How many deserved to have their face on the Women of Achievement stamps? Many hundreds of names must have clogged the long lists as the Royal Mail made its choices. The chosen six - Marie Stopes, Claudia Jones, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Eleanor Rathbone and Barbara Castle - are stalwarts all: bold campaigners and pioneers who were discouraged and disparaged in their determination to change all our lives for the better. In their day they were high-profile women, admired by their followers, disparaged as battleaxes by the mysoginist press.

Any woman who tries to break with convention can expect tough times ahead and mockery when she gets there. There's even a vicar now condemning the choice of Marie Stopes because, he maintains, her interest in the eugenics movement makes her a Nazi. I wonder if he thinks that goes for Virginia Woolf and H.G. Wells too? They also showed interest in a movement that at the time commanded widespread intellectual interest. The same vicar also wants gays tattooed with a warning against sodomy. So are we worried? Here's my list of women of quieter achievements, whose resolute commitment to their work deserves to be brought out of the shadows.

Helen Crummy (1920- ) was born in working-class Craigmillar, Edinburgh, a tough and intelligent woman who didn't like it when, on asking at her son's primary school whether he could learn the violin, was told that it took teachers all their time to teach the 3 Rs. She set about founding the Craigmillar Festival, an enterprise that brought creativity into the lives of a run-down and neglected enclave of Edinburgh the tourists never see. She first galvanised other mothers, then the entire community. Councillors and bureaucrats sat up and took notice. To everyone's surprise but her own, the enterprise flourished. Her book Let the People Sing has gone round the world and in 1992 she was given an honorary doctorate at Heriot-Watt University.

Imogen Holst (1907-84) only child of the composer Gustav Holst, gave her life to music and other musicians. Growing up steeped in music with natural talent of her own, she went to Aldeburgh at the behest of Benjamin Britten and never left. She became for a while musical director of the Aldeburgh Festival but her outstanding gift was to serve a composer greater than herself and to fill the musical world about her with selfless generosity and affection.

Susan Travers (1909-2003) was the first woman member of the French Foreign Legion. At the outbreak of the Second World War she joined the Croix Rouge and was a driver with the legion in the Western Desert when it held out against Rommel's siege at Bir Hakeim. From there she led a reckless breakout to the British lines, which earned her the Croix de Guerre and the Ordre du Corps d'Armée. She stayed with the legion, fighting up through Italy and France. Why has there never been a biopic?

Olivia Manning (1908-80) was an outstanding novelist. Travelling with her British Council husband to Romania on the brink of the Second World War, she drew on their experiences for a prodigious series of novels Fortunes of War: in fact two trilogies - The Balkan Trilogy and the Levant Trilogy - about rickety expats in wartime Egypt, Greece, and Romania. They made a fine TV series starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh.

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