100 Nasty Women of History Read online

  In a much more fun piece of reporting, Nellie set out in 1889 to try and beat the record of the Jules Verne character Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days. She made it in 72 days, and returned to cheering crowds in New York. (By the way, if anyone wants to pay me to try and beat this record, I would be super happy to give it a go.)

  Nellie was crafting a whole new approach to journalism. As a woman in a male industry, she could go undercover in places her male peers never could. Clearly jealous, some of her male colleagues who undoubtedly also had shit mutton chops dismissed her work as ‘stunt reporting’. Sure, bros. You’re clever and important, so you must know what you’re talking about.

  However you feel about ‘stunt journalism’, and however shit your facial hair is, it’s undeniable that Nellie’s style of reporting drew in a huge audience, exposed dark and terrible injustices, and produced tangible change. If that’s not real journalism, what is?

  41

  Elizabeth Hart

  1772–1833

  Elizabeth Hart, also known as Elizabeth Hart Thwaites after she bagged her man, was one of two prominent sisters who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries on the Caribbean island of Antigua.

  The sisters were free, mixed-race women of some property and social standing, living at a time shortly before the end of slavery in the British Caribbean. Both married white Methodist men, and so had matching husbands. They both worked in education and social work, founding a Female Refuge Society for enslaved and free needy women and running schools from the 1810s to the 1830s. And, of course, they both loved Methodism. They simply could not get enough of the Methodist church. But really, who can?

  What we know of the Hart sisters, we mostly know from letters they wrote to a Methodist preacher about how much they loved Methodism (a classic Hart sisters pastime). In their letters they wrote about the evils of slavery, and denounced the practice of concubinage and the sufferings of enslaved women.

  The reason this chapter is about Elizabeth and not her older sister Anne, however, is because Anne sounds like a bit of a narc, whereas Elizabeth was a bit more sinful, and so a bit more fun.

  Elizabeth’s sins, as detailed in an 11-page letter she wrote to a preacher, include:

  Wavering in her faith as a youth.

  Being ‘lulled into Carnal security’. (Who hasn’t been?)

  Enjoying ‘company, conversation and Books which did not tend to the Glory of God’.

  Enjoying ‘Music’s charms’.

  Dancing.

  General youthful folly.

  Dancing seemed to be a true weak spot for Elizabeth, who wrote of her guilty feelings when listening to one British preacher who had come to the Caribbean to talk about Jesus. She said she felt ‘really ashamed of [her] conduct by the sermon which the Doctor Preached … in which he mentioned the evil consequences of Dancing in particular.’ Uh oh.

  Elizabeth also seemed to have a bit of an emo streak, writing a poem about her tormented spiritual journey after the death of another missionary, a Mr McDonald, who she may have fancied and we can only presume was a dreamboat.

  My solemn engagements are vain

  My promises empty as air

  My vows I shall break them again

  And plunge in eternal despair.

  Meanwhile, big sister Anne wrote nothing of her carnal pursuits. If she had any, they have been lost in the sands of time. Or perhaps she was just nice and boring.

  Beyond Elizabeth’s forbidden love of dancing, good conversation and ungodly Books and company, she and her sister also wrote arguments against the racial stereotypes of their time. Elizabeth argued in her letter that enslaved people were in no way inferior or degenerate, but were simply suffering under the yoke of slavery. As well as their letters, the sisters wrote histories and biographies and manifestos and polemics against slavery. They were some of the first African female writers in the Caribbean.

  Both sisters worked as the first educators of free and enslaved black people in Antigua, and focused all their energies on bettering their conditions on the island. They were both in a somewhat precarious social position, attempting to gain acceptance into Methodist society at a time when Christian interracial marriage was still taboo. They argued in favour of allowing free women of colour such as themselves to gain leadership positions in the Methodist church, pointing out how well placed they would have been to preach across racial lines on the island.

  Elizabeth died in 1833, and her boring sister Anne died in 1834. We can only assume they are both now chilling in Methodist heaven, where perhaps Anne has been convinced to try a bit of dancing herself, and maybe Elizabeth has caught up with the missionary she secretly fancied, Mr McDonald.

  42

  Jovita Idár

  1885–1946

  When United States Army Texas Rangers came to the newspaper where Jovita Idár worked in 1913, they ran into a bit of unexpected trouble.

  After an editorial in the paper El Progreso criticised President Woodrow Wilson’s intervention in the Mexican Revolution, the Rangers wanted to shut down the paper and destroy its office and printing press. Unfortunately for them, Jovita stood in their way, well aware that what they wanted to do was illegal. (Note to any interested parties/presidents: destroying newspapers that have said mean things about you is illegal, and has been for quite some time.) So she stood in the doorway, refused to stand aside, and sent them packing.

  Early the next morning, they snuck back when she wasn’t there, broke down the door and broke the press with a sledgehammer, also breaking the windows and scattering the type across the floor. But as it turns out, destroying a printing press and scattering a newspaper’s type all over the floor like an angry toddler will never stop a woman like Jovita from saying what she wants to say – the Idár family simply picked up and kept on publishing more and more newspapers.

  Jovita was born in 1885 in Laredo, Texas. The Idár family was made up of teachers, activists and muckraking investigative journalists. If you don’t know the term, muckraking is exactly what it sounds like: digging up dirt on powerful people and institutions. For a Mexican-American family in Texas, it was a dangerous job to expose the racism and economic injustices directed at their family and community.

  The family paper was La Crónica, and its goal was the ‘industrial, moral, and intellectual development of the Mexican inhabitants of Texas’. It was run by Jovita’s father, who was the kind of guy you’d describe as a ‘pillar of the community’. Every community, if it’s lucky, has a pillar. Jovita and her father and brothers reported on the very worst issues facing Mexicans in Texas, from segregation to lynching, and Jovita took over running the paper after her father’s death.

