via muslimswearingthings

[lotesse]

Noor Inayat Khan, who I never learned about in school, and who was apparently infinitely more badass than everybody. A Muslim Indian woman who went behind enemy lines in WWII as a signaler, didn't crack under interrogation, and died in Dachau with the word "freedom" on her lips?! Sometimes I feel like my education's failed me; without the internet I would know so much less about so many truly amazing women.

Comments

[starlady]

I think education fails us in a lot of things, particularly the stories of women. But it's certainly true that I though American history was really boring until I realized that it was far more fraught and fascinating than I was almost ever taught in school.

[lotesse]

For reasons related to academic work, I've been thinking about my childhood encounters with the big nineteenth-century ladynovelists, and I'm amazed at how long it took me to find most of them. I read Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle for school, and my mother pushed me over to Thomas Hardy as a teen, but it wasn't until I took a community college Women's Literature course that I found Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf and Christina Rossetti - and Austen, Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, not until college.

[starlady]

Wow. Oddly enough, my high school did much better by that yardstick than my college.

[idleleaves]

Sometimes I think education is really only a springboard. It gives you the very basics, but all the best and most amazing things you discover later, on your own. (If you choose to keep learning and discovering, but the fact that so many people don't is another rant altogether.)

All I know of her, unfortunately, is from The Tiger Claw, a fictionalised account of her life.

[lotesse]

... there's a book?! Oh my god, I have to have this NOW.

[idleleaves]

Yep. >_> It's by Shauna Singh Baldwin.