100 Nasty Women of History Read online

  In the end, Sor Juana defended herself cleverly against the threat of the Inquisition. Being a whole lot smarter than any clergyman in her orbit, she wrote convincing arguments that the reason she primarily wrote on secular subjects rather than religious ones was because, oh dear me, she just wasn’t smart enough to comprehend such important, otherworldly topics. Yes, she could learn Latin in a matter of weeks, and could write a 975-line mythic poem of epic proportions that would be celebrated in Spain as a literary masterpiece. But she just wasn’t good enough with her girly little head to write the sorts of Goddy things that the church preferred.

  Despite her eloquent defence, the only way Sor Juana could ensure she escaped torture was to sign a declaration repenting for her previous scandalous ways, a declaration which she wrote in her own blood and was compelled to sign, ‘Yo, la peor de todas’ which can be translated as ‘I, the worst of them all,’ or even ‘I, the worst of all women.’ (Same.) The church took away and sold her immense collection of 1,000–2,000 books, as well as her musical and scientific instruments, and when she died treating illness in her convent in her 40s, they burned her writings so that her ideas wouldn’t cast a salacious stain on the history of the church and New Spain.

  Luckily, and to the great disappointment of any fans of the Spanish Inquisition, her works were rediscovered and published in the 1950s and beyond. In modern Mexico, Sor Juana has been reclaimed as the mother of Mexican and Latina feminism – and was declared in 1974 at a celebration in Mexico City to be ‘the first feminist in the New World’. As the Mexican poet Octavio Paz has put it very nicely: ‘It is not enough to say that Sor Juana’s work is a product of history; we must add that history is also a product of her work.’

  38

  Tarabai Shinde

  1850–1910

  If you are a lady, a gentlewoman, a chick, a broad, a girl, or a person who considers themselves a feminist, you may have at some point in your life felt an uncontainable fury, a righteous anger, a screeching, burning fire of rage and indignation at the actions of some man or another. Whenever this occurs, there’s not much to do to cure the affliction of your soul other than scream into the abyss, metaphorically or not.

  The way that Tarabai Shinde coped with her rage in 1882 was to write a furious, sarcastic, stinging, shouty feminist rant of a booklet. It was titled ‘A Comparison Between Women And Men’ and subtitled ‘An essay to show who’s really wicked and immoral, women or men?’ Spoiler alert: it was men.

  Tarabai came from an elite family in the little town of Buldhana in what is now Maharashtra, India. Her particular rage in 1882 was in reaction to the news that a woman had been sentenced to hanging for killing a baby she had had out of wedlock. The woman was a widow, and women of her class weren’t supposed to ever remarry or have more children after the death of their husband. The woman’s punishment, and the public discussion that followed concerning the general immorality and wickedness of women, pushed Tarabai over the edge.

  She was sick of men. Men who sold out to the British colonisers, male religious leaders who made up oppressive rules for women, all of male society who prevented women from receiving education or being allowed free movement, and forced them into terrible marriages. She was sick of not having a voice, sick of the conventions that confined her to her home, sick of the way women were written about in novels and plays and newspapers, and sick of women being blamed for matters out of their control. And so she put it all to paper in her blistering ‘A Comparison Between Women And Men’ polemic, thought to be one of India’s first feminist tracts – though who’s to say 19th-century India wasn’t full of feminist tracts that we just haven’t discovered yet? Quick everybody check your old cupboards!

  OK, let’s enjoy some highlights from this work, shall we? It’s just so delightfully shady:

  Every day now we have to look at some new and more horrible example of men who are really wicked and their shameless lying tricks. And not a single person says anything about it. Instead people go about pinning the blame on women all the time, as if everything bad was their fault! When I saw this, my whole mind just began churning and shaking out of feeling for the honour of womankind. So I lost all my fear. I just couldn’t stop myself writing about it in this very biting language. In fact, if I could have found even stronger words to describe how you men all stick together and cover up for each other, I would have used them in my clumsy way. Because you men are all the same, all full of lies and dirty tricks.

