Deviant Women

For over 1000 years, poetry has remained one of the most important traditions of Persian culture. So when, in the mid-twentieth century, a young woman emerged with a voice that spoke with a whirlwind of desire, a voice yearning with love, intimacy, and insight well beyond her years, the establishment was shaken. With a tumultuous love life that saw her become one of Iran's most controversial and scandalous public figures, Farrokhzā...

As Halloween approaches and we near the end of the spooky season, it's time to delve back into the world of the dark and sinister. And who better to take us there than the queen of mystery, suspense and menace, author Daphne du Maurier.

Du Maurier spent her formative years exploring the windswept coast of Cornwall where her imagination was fired by shipwrecks and derelict mansions, with the ever present backdrop of the ocean churnin...

On the darkest of dark and stormy nights, the teenage Mary Shelley awoke from a nightmare. In her vision she saw a young man, a 'pale student of unhallowed arts', kneeling over his creation. The image inspired one of the most enduring horror works of our time, Frankenstein. But Mary Shelley was not just a mistress of the gothic. Born to one of the most influential proto-feminists of our age, Mary Wollstoncraft, and political radica...

When it comes to fairy tale tellers, most of us think of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, or even Charles Perrault. But the names we less frequently associate with the genre are those of women: the writers and weavers of stories that are so often overshadowed by many of their male contemporaries. During the tail end of the 19th century, one such woman was adding her voice to the world of the Fae, crafting stories of tal...

In the 1920s, the infancy of aviation, pilots took to the skies to shock and awe their audiences with death dives, barrel-roles, and wing-walking. Within these flying circuses, one performer truly stood out: the Bird Woman, Bessie Coleman. Born to a family of sharecroppers in Texas, Coleman knew that to live her dreams, she'd need to leave the US and its prejudiced segregationist policies and move to France. Here, a place where wom...

In 1919, an autobiography appeared that scandalised polite American society. Chronicling the life and times of a sex worker who went by the pseudonym Madeleine Blair, Madeleine: An Autobiography took to task the puritanical forces that condemned her work and her industry, and laid on the table the story of her life as a so called 'soiled dove'. In her frank and engaging accounts, she outlines the many ups and downs that lead h...

After a childhood spent buried amongst the texts of her grandfather's library teaching herself Latin and Nahuatl, Greek rhetoric, and philosophy, it's not surprising that the young Juana was considered a prodigy. So much so that, at just fifteen, she found herself lady-in-waiting to the Vicereine, wife of the Viceroy of New Spain. Court life, however, didn't appeal to young Juana, who, sick of rich and drunken bachelors and their f...

In the deep, dark forests of Russia, where danger lurks in the liminal spaces, you might just find the unusual abode of one of folklore's most fascinating characters: the incomparable Baba Yaga. With her hooked nose, her bedraggled hair and her wrinkled skin, this hag of hags appears in her strange mode of transport, ready to aid or to hinder, depending on how much you keep your wits about you. With roots in the early Slavic panthe...

In 1919, into the heart of the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance, Norma Miller was born. As a child, she would watch the likes of Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald play to the hopping crowds of the Savoy Ballroom, the majestic heart of Harlem and the birthplace of swing. At just 12, she was plucked from the street outside its doors and so began a career that would take her around the globe as one of the world's foremost swing dancers ...

May Contain Traces Of Soy is a new show on Lipp Media, a network celebrating the voices of women and the LGBTQ+ community. Join host Rochelle Lindquist on her journey down a plant-based path as she pursues a more zero-waste existence.

In this episode, Rochelle discusses women's health, period stigma and period poverty with Katie Norbury from Share the Dignity and Get Papped. They also discuss the importance of going zero-waste w...

During the 1960s, the world was in the grip of enormous ideological change. In Australia, there was public outcry against the Vietnam War and growing support for equal pay for women, free education, fair wages, and the abolishment of the White Australia Policy. There was also growing support for radical changes to the rights, or lack thereof, afforded to Indigenous Australians. Helping to drive this movement was a woman who was int...

Born into The United States' last days of slavery, Ida B. Wells was raised to fight. The daughter of two politically active entrepreneurs, she wanted to raise herself and her siblings into the middle class. But while emancipation may have passed into law, new structural barriers emerged to keep women like Wells out - out of the economy, out of the political system, and out of first class train carriages. When a conductor tried to f...

Saint, mystic, Mamma. Activist, author, Doctor of the Church. These are some of the ways that the young Catherine di Benincasa would come to be remembered. After receiving visions of Christ when she was only a child, Catherine devoted herself to religious sacrifice, compelled by the knowledge that God had bigger plans for her. When her life of penitence and privation led her to join the Dominican Order, her piety soon began to earn...

At the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, well before Joan of Arc led her army, another French woman was making men tremble. On the volatile English channel, Jeanne de Clisson was seeking vengeance. The target of her wrath was none other than the King of France, Phillip VI, himself. As leader of the Black Fleet, she carved a name for herself as a violent and unwavering leader, unafraid to hack the heads from her enemies with a sw...

When wealthy American socialites Florence and Edward Deacon moved to the vibrant playground of Paris in 1879, they had come to join the artists and intellectuals of the haute bohème. Born into this world of decadence, their daughter Gladys would soon have her childhood shattered by a shocking scandal that pitted her mother and father against each other for the rest of their lives. Despite this, Gladys would go on to be educate...

In the 1960s, vice-admiral Erik af Klint opened a crate of art. It had been left to him by his aunt with strict instructions that it should remain sealed for some twenty years after her death. What Erik found was a remarkable cache of work that would throw into question everything we believe about the beginning of abstract art. You see, five years before Kadinsky and Mondrian began their forays into abstractionism, a Swedish woman ...

Brand new on Lipp Media, All Bases Covered is a weekly podcast helping you navigate the beauty industry to cut through the bullsh*t. Lauren, Lisa and Alex use their backgrounds in beauty, science and business to cover all bases in discussing the latest beauty news, trialing new products, breaking down ingredients and plenty more.

In this episode, the girls discuss animal testing & China - can the people’s favourite brand sta...

By the turn of the twentieth century, the fight for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom had already been raging for nearly forty years. Suffragists everywhere had been calling for changes that would allow women the right to become part of the political life of the nation, but their pleas had persistently been denied. Frustrated and angered, a new generation of activist women rose up, and the suffragette was born. With the motto ...

For one last Women’s History Month celebration, we teamed up with Steph and Andrea from ‘All the Shit I’ve Learned Abroad’ to share tales of our favourite travel heroines. All four of us are avid solo female adventuresses, but perhaps we wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for the women who paved the way. From Isabelle Eberhardt’s cross-dressing nomadic life in North Africa, to Aloha Wanderwell’s seven-year road trip, Robyn Davidson’s solo tr...