It’s almost hard to imagine all the things women once weren’t allowed to do, by custom or by law: smoking in public, wearing pants, owning property. But for every forbidden act, there was one woman who stood up to be the first to do it anyway. There was the 16th-century Italian nun Plautilla Nelli, the first woman to paint a scene of the last supper; Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license; and 67-year-old Emma Gatewood, the first woman to thru-hike the Appalachian trail alone, in…
