Published Oct 15, 2026 9:02 AM EDT In the mid-1970s, Linnda Caporael was a college student facing a seemingly mundane decision. A science major at U.C. Santa Barbara, she needed a humanities course to graduate. The course she chose, on women in American history, came with a term paper, and she had to pick a topic. Caporael’s first choice—Lydia Wardell, a Quaker woman who protested Puritan persecution by walking naked into a meeting house in the 1660s—was intriguing, but already taken.