I decided to fact-check one of the most incredible stories on the list, that of Rukhsana Kausar, the farmer’s daughter who killed a notorious terrorist and drove off his cell.
While some of the details are exaggerated, the story is essentially true. She attacked the terrorist with an axe, then grabbed his gun and killed him, whereupon she and her brother drove off the terrorist’s gang.
One of the other women on the list, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, was well known even on our side of the Atlantic for her heroism against the Nazis. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about her.
They missed out on Saint Olga of Kyiv – now that woman was a real bad ass. She’s the Patron Saint of Ukraine – something Putin “forgot”.
The details of Olga’s badasshood:
“After Igor’s (her husband the King of Kiev)’s death at the hands of the Drevlians, Olga assumed the throne because her three-year-old son Sviatoslav was too young to rule. The Drevlians, emboldened by their success in ambushing and killing the king, sent a messenger to Olga proposing that she marry his murderer, Prince Mal. Twenty Drevlian negotiators boated to Kiev to pass along their king’s message and to ensure Olga’s compliance. They arrived in her court and told the queen why they were in Kiev: “to report that they had slain her husband … and that Olga should come and marry their Prince Mal.” ] Olga responded:
Your proposal is pleasing to me, indeed, my husband cannot rise again from the dead. But I desire to honor you tomorrow in the presence of my people. Return now to your boat, and remain there with an aspect of arrogance. I shall send for you on the morrow, and you shall say, “We will not ride on horses nor go on foot, carry us in our boat.” And you shall be carried in your boat.[
When the Drevlians returned the next day, they waited outside Olga’s court to receive the honor she had promised. When they repeated the words she had told them to say, the people of Kiev rose up, carrying the Drevlians in their boat. The ambassadors believed this was a great honor as if they were being carried by palanquin. The people brought them into the court, where they were dropped into a trench that had been dug the day before under Olga’s orders, where the ambassadors were buried alive. It is written that Olga bent down to watch them as they were buried and “inquired whether they found the honor to their taste.”
Olga then sent a message to the Drevlians that they should send “their distinguished men to her in Kiev, so that she might go to their Prince with due honor.” The Drevlians, unaware of the fate of the first diplomatic party, gathered another party of men to send “the best men who governed the land of Dereva.”] When they arrived, Olga commanded her people to draw them a bath and invited the men to appear before her after they had bathed. When the Drevlians entered the bathhouse, Olga had it set on fire from the doors, so that all the Drevlians within burned to death.”
From Wiki of course.
She instinctively knew the lesson we all must learn: one must never trust a Derevlian. They’ll just keep bothering you, trying to borrow money, asking you to help them move, killing your husband – things of that nature. The only way to get rid of them for good is to bury them alive.
Sacher-Masoch’s version of the story, as told in “Bloody Wedding in Kyiv” is even more gruesome. In addition to all the things you mentioned, she kept Prince Mal (called Maz in the story) alive, but chopped off his arms and legs and hept him chained under her dinner table for the rest of his life, acting as her dog, where he was forced to live off table scraps that he had to pick up with his mouth.
As Jesus, in his mercy, always taught.
Thus qualifying her for sainthood.