‘voice of’ an escort service, not to mention professional stand-up comedian, it’s a small wonder Lisa Lee Curtis is, thus far, the only one in her family without a criminal record.
Winner of multiple completely irrelevant comedy contests, a bourbon-soaked guest on numerous radio shows, and lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time so that she could perform alongside Robin Williams, Lisa has switched gears to yelling at people on the internet and advocating for the LGBTQ+ community as well as for reproductive healthcare to remain safe and accessible.
Having worked every job from teacher’s assistant and logistics manager to phone sex operator and ‘voice of’ an escort service, not to mention professional stand-up comedian, it’s a small wonder Lisa Lee Curtis is, thus far, the only one in her family without a criminal record.
Winner of multiple completely irrelevant comedy contests, a bourbon-soaked guest on numerous radio shows, and lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time so that she could perform alongside Robin Williams, Lisa has switched gears to yelling at people on the internet and advocating for the LGBTQ+ community as well as for reproductive healthcare to remain safe and accessible.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 26, 2023
This is such an important book!
It was fantastic to learn more about the lives, dedication, success, accomplishments, and perseverance of so many different women. Many are names and stories that I've heard of before, some in detail, but it was great to be able to dig in to person behind those tales a bit more. Or to explore a side to the stories I had not previously considered. So many great stories of women we should all know more about; but sadly, like the subtitle suggests, we probably don't.
I enjoyed that the author did not use her "kid gloves" in order to pull any punches in the style and voice she adopted for this book. Because there were so many darker biographical elements to consider, it reminded me of some of the incredibly idiotic atrocities a male-dominated society has continued to inflict upon women. The author's voice brought a wry humor and a bit of lightness to the reading, almost as if you were sitting across a table in a coffee shop with the author and listening to her share a tale.
Warning to the "alpha males" who have gotten their virtual panties tied into a knot over the summer 2023 Barbie movie or over rainbows appearing on your "beer" cans. If those things upset you, you're definitely not woman enough to be able to handle this book, and chances are you'll find yourself sharing videos of yourself buying boxes of the book just to shoot up on social media with your semi-automatic weapons, or driving over them with your "look-at-my-small-penis" sized pickup trucks. Which is too bad, because you could stand to open your mind a little and read a book like this and learn a little something about yourself, about society.
This book would make a great gift, provided the person receiving the gift can handle a little adult language, humor, and profanity. And if the author releases a second volume I'll be one of the first to buy a copy immediately on sight.
It was fantastic to learn more about the lives, dedication, success, accomplishments, and perseverance of so many different women. Many are names and stories that I've heard of before, some in detail, but it was great to be able to dig in to person behind those tales a bit more. Or to explore a side to the stories I had not previously considered. So many great stories of women we should all know more about; but sadly, like the subtitle suggests, we probably don't.
I enjoyed that the author did not use her "kid gloves" in order to pull any punches in the style and voice she adopted for this book. Because there were so many darker biographical elements to consider, it reminded me of some of the incredibly idiotic atrocities a male-dominated society has continued to inflict upon women. The author's voice brought a wry humor and a bit of lightness to the reading, almost as if you were sitting across a table in a coffee shop with the author and listening to her share a tale.
Warning to the "alpha males" who have gotten their virtual panties tied into a knot over the summer 2023 Barbie movie or over rainbows appearing on your "beer" cans. If those things upset you, you're definitely not woman enough to be able to handle this book, and chances are you'll find yourself sharing videos of yourself buying boxes of the book just to shoot up on social media with your semi-automatic weapons, or driving over them with your "look-at-my-small-penis" sized pickup trucks. Which is too bad, because you could stand to open your mind a little and read a book like this and learn a little something about yourself, about society.
This book would make a great gift, provided the person receiving the gift can handle a little adult language, humor, and profanity. And if the author releases a second volume I'll be one of the first to buy a copy immediately on sight.
