WRITTEN BY: JENNA ANDERSON

**Update: April 8, 2016: The Ordinary Women video series has reached its fundraising goal and has raised over $207,000. The funds raised will go towards completing the video series as well as creating a curriculum for educators. Stay tuned for the release of the first episode on 10th Century novelist Murasaki Shikibu in September 2016. For more updates on the video series, click here.**

Are you tired of seeing women depicted as secondary characters to the men of history? Feminist Frequency is! They want to challenge stereotypes and the status quo by highlighting the daring, defiant, heroic women of history that are often ignored by history books.  On International Women’s Day Feminist Frequency announced a crowdfunding campaign for their new video series Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History.

Feminist Frequency is a video webseries that explores the representations of women in pop culture narratives. Created in 2009 by Anita Sarkeesian, it is a non-profit charity that serves as an educational resource to encourage critical media literacy and provide resources for media makers to improve their work.

Sarkeesian says she is often told that it is “unrealistic, or historically inaccurate to have female characters in media that are more than just passive sidekicks or eye candy.” That’s why she thinks it is important to provide a different narrative of exceptional women from history, because, the way women are portrayed in the media affects our ideas of women in real life.

The video series is devoted to women throughout history who defied stereotypes and lived remarkable lives. Sarkeesian says that these women “can help us reimagine the world as a place where women doing revolutionary things isn’t incredible at all, it's just normal.”

The women the video series will highlight include: Murasaki Shikibu, the inventor of the modern novel; Ada Lovelace, the writer of the first computer program, Ching Shih, a pirate captain; Emma Goldman, a political revolutionary; and Ida B. Wells, a civil rights leader and journalist.

Sarkeesian hopes that by the time Women’s History Month 2017 rolls around each of the exceptional women highlighted in the video series will be known by name, and that women will not just be recognized for the limitations put on them, but for their extraordinary achievements.

Watch this video for a behind the scenes peek at the development of Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History, and make sure to check out Feminist Frequency's YouTube Channel to see all of their other videos, including game reviews and the Tropes vs Women in Video Games series.