  Tarabai writes that she is ‘just a poor woman without any real intelligence,’ and, speaking directly at the men she seeks to drag, we see that solid sarcasm can still work 140 years later:

  With powerful intellects like yours you’ll find all types of criticisms to level at it, and all sorts of ways to sing the praises of your own kind instead …

  In another passage that doubles as a description of an office I once worked in, Tarabai absolutely destroys the men who talk a big game but don’t have much to show for it. She critiques her compatriots who fancy themselves to be modernising India and fighting against the British, but are in fact as useless, as, well, you’ll see:

  … but who actually does anything? You hold these great meetings, you turn up at them in your fancy shawls and embroidered turbans, you go through a whole ton of supari nut, cartloads of betel leaves, you hand out all sorts of garlands, you use up a tankful of rosewater, then you come home. And that’s it. That’s all you do. These phoney reform societies of yours have been around for thirty, thirty-five years. What’s the use of them? You’re all there patting yourselves on the back, but if we look closely, they’re about as much use as a spare tit on a goat.

  And as we all know, there’s not much use for a spare tit on a goat.

  One boy who lived in Tarabai’s town remembered her in her later years as a cantankerous old woman. You know, the kind of woman who reads too much and isn’t soft and maternal the way women should be. ‘She had a very fiery temper,’ he said. (No shit.) ‘Whenever she saw small children, she would chase after them, hitting at them with her stick.’ Whether or not the children Tarabai chased with her stick were punk-ass kids, however, remains unclear.

  Tarabai faced criticism for what she wrote, and never published anything again, as far as historians can tell. Perhaps she’d just said everything she’d wanted to say. Perhaps a thousand proto-Internet commenters swept upon her house, insisting with their superior intellects that, well, actually, there are, in fact, many uses for a spare tit on a goat. In any case, she ended her tract on a positive note, no child-chasing to be found: ‘I pray the lives of women in this world may at last become sweet and that all women find a place of happiness in this world and the other.’ She then thanks God and signs off, retiring from her brief but flawless writing career in order to spend more time with the neighbourhood’s children.

  39

  Phillis Wheatley

  c. 1753–1784

  I know it’s kind of the point of the book, but why doesn’t everyone know about Phillis Wheatley? Why had I never heard of her before writing this? Why do I know all the words to the songs of the South Park movie that came out in 1999, when that square millimetre of mental real estate could have been filled with the poems of Phillis Wheatley? Why could we have not spent one less week on Lord of the Flies in school, since everyone already knows that kids are shitty, and used that time to study Phillis instead?

  To get a sense of Phillis Wheatley’s importance, we can start with Thomas Jefferson, who was very concerned that people should know that Phillis Wheatley was not important. In fact, he wrote in his 1781 book Notes on the State of Virginia that Phillis Wheatley was SO unimportant that, ‘Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Wheatley; but it could not produce a poet … The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.’

  Yes, he believed her work to be ‘beneath the dignity of criticism’, while ironically bothering to criticise her in his book. ‘I don’t even LIKE her,’ Jefferson wrote, bef
ore bursting into tears. ‘I don’t think about her at ALL. I’m not obsessed with her, YOU are. God,’ he continued, snot dribbling out of his nose and into his mouth. ‘I’M the only genius, that’s why they’ll put me on the $2 bill someday, the best bill ever!!!! MOM I WANT A GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH GIMME IT I’M A GENIUS!!’

  The source of Jefferson’s fears? Phillis Wheatley was an enslaved black woman who also happened to be a genius. Her very existence as such threatened his entire world view, and indeed the justification for slavery: the imagined inferiority of her race. So where did this supposedly dangerous young woman come from?

  Phillis Wheatley was captured and enslaved in West Africa sometime between the ages of seven and ten, and arrived in Boston aboard a slave ship in July 1761. (Smug East Coast types: a quick reminder that the American south was not the only place that benefited from, or enacted, slavery.)

  Phillis was bought by a wealthy merchant, John Wheatley, for his wife Susannah. The Wheatleys set about giving Phillis a classical education. She learned English, Latin, and Greek, and within a matter of months was reading and writing poetry, had memorised the Bible, and had begun writing letters to religious leaders.