April 28, 2024
Do you ever read a book and wish the author would just shut the fuck up? Because I just did.
If my dad hadn't given this to me for this past Christmas, I would have DNF'd it from the very first page. I don't fuck around with books or people who clearly hate men and walk around like they're the most “woke” person to ever exist and if you disagree with a single thing they have to say you're clearly a trash human being.
Buckle up because this is going to be a scorcher of a review.
First off, I don’t like anthologies. But I do love me a badass bitch. So my dad saw this somewhere online and figured my love of badasses would override my dislike of short stories, which is fair. This could have been really interesting and I could have learned a lot about the women featured, if only this book had been about them, and not the author’s personal thoughts and opinions on all of the men in their lives and the surrounding circumstances.
From the absolute get go, the author is rude, aggressive and wholly unappealing to read. The Q&A at the beginning is unnecessary, I do not care why this woman has decided to write this book. I want to read about cool women, not the author. For someone who CLEARLY hates men, boy does she give a lot of her time, energy and paper space to talking about them. She complains about them in the intro, she responds to their social media posts in the book and responds with such vitriol and anger towards everything that put me in a constant state of eye rolling. My gripe with this is the fact that who does this woman think she’s speaking to? If men have given her shit online (which I’m sure they have), they sure as hell aren’t reading your book. If you want to appeal to women (which I’m assuming she did), why are you screaming about men and preaching to the choir? You’re shouting just because you learned how to be bitchy and sarcastic and come off as not giving a fuck about men in any way but you VERY clearly do. Wait till we get to the Trump part.
In any of the biographies that dealt with women in politics, the author somehow brings up Trump. She only calls him 45 but we all know who she’s talking about and it is almost never relevant to bring him up. Why she felt the need to, I don’t know. AND THEN!!! I am turning the page to chapter 45 (out of 50) and the whole page is taken up with “you know how some cultures skip floor 13 in tall buildings? We’re going to do the same for 45” and then it becomes chapter 46. I almost screamed. This author, this woman wastes AN ENTIRE PAGE of her own book(!!!) dedicated to a man she hates. FOR WHAT. For a book about women, my main takeaway shouldn’t be how much the author hates men!!! It shouldn’t be about an entire page dedicated to a terrible man! It should be about the WOMEN and the impact they have made on the world and yet I barely remember anything about the women because all I can recall is all the shitty comments she made about men. It’s asinine.
There was also at least one line that struck me very wrong, in that the description of one of the women was inherently sexist. She describes her as “she may have been a woman, but she was tough as shit and stood approximately six feet tall and weighed around 200 pounds.” …does this mean she was not the normal standard for a woman? For the time period (late 1800s), sure but it seemed so weird to me to point this out like why are we commenting on what she looked like with the prefix of “she may have been a woman”? It’s gross.
Another line was about Josephine Baker, who was described as performing an act “she knew the whole theme was problematic and gross, but she was making a fuckton of money and living her best life, so she figured she was the winner here.” It’s implied that Baker thought this (I don’t know if she did, the author has clearly never learned how to cite a damn thing) but it is also implied that the author knows it’s gross but doesn’t care, because… women? And like what the fuck, bestie. Do we only care about gross and problematic things when men do them? Because that certainly ain’t the vibe now, is it?
About halfway through the book the editing quality plummeted, all of a sudden there were words missing in sentences and missing spaces between words. I truly thought the author had written this with ZERO editing until I read the notes at the end that thanked the editor. Then I was shocked someone could have done such a bad job.
There were also a few women included who I thought hadn’t really done enough to be a part of the book, I wasn’t impressed nor did I think they were “a badass.” The author didn’t really give a criteria on what she thought made these women worthy of inclusion, so I guess that’s just based on personal preference. I did think the inclusion of the author’s mom as the final chapter was a nice, unexpected way to close the book. It sounds like that woman went through a lot, unfortunately.
