“I’ll throw acid on your pretty little face […], so wrote a genteel fanatic antifeminist”

Abstract This paper examines autobiographical reports of acts of (non-)verbal aggression against four Greek women pioneers in education, medicine, art and dance. These aggressive acts had been launched by some of their male contemporaries against the women’s efforts to occupy authority or elite positions. The analysis, which falls within the scope of historical (im)politeness research ( Kádár and Culpeper 2010 ), focuses specifically on the rarely addressed issue of how the autobiographers discursively deal with the narrated incidents. The four women’s real-time reactions to, and post hoc appraisals of, the aggressive acts are categorized and discussed by applying and extending Bousfield’s (2007) model of responses to impoliteness. Furthermore, contemporary witness and third-party contributions, offensive and defensive, are analysed in the light of relevant models ( Dobs and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2013 ; Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2014 ). It is found that all four women take a dignified and defiant stance towards the recorded female-exclusionary behaviours, evidencing a common, diachronically/intergenerationally consistent self-heroizing disposition.