Looking for heroines (real and fictional)

It's been a few days since I decided to switch the focus of this blog to female heroes, and I confess that so far (perhaps because I've missed or overlooked them) I haven't seen anything in the news worth reporting. The other day, however, I was watching "Criminal Minds" and was riveted by "Open Season," the episode about 2 serial killers who would take their victims into the wilderness and hunt them down with bows and arrows. Shades of Deliverance.

This would have been derivative of many similar "hunt 'em down" serial killers in countless cop shows, but the thing that set it a part - and fascinated me - was the incredibly feisty woman who turned out to the killers' last victim.

Instead of running and being a target, she hid behind trees, stalked them, and brought them down with a hunting knife (obtained by some unfortunate campers she ran into, who all fell victim to the hunters' arrows).

Apart from liking the show's compassionate take on the killers - they were clearly victims of their upbringing (reared by a serial-killer uncle) - I loved the fact that, for once, the victim turned the tables on her would-be slayers and they ended up dead instead.

So the only heroine I've found so far is fictional - how pathetic is that? I'd like to invite my readers - if I have any - to join in my search send in their suggestions for heroines (real and fictional) who could be profiled on this site.

Finding Hatshepsut: sometimes time is the best revenge

'Find of century' for Egyptology

The mummy was discovered by Howard Carter in 1903

Egyptologists say they have identified the 3,000-year-old mummy of Hatshepsut, Egypt's most powerful female ruler.

"No woman is born a prostitute"

I've been so disheartened lately by news of female journalists and broadcasters being murdered in Iraq and Afghanistan, "honour" killings, a "wife-fattening farm" in Mauritania, etc. etc., that I was thinking of giving up on this blog in despair. After all, I'm the first to criticise people who rail and wail and winge about injustice but do nothing but wring their hands. Therefore (a word that should be unknown to poets, according to André Gide), I was pleased and heartened to see this article on the BBC website today:

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Argentine prostitutes fight back

Prostitutes in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, have launched a campaign to raise awareness about the difficult circumstances in which they work.

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Read it and smile.

I think I'll make female heroes the theme of this blog from now on, and take the word heroine back from the druggies while I'm at it.

XXX