Hillary Clinton and her daughter Chelsea have collaborated in writing The Book of Gutsy Women, a glossy work that purports to be their “favorite stories of courage and resilience” about “gutsy women who have inspired -- women with the courage to stand up to the status quo, ask hard questions, and get the job done.” 

The book seems to be a vanity project designed to keep Hillary on the rounds of the talk shows claiming to speak for women. On "The View", Mrs. Clinton disclosed that her “gutsiest” decision was to stay married to Bill and was comparable to a family having to deal with a transgendered child. This observation prompted Madeleine Kearns at National Review to conclude that Mrs. Clinton “must be one of the most transparently disingenuous politicians to have ever lived.” Indeed -- and desperate to stay relevant and woke.

The book lists over 100 women, some of whom merit inclusion – such as Madame Curie, Anne Frank, Helen Keller, and Florence Nightingale. However, they are placed alongside trivial media personalities like Ellen DeGeneres and Billie Jean King.

As one might expect, the book includes a lot of women on the political Left, running the gamut from liberal icons like Eleanor Roosevelt to outright leftists like Bella Abzug. Danica Roem, the first openly transgender elected to a state legislature also made the cut. Among the women listed under the heading “Earth Defenders” are Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring contributed to the eventual banning of DDT, a decision that cost millions of lives, and the perpetually angry Swedish teen Greta Thunberg.

There are no conservative or libertarian women on the list (Betty Ford doesn’t qualify) because they don't embody the identity politics on which Clinton's failed campaigns have been based. It should be remembered that when Hillary addressed the failure of more women to support her in 2016, she opined that women were pressured to vote the way their husbands or sons instructed them to, a statement that was utterly demeaning to women, implying they lacked the agency to make up their own minds. It couldn't be that they just didn't like her and didn't agree with her leftwing agenda.

To be “gutsy,” according to the Clintons, is “about never giving up -- and working to pave the way for the next generation.”

With that in mind, here are the profiles of five gutsy women who didn't make the list because they don't fit Hillary's politically correct narrative.

Margaret Thatcher

One of the most consequential political figures in the 20^th century, Margaret Thatcher served as prime minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990. “The Iron Lady” rose from humble beginnings (the daughter of a greengrocer) to become England’s first female prime minister and the only British PM to win three consecutive terms.

Her economic legacy of free markets, free trade, competition, and lower taxes left an enduring stamp on Britain. She broke the power of the labor unions and moved major state industries like telephones and gas supply to the private sector. As she once famously said: “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”

Thatcher, President Reagan, and Pope John Paul II formed an ideological phalanx that led to the fall the Soviet Communism. Reagan biographer Craig Shirley noted that:

“After the rise of Thatcher in 1979, the rise of John Paul II, also in 1979 and the rise of Reagan in 1980, the economic, moral and military alliance against Soviet communism was complete. Reagan was arming freedom fighters, the Vatican was sending food and medical supplies and Thatcher was firming up European support, calling on them to act like men…

Eleven years later, a wall fell and the Soviets were consigned to the ash-heap of history.”

Clare Boothe Luce

As an author, playwright, politician, and  ambassador, Clare Boothe Luce was one of the most accomplished women of the 20^th century. Her spouse was Henry R. Luce, co-founder and editor of Time, in those days, a respected journal.

Luce’s most successful play, The Women, opened on Broadway in 1936 and was later filmed. In 1942, she was elected to Congress as a Republican. Later, she was appointed Ambassador to Italy, becoming the first American woman to represent her country to a major power.

In the 1950s and 60s, she became a leading anti-communist speaker and writer. In 1981, President Reagan appointed Luce to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and in 1983 she was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

She is remembered today through the work of the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women that promotes leadership roles for conservative women.

Phyllis Schlafly

In her long life as an author and activist, Phyllis Schlafly wrote or co-wrote more than twenty books, founded the Eagle Forum, and led the fight against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Her first book, A Choice Not an Echo, which sold three million copies, is widely credited with helping Barry Goldwater win the Republican nomination for President. As Ann Coulter remembered:

“Without Schlafly, without that book and that candidacy, it is unlikely that Ronald Reagan would ever have been elected president.”

Schlafly also wrote prolifically about American foreign policy and the need for a military defense shield but became best known for her trenchant opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. She founded the Eagle Forum in 1972, at a time when the ERA looked unstoppable, and led the battle to defeat it.

Schlafly’s final book was The Conservative Case for Trump, released in September 2016. Unfortunately, she did not live to see Trump’s election that November.

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was born in Russia and was an eyewitness to the horrors inflicted by the Bolshevik Revolution. By the time she emigrated to America in 1925, her core beliefs were established. In the foreword to her first novel, We the Living, Rand wrote:

“When, at the age of twelve, at the time of the Russian Revolution, I first heard the Communist principle that Man must exist for the sake of the State, I perceived that this was the essential issue, that this principle was evil, and that it could lead to nothing but evil regardless of any methods, details, decrees, policies, promises and pious platitudes.”

Free market capitalism, she believed, was the only system consonant with man's rational nature.

Her breakthrough novel was The Fountainhead (1943), which tells the story of the idealistic young architect Howard Roark. The theme of The Fountainhead, as explained by Rand, was “individualism and collectivism, not in politics, but in man’s soul.” Initially rejected by several publishers, the novel went on to become an international bestseller and a film.

Her 1957 follow-up, Atlas Shrugged, portrayed a United States on the edge of collapse as a result of socialist and collectivist policies. The novel proved to be enormously influential and stunningly prescient. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the creeping socialist policies that followed caused the sales of Atlas Shrugged to spike. To anyone who had read the dystopian novel, it all seemed depressingly familiar.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder, in collaboration with her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, wrote the beloved Little House series of children’s books, based on Laura's childhood in a pioneer family in the late 19^th century. The Little House stories painted a vivid picture of the American West, where people struggled to overcome hardships and shape their own destinies.

Her daughter Rose was a novelist, a biographer of Herbert Hoover, and celebrated writer whose 1943 book The Discovery of Freedom became a libertarian classic. As a silent collaborator, she helped Laura build the Little House stories around certain themes, including freedom, respect for free markets, and the love of nature.

In her book Libertarians on the Prairie, Christine Woodside explained that Laura and Rose created a children's series “that built loyalty for the ideas of the Founding Fathers and for wilderness and wildlife. The books have represented the pioneer allegory's triumphant side. Many of those pioneer homesteaders failed, and many were made miserable in failing. But all of us admire those who tried.”

To date the Little House series has sold 60 million copies. The books also spawned a successful TV series in the 1970s and early 1980s which sparked a new wave of enthusiasts including President Reagan.

There are of course many more women of accomplishment who don't fit the feminist agenda. More importantly, there are millions of ordinary women who don’t aspire to leadership or fame, but do the vital work that sustains the nation, working and raising families, serving their churches, volunteering in their communities, and homeschooling their children. In 2016, Hillary had a word for those women -- “deplorables.”

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