Pioneers …

… Witty Women. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

If the women in Dean's book are incorrectly linked under the category of sharp, they might be better understood via a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt: "conscious pariah." The women in this book were many things—brilliant, difficult, successful, frequently wrong—but they were all outsiders. (Often literally: Arendt, Adler, and Malcolm were all immigrants.) "A conscious pariah knows she is different," Dean writes, "and knows she may never, at least in the eyes of others, properly escape it. But she is also aware of what her individuality gives her."