My end take on the book is I REALLY wish the author would have kept all her personal thoughts/opinions etc to her damn self. They added literally nothing to the book or to these women’s stories, they were just expletive-filled filler sentences. And I love swearing lmao but this woman honestly took it too far. You don’t need to use “fuck” all the time. And it seems like the author was aware of how much of her opinions she inserted because there was a LOT more of it in the entries that the woman was dead, those that were still alive at the time of writing were given a lot more respect and dignity to their stories. It’s unfortunate that the author thought her thoughts and opinions were so important to override the stories of these women. I would recommend skipping this entirely, and just looking up the women on your own time, in their own words (as much as possible). These women honestly deserved better.
If my dad hadn't given this to me for this past Christmas, I would have DNF'd it from the very first page. I don't fuck around with books or people who clearly hate men and walk around like they're the most “woke” person to ever exist and if you disagree with a single thing they have to say you're clearly a trash human being.
Buckle up because this is going to be a scorcher of a review.
First off, I don’t like anthologies. But I do love me a badass bitch. So my dad saw this somewhere online and figured my love of badasses would override my dislike of short stories, which is fair. This could have been really interesting and I could have learned a lot about the women featured, if only this book had been about them, and not the author’s personal thoughts and opinions on all of the men in their lives and the surrounding circumstances.
From the absolute get go, the author is rude, aggressive and wholly unappealing to read. The Q&A at the beginning is unnecessary, I do not care why this woman has decided to write this book. I want to read about cool women, not the author. For someone who CLEARLY hates men, boy does she give a lot of her time, energy and paper space to talking about them. She complains about them in the intro, she responds to their social media posts in the book and responds with such vitriol and anger towards everything that put me in a constant state of eye rolling. My gripe with this is the fact that who does this woman think she’s speaking to? If men have given her shit online (which I’m sure they have), they sure as hell aren’t reading your book. If you want to appeal to women (which I’m assuming she did), why are you screaming about men and preaching to the choir? You’re shouting just because you learned how to be bitchy and sarcastic and come off as not giving a fuck about men in any way but you VERY clearly do. Wait till we get to the Trump part.
In any of the biographies that dealt with women in politics, the author somehow brings up Trump. She only calls him 45 but we all know who she’s talking about and it is almost never relevant to bring him up. Why she felt the need to, I don’t know. AND THEN!!! I am turning the page to chapter 45 (out of 50) and the whole page is taken up with “you know how some cultures skip floor 13 in tall buildings? We’re going to do the same for 45” and then it becomes chapter 46. I almost screamed. This author, this woman wastes AN ENTIRE PAGE of her own book(!!!) dedicated to a man she hates. FOR WHAT. For a book about women, my main takeaway shouldn’t be how much the author hates men!!! It shouldn’t be about an entire page dedicated to a terrible man! It should be about the WOMEN and the impact they have made on the world and yet I barely remember anything about the women because all I can recall is all the shitty comments she made about men. It’s asinine.
There was also at least one line that struck me very wrong, in that the description of one of the women was inherently sexist. She describes her as “she may have been a woman, but she was tough as shit and stood approximately six feet tall and weighed around 200 pounds.” …does this mean she was not the normal standard for a woman? For the time period (late 1800s), sure but it seemed so weird to me to point this out like why are we commenting on what she looked like with the prefix of “she may have been a woman”? It’s gross.
Another line was about Josephine Baker, who was described as performing an act “she knew the whole theme was problematic and gross, but she was making a fuckton of money and living her best life, so she figured she was the winner here.” It’s implied that Baker thought this (I don’t know if she did, the author has clearly never learned how to cite a damn thing) but it is also implied that the author knows it’s gross but doesn’t care, because… women? And like what the fuck, bestie. Do we only care about gross and problematic things when men do them? Because that certainly ain’t the vibe now, is it?
About halfway through the book the editing quality plummeted, all of a sudden there were words missing in sentences and missing spaces between words. I truly thought the author had written this with ZERO editing until I read the notes at the end that thanked the editor. Then I was shocked someone could have done such a bad job.