  Her first poem was published in 1767, when she was just a teenager. Her owners helped publicise her work by introducing her to intellectual society in Boston – but let’s not give them a cookie, because whether or not you teach your slave Latin, you’re still a fucking slave owner.

  Soon enough, Phillis’s writings and skills as a conversationalist had made her something of a local celebrity in Boston. She grew influential in an incredible time in Boston – this was, after all, the years shortly before the Revolutionary War, and other than dealing with Jefferson’s whinings, Phillis corresponded with the sorts of founding fathers American high school students are taught to revere as gods.

  Despite her acceptance in white Boston intellectual society, the Wheatleys could not find Phillis a publisher for her first book of poetry, because, surprise, racism. Instead, Phillis was sent to London to meet a publisher there. In London, she met Benjamin Franklin, among others.

  Phillis arrived in London just a year after the Somerset decision had outlawed slavery in England and Wales, though not throughout the empire, because, well, the empire’s wealth and existence depended on slavery. But here was Phillis, arriving and turning from a local celebrity to an international one, while still enslaved. Phillis wrote that the graciousness with which she was received in London ‘fills me with astonishment’.

  Now, remember how we didn’t give the Wheatleys a cookie? Good. The family’s son, Nathaniel, forbade Phillis from meeting again with Benjamin Franklin, because she was still enslaved by his family and he was worried that Ben might give her ideas about freedom.

  Finally, in the same year of her book’s publication, 1773, Phillis was freed: ‘My Master, has at the desire of my friends in England given me my freedom,’ she wrote. Her American owners had been suitably shamed by members of English society into freeing their slave.

  Phillis pointed out the hypocrisy of American revolutionaries for desiring freedom while carrying on enjoying the institution of slavery. She once wrote of this hypocrisy to a reverend about ‘The strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the Exercise of oppressive Power over others agree, – I humbly think it does not require the Penetrations of a Philosopher to determine.’ Which is basically a fancy 18th-century way of saying ‘You’re a bunch of fucking hypocrites’.

  Phillis’s life and achievements were profoundly influential upon the society in which she mingled. In her short life, (she only lived to be 31), she became the first black person in the Americas to be published, she met with Washington, for whom she had written a poem of praise, and was praised in turn by Voltaire, who compared her writing to that of Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia.

  In one poem, ‘An Hymn To The Morning’, Phillis wrote:

  Aurora hail, and all the thousand dies,

  Which deck thy progress through the vaulted skies:

  The morn awakes, and wide extends her rays,

  On ev’ry leaf the gentle zephyr plays;

  Harmonious lays the feather’d race resume,

  Dart the bright eye, and shake the painted plume.

  Ye shady groves, your verdant gloom display

  To shield your poet from the burning day

  It’s a lot more beautiful than most people’s thoughts on the morning, which generally range from ‘Shut up’ to ‘Five more minutes’ to ‘But I don’t want to go to school.’

  Writing influential tracts on the subject of liberty and freedom and religion in the first years of the American republic, and consorting with leading thinkers of the day, Phillis Wheatley could well be regarded as one of America’s very founders – had history not Thomas Jeffersoned her.

  But Phillis Wheatley could not matter to the founding fathers. She could not be a genius, despite her extraordinary gifts for learning and for writing. She couldn’t be any of these things without unravelling the ideologies that the new United States depended on: a moral justification for slavery rooted in the inferiority of black peoples, and a concept of American liberty and justice for all that did not include that large proportion of the population which was enslaved.

  Just by existing, Phillis was dangerous to the entire American project.

  We should all know more about Phillis Wheatley. She should be on the $50 bill. Across the land, every payday, people feeling lush will say to one another: ‘I’ve got a wallet full of Wheatleys.’ Besides having a nice ring to it, just think how much it would piss off Thomas Jefferson.

