I write about women who have carved their path through obstacles to pursue their dreams and calling. This might have something to do with the fact that I am adopted and most adopted children have to discover their own calling without a compass or a map of history and genetics to help them find their way.

Sometimes the obstacles for women are society, sometimes men, sometimes self-doubt. The women who succeed, and even those who try and fail because their time has not yet come, inspire us all because they beat a pathway for the rest of us to follow.  But because history has been so male centric – where is the female Iliad, I ask? – the accomplishments of these women are buried in footnotes or left unmentioned altogether. For some women, however, their achievements have been deliberately erased from history.

My fascination with women erased by history began in the tenth grade in 1980. I loved history, especially ancient history and European medieval history, just not American history. Studying the colonial period of the United States and its deleterious impact on native populations, tracing the effects of Manifest Destiny and the Trail of Tears, and learning about a civil war fought by one side to keep people enslaved for their financial benefit, all made me sad. The literature of American history did not help. Reading about women burned at the stake in Salem through Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and perceiving its deeper meaning of how people will say anything and accuse others to save themselves, and reading the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne did not endear me to the story of America’s development. In fact, Hawthorne’s novel, the Scarlet Letter, about Hester Prynne and her daughter Pearl standing in the blaze of shame with a flaming scarlet A sewn on Hester’s dress, was particularly abhorrent to me, a child also born in shame and adopted out of her family of origin for this sin. The history of America seemed to me the history of destroying Native Americans, African Americans and women for some strange vision of progress that I could not comprehend.

So, no. But escaping into the magic of the National Geographic Magazine that slid through the mail slot in our rounded front door every month, wrapped in protective brown paper, with its silky pages of text, fold-out maps and glossy photos, yes. My favorite stories were articles about Egypt, desert sand dunes, camels and pyramids. Egypt, a place in north Africa, the homeland of some of the ancestors I could never know.

And then to find out that there was a queen before Victoria in the 19^th century, before Elizabeth the First in the 16^th century, before even Cleopatra in the first century BC, who had ruled the Nile and all of Egypt through a time of great peace and prosperity, captivated my imagination. This person was not just a queen, she was a pharaoh. Pharoah Hatshepsut reigned from approximately 1478 BC as part of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. We know this dynasty through other famous pharaohs and another queen: Tutankhamun, Amenhotep, Akhenaten, and Akhenaten’s wife, Nefertiti. During Hatshepsut’s time as pharaoh, she completed massive construction projects, including waterways and canals and the temple complex at Deir el Bahari across the Nile from the temple of Karnak, to which she also added building structures. Hatshepsut was laid to rest in a tomb in the temple complex she built under the pyramid shaped mountain, El Qurn, upon her death in 1458 BC.

When I learned that her stepson chiseled Hatshepsut’s name off the pillars that memorialized her works and replaced her name with his, I wrote my first essay about a strong woman whose feats were deliberately destroyed by a man and gave a presentation on it. Perhaps the true meaning of “behind every successful man is a woman” came from this pharaoh and the achievements claimed by her stepson.

Fast forward to 1984, my sophomore year at the University of California, Riverside, when I asked my art history professor why he wasn’t teaching us about any women artists. In a lecture hall, with black and white slides of the work of male Renaissance artists flickering on the giant projector screen, Dr. Carrott, wearing his trademark bow tie and round horn-rimmed glasses, turned to look up at me. Then he told the crowd of about 40 students, “No woman has ever made any contribution to the history of art.” I ended up graduating a year early, deciding not to pursue a degree in art history, instead focusing on my English major, and my final term paper on the efforts of John Milton’s daughters (think Paradise Lost) who wrote and edited their father’s work, as he was blind and could not have written them without his daughters’ assistance.

Decades later, on one of my trips to Paris, I visited the Louvre. Entering a familiar gallery of French Rococo painters, I came across a Madonna and Child painting by a female artist I had never heard of. That day I learned that Dr. Carrott had not been truthful. In fact, Dr. Carrott was echoing the words of the men who had kept women out of the French Royal Academy of Art and Sculpture in the 18^th century and the government funded art systems that followed. The woman in the portrait looked straight out at me with an appeal that struck across centuries. I had to find out more about her. The quest to learn more about Élisabeth Vigée Lebrun caused me to spend the next five years researching her life and the lives of other female artists of the French Ancient Regime and the Revolution. And the painting that called to me? It was Élisabeth’s plea to the head of the Royal Academy to recognize her contributions to art.

It has taken me a long time to refute Dr. Carrott, but my coming novel about Adélaïde Labille Guiard, Élisabeth’s direct competitor, is the story of a female artist who was at the top of her field in 18th century France and whose efforts, and impact on her time, were deliberately destroyed.

Now, back to Hester Prynne for just a moment. I really haven’t given her a fair knock. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a story about a minister who impregnated a woman and left her and their child to bear the consequences alone. The more the minister claimed to be a worthless person, the more he was praised by the townspeople, and the more Hester and her daughter were seen in public, the more they were vilified and ostracized. The truth of the matter is that Hester was a strong woman, a single mom rearing a child and providing for her with no outside help. And her daughter Pearl had to grow up living the life of an outcast. As an adopted child, I get this. But together, Hester and her daughter took on their culture, the society and times in which they lived, and exposed its cruelty and hypocrisy for what it was.

What would Pharoah Hatshepsut, Hester Prynne and Adélaïde tell me if we were to meet for sorbet, cocoa, coffee and boba (the popular drinks of their times and mine) at the Universal Conference of Women in the Sky? They might not have a lot of time to speak to me, they would be too busy following their agendas, or trying to survive – and thrive – with dignity in whatever circumstances and challenges they found themselves in, but they would definitely tell me, keep on telling our stories, sister!