There were also a few women included who I thought hadn’t really done enough to be a part of the book, I wasn’t impressed nor did I think they were “a badass.” The author didn’t really give a criteria on what she thought made these women worthy of inclusion, so I guess that’s just based on personal preference. I did think the inclusion of the author’s mom as the final chapter was a nice, unexpected way to close the book. It sounds like that woman went through a lot, unfortunately.
My end take on the book is I REALLY wish the author would have kept all her personal thoughts/opinions etc to her damn self. They added literally nothing to the book or to these women’s stories, they were just expletive-filled filler sentences. And I love swearing lmao but this woman honestly took it too far. You don’t need to use “fuck” all the time. And it seems like the author was aware of how much of her opinions she inserted because there was a LOT more of it in the entries that the woman was dead, those that were still alive at the time of writing were given a lot more respect and dignity to their stories. It’s unfortunate that the author thought her thoughts and opinions were so important to override the stories of these women. I would recommend skipping this entirely, and just looking up the women on your own time, in their own words (as much as possible). These women honestly deserved better.
June 4, 2023
Have you ever read a book that you wish the author had omitted their personal bias from? That's this book. I enjoyed reading the stories of women both new and familiar. I would have preferred to learn more about each one of these women than the author's personal commentary and judgment of the surrounding circumstances and relationships of these women. Every single one of these stories can stand on their own.
July 9, 2025
"Yeah, women have been scapegoats for-fucking-ever, being blamed for men's behavior, blamed for their failures, while, strangely enough, oh-so rarely given credit for their successes, even when they were the ones doing the actual work he was being lauded for, and historically blamed for a myriad of calamities in the most asinine ways."
I learned a lot from reading this book. I enjoyed the fact that this book was not a mere dry recitation of facts. Each biography gave us a lesson in being a Badass Bitch. I also appreciated how diverse and inclusive the author was in the women she chose to include. The book had women from around the world and addressed topics such as LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, and the #metoo movement. Perhaps my favorite part of the book was the author's own witty commentary interspersed throughout the biographies. Her commentary was on point, funny and sarcastic at times (which I can really appreciate as I dub myself the Queen of Sarcasm). Many criticized this author's language and sometimes questioned her inclusion of certain women. I disagree. The whole theme of the book is to be yourself, unapologetically. That's exactly what this author did.
I absolutely loved how the last biography was about the author's own mother. "And that's why I consider her one of the strongest women I will ever have the pleasure of knowing. She didn't start a movement. She didn't invent anything. The shit she survived - things that you would NEVER have known by looking at her or even thinking you knew her - holy shit."
The message: you don't have to do great things to be a Badass Bitch.
I learned a lot from reading this book. I enjoyed the fact that this book was not a mere dry recitation of facts. Each biography gave us a lesson in being a Badass Bitch. I also appreciated how diverse and inclusive the author was in the women she chose to include. The book had women from around the world and addressed topics such as LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, and the #metoo movement. Perhaps my favorite part of the book was the author's own witty commentary interspersed throughout the biographies. Her commentary was on point, funny and sarcastic at times (which I can really appreciate as I dub myself the Queen of Sarcasm). Many criticized this author's language and sometimes questioned her inclusion of certain women. I disagree. The whole theme of the book is to be yourself, unapologetically. That's exactly what this author did.
I absolutely loved how the last biography was about the author's own mother. "And that's why I consider her one of the strongest women I will ever have the pleasure of knowing. She didn't start a movement. She didn't invent anything. The shit she survived - things that you would NEVER have known by looking at her or even thinking you knew her - holy shit."
The message: you don't have to do great things to be a Badass Bitch.
January 5, 2024
Badass indeed
This book was so interesting and refreshing to read. I'm planning to learn more about some of these basses bitches.
This book was so interesting and refreshing to read. I'm planning to learn more about some of these basses bitches.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews