15 Women Who Were Right Too Early

The pattern repeats so precisely it stops being a coincidence. A woman is correct, early, in public, and the credit arrives late or lands somewhere else entirely.

Fifteen designs, fifteen versions of that.

1. Marie Curie

Two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, the only person ever to manage it. She named her first element polonium after a country that did not exist on any map at the time, because Poland had been partitioned out of existence and she wanted it in the periodic table anyway. Her notebooks are still radioactive and are kept in lead-lined boxes. There is a longer note on her.

The Breaking Atoms tee.

2. Rosa Luxemburg

Imprisoned for most of the First World War for opposing it, and correct about it from the first week. Her most quoted line, that freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently, was written as criticism of her own side.

The Rosa Luxemburg tee.

3. Emma Goldman

Deported in 1919, arrived in the Soviet Union, examined it honestly and published My Disillusionment in Russia in 1923. Being right that early made her unwelcome in both directions at once, which is the reliable cost of the position. There is a longer note on the quote she never said.

The Emma Goldman tee.

4. Sophie Scholl

The White Rose printed and distributed leaflets in Munich in 1942 and 1943 saying plainly what the state was doing, at an age when most people are choosing a degree. She was twenty-one when she was executed. The leaflets were smuggled out of Germany, and the Allies later air-dropped millions of copies of the sixth one back over the country.

The Die Weiße Rose tee.

5. Margaret Atwood

West Berlin, 1984, a rented typewriter and one rule: nothing in the book that people had not already done somewhere. Everything in Gilead has a precedent. The novel gets called prophetic constantly, and the compliment misses what she actually did, which was research.

The Margaret Atwood tee.

6. Agatha Christie

The best-selling novelist in recorded history, and the one genuine mystery in her life is still unsolved because she declined to explain it. Eleven days missing in 1926, a thousand police, found in a Harrogate hotel under her husband's mistress's surname, and then silence about it for fifty years.

The Murder at the Vicarage tee.

7. Siouxsie Sioux

She played her first gig with a band that was hours old, no songs, no rehearsal, twenty minutes improvised over one drumbeat at the 100 Club in September 1976. Post-punk starts partly in that room. She has spent fifty years declining the title of godmother of goth on the grounds that she was making her own thing. There is a longer note on that night.

The Siouxsie Sioux tee.

8. Cherry Bomb

The Runaways were teenagers who had to argue for the right to be on a stage at all. "Cherry Bomb" was written on the spot at Cherie Currie's audition when she turned up with the wrong song prepared. It ran about two minutes, it worked, and half the bands that followed took the template without the argument.

The Cherry Bomb tee.

9. Medusa

Punished by a goddess for being assaulted in her temple, and recast as the monster of the story for two thousand years afterwards. Garbati's 2008 sculpture reverses the ending, and the 2020 cast in Manhattan stands facing the courthouse where Weinstein was tried. Placement is an argument too.

The Medusa tee.

10. Jeanne d'Arc

Burned as a heretic in 1431, and twenty-four years later her mother reopened the case. Isabelle Romée, near eighty, stood at Notre-Dame de Paris with a petition and argued for her daughter's name in front of papal judges. In 1456 the court annulled the verdict and condemned the original trial as corrupt. The soldier stayed dead. The mother won.

The Jeanne d'Arc tee.

11. Marie Antoinette

In 1783 someone commissioned a watch for her with every complication known to horology and no budget or deadline. She was executed ten years later and it was still unfinished. The watchmaker died too, and his son completed it in 1827, forty-four years after the order. She never saw the most famous object associated with her.

The Marie Antoinette tee.

12. A Woman's Place is in the Revolution

The line predates its current use by decades and has been repainted onto every movement since. It is on this list because it is the sentence the other fourteen entries keep proving.

The A Woman's Place tee.

13. Girl with a Pearl Earring

It sold at auction in The Hague in 1881, filthy under old varnish, for two guilders and thirty cents. The buyer donated it to the Mauritshuis and it became the most recognised face in Dutch painting. It was called Girl with a Turban until 1995. The pearl is probably not a pearl either, since analysis points to glass or polished tin.

The Girl with a Pearl Earring tee.

14. Mathilda

Léon exists because another film stalled. With The Fifth Element delayed, Luc Besson wrote a script at speed to keep his crew working, and the stopgap became the classic. Natalie Portman was eleven at the audition and twelve during filming, in her first film. Nobody has ever called it the side project it was.

The Mathilda tee.

15. Dorothy

In the 1900 novel her shoes are silver. MGM made them ruby because red reads better on a yellow road in Technicolor. The most famous shoes in cinema are a film stock decision, and the girl wearing them walked the whole way and then chose to go home.

The Wizard of Oz tee.

Fifteen people who were right before it was convenient. The record eventually agreed with all of them, which is not the same as thanking them.

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