Anna Maria Garthwaite: Successful Silk Designer
She turned observations of flowers and plants into intricate textile designs, building a successful creative career and leaving rare evidence of women’s work in the industry.
Women worth knowing
All Stories
Extraordinary women, overlooked stories, and a more complete history. Explore the lives, ideas, and achievements that changed the world.
18th century women
Women’s lives, work, and ideas, 1701–1800.
Artists who made their own reputations. Writers who insisted on being heard. Women who challenged the limits of medicine, education, and political life. Meet some of the remarkable women of the 18th century through their work, ideas, and struggles.
Where to begin
Art, work & ambition
Women built creative careers in workshops and at royal courts. Their surviving work offers another way into the history of the period.
- Anna Maria Garthwaite — a silk designer whose floral patterns helped shape a trade.
- Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun — a portrait painter who built a reputation across Europe.
Knowledge & education
Learning did not happen only in universities. Women exchanged ideas through letters, travel, and literary gatherings.
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu — a writer who championed smallpox inoculation after encountering it in the Ottoman Empire.
- The Bluestockings — women who made room for intellectual conversation and literary friendship.
Revolution & resistance
Promises of liberty raised urgent questions about who could claim it. Women entered political debates and fought for freedom.
- Théroigne de Méricourt — an activist who called for women’s participation in the French Revolution.
- Women who sued for freedom — legal struggles against slavery across the 18th and 19th centuries.
All 18th-century stories
Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette’s favorite portraitist
She built a celebrated portrait career despite barriers to formal training, using artistic skill and determination to earn recognition across courts and countries.
Women Who Sued For Freedom From Slavery
Enslaved women fought in court for their own freedom and their children’s, using legal claims to challenge a system that treated their families as property.
What Are Bluestockings? The Movement, Origins, and Insult
Women created space for serious intellectual conversation in literary societies, challenging expectations of femininity even as a label for learning became a weapon of ridicule.
Elisabeth Christine Ulrike – Scandal and Exile
She challenged the double standards of a royal marriage and faced permanent exile, exposing how little protection status offered a woman who refused its expectations.
Lady Mary Montagu, Brilliant Autodidact Aristocrat
She championed knowledge of smallpox inoculation learned abroad, using her influence to challenge medical resistance and bring a different approach to preventing disease into public view.
Théroigne de Méricourt, Heroine of the French Revolution
She embraced a revolution’s promise of liberty and equality, entering political life where a woman’s ambition attracted both passionate support and vicious public attacks.
Grace Dalrymple Elliott, Courtesan and Spy
She risked her life to help others during a revolution, leaving a memoir that preserves a woman’s perspective on political upheaval and the struggle to survive it.
Marguerite D’Youville, the First Canadian Saint
She built a community devoted to people in need, challenging authorities to protect the sick and poor and leaving a lasting legacy of care.
Rose-Adélaïde Ducreux, French painter, composer, and musician
Her self-portrait captures an artist who understood music as intimately as painting, preserving the skill and ambition of a woman working across creative disciplines.