  40

  Nellie Bly

  1864–1922

  Nellie Bly is exactly the kind of name you’d want for a scrappy, go-get-’em, brassy lady journalist who tucks a pencil behind her ear and says ‘I swear, mister, I’ll get the scoop!’ In fact, it was the name of a popular 19th-century song, and also was the pen name of Elizabeth Jane Cochran, born in 1864 in Pennsylvania. We’ll call her Nellie here, though, because it’s cooler.

  When Nellie’s father died, he left no will to look after his second wife and their family, and so his money went only to his first family and left Nellie and her mother impoverished. Nellie knew she had to find a way to support her mother. She went to school to train to be a teacher, as did pretty much every ambitious 19th-century woman in this book – teaching was seen as about the only job open to women at the time – but didn’t have the money to continue beyond the first term. Desperate for a proper job, Nellie would finally find her calling when reading a column in the Pittsburgh Dispatch titled ‘What Girls are Good for’ which declared working women to be ‘a monstrosity’, written by a popular columnist who was probably sad and alone and had shit mutton chops. Nellie did what one does faced with a sexist prig, and wrote a letter to the paper saying that he was a sexist prig, and that women had to work to survive. The paper loved the drama of it all, and gave her a job.

  Nellie threw herself head first into her dream job. She wrote about the conditions of women working in factories in Pittsburgh, and the awfulness of divorce laws for women in the State of Pennsylvania. She was just proving herself to be a natural investigative journalist when her editors, alarmed that this lady writer they had so carelessly brought into their midst should be doing actual journalism, relegated her to the women’s section of the paper. Thankfully, this is something that has never happened again in the history of journalism, no sirree, nothing to see here.

  They were right to do it, really. Girls don’t like hard news! They like fashion and cupcakes and pretty little kittens. While these things are all actually great, to be fair, Nellie was not interested in writing about them, however, and convinced her bosses to let her report as a foreign correspondent from Mexico. She went, she wrote about the daily lives of Mexicans, she critiqued the Mexican government, she was thrown out of Mexico, sh
e returned to Pittsburgh, and her editors were like, ‘Aw, how cute of you. Back to the fashion pages!’

  Feeling absolutely stuck, Nellie simply quit and left a note which read: ‘I’m off for New York. Look out for me. Bly.’ People just don’t quit like they used to.

  After six months of funemployment, which was actually less funemployment and more traipsing around New York begging for work from newspapers, Nellie scored a job at the New York World, edited by Joseph Pulitzer.15

  Nellie wanted to be a real journalist. She wanted to throw herself headlong into stories with the explicit purpose of improving working people’s lives. Pulitzer set her a challenge to prove she was tough enough: to get herself admitted to a notorious mental institution, the Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum, which is nearly impossible to say, it turns out. But how would she get herself committed? She couldn’t just walk up to the gates and say, ‘Hello, I’m terribly mad, do please admit me to your fine institution!’

  Well actually, it was the 1880s, and a woman expressing her own opinion could be enough to have her packed away for ‘treatment’. A woman with ideas was dangerous, and must be interred for her own safety and the safety of the wider public, of course. ‘I was left to begin my career as Nellie Brown, the insane girl,’ she later wrote. ‘As I walked down the avenue I tried to assume the look which maidens wear in pictures entitled “Dreaming”. “Far-away” expressions have a crazy air.’ In fact, Nellie only had to fake madness, pretending not to know who she was, for as long as it took to get to the asylum, after which she was just herself, which I suppose was alarming enough to 19th-century sensibilities.

  For ten days, Nellie experienced the horrors of the asylum, its rotten food, its cruel employees, and the mistreatment of patients. She had buckets of icy water poured over her head for a ‘bath’, she saw rats everywhere and patients being beaten by the staff or tied up in ropes, and discovered that many women detained in the asylum seemed perfectly sane and had been sent there for dubious reasons by their husbands. She was eventually released at the request of her paper, and the report she published created a huge public outcry. She went on to write a book about the experience titled Ten Days in a Madhouse, in which she expressed her pleasure that as a result of her work ‘the City of New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per annum than ever before for the care of the insane.’ Nowadays, that’s around $25 million.