BABATHA is Neri Livneh's heroine:

My heroine, at last
By Neri Livneh (Haaretz)

For years I've been looking for her, the heroine of my life. Whenever I conjure up the moment when some journalistic figure asks me to name my role model, the one who has done the most to get me to my present stage (on the somewhat unlikely assumption that there will one day be such a "stage" upon which I can sit myself, complacent and floral-wreathed, and look back with satisfaction, panoramically surveying the list of people who influenced my life), I discover, to my feminist chagrin, a couple of regrettable facts: it is difficult to find any necessary circumstantial connection between the people I have admired and the person I became - and far worse, the list contains more men than women.

[...]

In the course of a symposium on "The Myth of Beauty," which was held at the Mishkenot Sha'ananim center in Jerusalem, a discussion on "The History of the Myth of Beauty" took place between Dr. Yael Renan, a lecturer in literature, translator and researcher of myths, and Debby Hershman, an anthropologist, archaeologist and curator at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The question they were discussing concerned the earliest evidence for the centrality of the cultivation of beauty.

Hershman related the story of Bavta Bat Shimon, who lived in the second century CE and was a successful merchant - in other words, she was a strong and successful woman, even in the terms of our time - and the daughter of a rich man who left her a large inheritance. This was the period of the Maccabean revolt and a million and a half inhabitants of the country had already been put to the sword by the Romans. Bavta's life was also in danger, and she decided to flee, as a refugee, together with another group of people who were going to hide in caves in the Dead Sea area. Like any refugee, she decided to take along only the most essential items for her survival. A whole collection of letters and documents, which would become a treasure for archaeologists who study the inheritance laws and customs of the period, commercial contracts and coins - but also those things for which she was ready to die, literally, rather than be caught without them; and in the end she in fact died and left them behind in the cave.

What were these things that Bavta took as she was fleeing for her life? A mirror, "perhaps the most beautiful one I have seen," Hershman said, set in a round decorated frame and housed in a polished metal box, a comb, an array of cosmetics and a small bottle of persimmon perfume, which was very expensive in those days. "That is what I mean by preserving one's human image," Renan said and added that she imagines she herself would not flee without lipstick.

So it was that without further ado, I at last found the heroine of my youth in the form of Bavta, the woman who preferred to leave behind, like Sheila Levine (the protagonist of the book "Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York"), a handsome body.

[...]

That's certainly a new perspective. But not an unfitting one.

UPDATE(11 June): Reader Stuart Bornstein has e-mailed to point out that the "Maccabean revolt" in the article should be the Bar Kokhba revolt. Thanks, I should have caught that.