25 (non-Bravo) real life housewives who are pretty badass

Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal

To cite a popular television show on Amazon: Good Girls Revolt. Patria, Minerva, and Maria Teresa  Mirabal turned the tide of Dominican political history, and were clandestine spies against a corrupt government. Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa were all assassinated in 1960.

The sisters, at the motivation of their uncle, came together to protest the ruler/dictator Rafael Trujillo, who routinely sanctioned atrocities over the people of the Dominican Republic. Minerva, Maria Teresa, and Patria formed a group called the Movement of the Fourteenth of June, named after a massacre one of the sisters witnessed at a protest against Trujillio.

When the political winds began to change, the sisters’ treatment in jail became more manageable for them, and they were eventually released. Their husbands, on the other hand were forced to stay in prison at La Victoria Penitentiary in Santo Domingo.

The three Mirabal sisters were killed on the way to visit their husbands in jail. They were forced off the road by a carload of Trujillo’s gangsters and clubbed to death on the shoulder of a highway. Their bodies were then mangled even further and tossed off a cliff to make them harder to identify.

The sister sacrificed their lives, both literally and figuratively, to depose a tyrant from office. Their efforts led to a complete reversal of power. In 1999, the UN  designated Nov. 25  as International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in honor of the sisters. This dasignals the beginning of a period of Activism against Gender Violence, with the last day being International Human Rights Day.