Annie Oakley. Now, that’s a name one would not associate with strength of character and determination. She was a strong woman, a warrior woman, who made a name for herself in the competitive arena of sharpshooting. A man’s world.   Phoebe Ann Moses (her stage name, Annie Oakley, was to come later) was born into a Quaker family in 1860. Her childhood was one of deprivation and sadness. Her father died when she was just six years old; her step-father died a few short years later, soon after marrying her mother. A third marriage did nothing to alleviate the grinding poverty in which the family lived.   Phoebe Ann’s mother,…

Malala Yousafzai is a child, a baby, really, in the whole scheme of things. She is sixteen years old. On October 9, 2012, Miss Yousafzai was shot in the head, point blank, by a grown man, a coward. He was a member of that benevolent group known as the Taliban.  (I promised myself I would not editorialize, but it is very, very hard.)   You must know the story by now. Miss Yousafzai advocated education for girls, and, indeed, had been writing a blog for the BBC World Service since the age of eleven. She defied the ban on education for girls, in Pakistan, and got shot for it. On…

Amelia Earhart   In honour of the recent discovery of the remains of her airplane, I’d like to tell you about Amelia Earhart. She was not the typical warrior woman. She never had to trudge through the desert looking for water, watch a child die, or even sell her soul to the devil. (Just kidding!) However, she did face obstacles that must have seemed insurmountable to most women (and men.) Earhart spent her early years in Kansas, where she was born, and her teen-age years in Chicago. By 1920, the family had moved to California. And that, my friends, is where Earhart fell in love with flying. She took a…

Let’s start with a warrior woman who was not so famous: Ms Maude Callen. Ms Callen was a nurse-midwife who laboured (Ha!Ha! Did you notice the pun?) in the lowlands of rural Berkeley County, South Carolina, in the heart of America’s South. She was born in Florida in 1898, married Mr Callen in 1921 and, in 1923, relocated to South Carolina as a missionary nurse. It is said the move was to be temporary, but Ms Maude Callen stayed and cared for folks for close to 50 years. Imagine.   Just imagine the dedication, the drive, the conviction that what she was doing mattered. And it did. Ms Callen not…

Merry meet and welcome, welcome to my new column. My name is Cara.Luna. I am a witch, a crone, a mother, a grandmother, a retired teacher and a writer. This column will be about women. Women just like you and me, but, faced with situations, some of their own making, some not, that would make a grown man cry, triumphed! I have to tell you, there are women out there who have inspired me to work hard to reach my potential. There are women out there who have achieved such amazing accomplishments, only a dead body would not be awed. I will introduce you to those inspirational ladies I call…