  When not busy with her investigations or frightening off burly officers by standing in doorways, Jovita also advocated for better education for her community. In a state where powerful forces in agriculture wanted Mexican-American kids to be working in their fields instead of learning to read, the schools for Mexican children were worse off, and the teachers paid much less. Luckily in today’s America, inequality in the education system has long since been eradicated,16 and public school teachers are paid handsomely.17

  Jovita believed that the answer to a better education system for Mexican children in Texas was not complete assimilation into white schools, but high-quality instruction in bilingual or Spanish-speaking schools, so that the kids could learn and preserve their culture, their language, and their history.

  The other big Idár family activity was organising the First Mexicanist Congress, held in 1911 in Laredo, a gathering of activists from across Texas to discuss civil and human rights. From this congress came the League of Mexican Women, of which Jovita would become president and lead charitable projects toward the development of education and the alleviation of poverty.

  ‘Woman must always seek to acquire useful and beneficial knowledge, for in modern times, she has broad horizons,’ Jovita wrote. She believed that women must be educated and become influ
ential in all industries – and not spend their days ‘living deceitfully on gossip and lurid tales’, as fun as that might be.

  Jovita participated in the Mexican Revolution of 1910, working as a nurse for La Cruz Blanca – a Red Cross-type organisation. She also served as a volunteer nurse with the American Red Cross in WWI.

  So Jovita, as well as being brilliant and brave, was a teacher, a journalist, a nurse, a community leader, and just about every other thing you can be if you care to be of service to your community. Before she died in 1946, she founded a free kindergarten, and continued to found and edit more publications. In fact, in a classic bridezilla move, she postponed her own wedding to focus on getting a new paper, Evolución, off the ground.

  As for the Texas Rangers, they never destroyed another of her printing presses. It would have been nearly as pointless as trying to get past her in a doorway.

  Ladies: if a man tries to enter your house and you suspect he has designs on your printing press, whatever you do, don’t let him in.

  43

  Louise Mack

  1870–1935

  Like many of the women in this book, the Australian journalist and novelist Louise Mack is one whose writing remains so witty and charming today that reading her words may fill you with an urge to reach across space and time to be best friends. As it was, she was best friends with Ethel Turner, another famous Australian writer of novels and children’s books. The two women would compete, support, and spur each other on to greater and greater things over the course of their lives and over the course of their deeply intense, intimate friendship. Get yourself a best friend who can do the same.

  Louise was born in 1870 in Hobart, Tasmania to a large family as boisterous as it was poor. Despite being incredibly bright, Louise spent so much time during high school editing a student paper, having fun with her friends, and writing lovesick poetry that she didn’t get into university as she had hoped.

  Instead, she became a governess, which she absolutely hated. ‘Teaching is so horrible,’ she wrote. ‘It takes the curl out of your hair and the backbone from your body and gives you dirty nails and a contemptible attitude and a bad temper.’ When not teaching and thereby losing the curl of her hair, Louise spent all her spare time writing or else eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations in order to come up with new characters for her stories.

  In 1896, she published her first novel, The World is Round. It was a satirical look at Sydney society – which made things a bit awkward for Louise among her fancier friends. She decided to travel to London to try and make it as a writer.

  On the long journey by ship between Australia and London, Louise wrote hilarious letters to her family, beginning with her disappointment at the boringness of her fellow passengers when she had expected great intrigue and conversation, and the way in which everyone on the ship drove each other mad as the weeks wore on.

  ‘It is the third week of the journey that the unloveliness of the human race becomes most apparent,’ she wrote. ‘Every time the women pass each other they smile. They never pass without it. Soon it becomes worn to shreds, a mere painful pressing back of the lips. You learn to dread it as you see it coming towards you.’ People who work in offices will recognise this phenomenon.

  When the ship stopped in Naples, Louise went ashore and managed to miss the ship as it departed. She had to chase it by making a mad dash to Marseille, where the ship was due to dock. Louise revelled in the adventure of being alone and broke in a foreign country: ‘Alone among all these Italians. The intoxication of moments like this is what your true traveller must ever seek. Without them one might as well stay at home. But with them the world is a glorious place.’

  Upon arriving in London, Louise was instantly in love with the city. She signed off her letter to her family recounting her travels with total incredulity at her circumstances, hardly able to believe she could be so lucky as to be in London:

  Here I am in London!

  Is it really I?

  Walking down High Holborn

  Unconcernedly?

  Circumscribing Fleet Street,

  Wandering through the Strand,

  HERE I AM IN LONDON!

  – So I understand.

  More later. With love,

  From Lou in London

  Louise wanted to be a good writer. An important writer. The kind of writer that future hipsters would refer to at Dalston house parties while rolling themselves cigarettes of ‘natural’ tobacco. But she also had to pay the bills.

  So while waiting to hear whether her second novel would be published, Louise, alone but not lonely in London, sucked it up and requested an interview with the fiction editor of the prominent publisher, the Harmsworth Press. After weeks spent holed up writing her novel, totally pale and barely able to afford food, Louise looked, in her words, ‘an absolute FRIGHT.’ Too weakened to walk the long way, and too broke to afford the taxi she took to the interview, she instructed the doorman to charge the taxi driver’s fare to the fiction editor himself, then ran off into the building before either could question her. Luckily enough, she was offered the opportunity to earn some money by writing serialised stories with a mass appeal.

  Though she knew she was writing absolute smut, Louise turned out to be a genius at writing the equivalent of today’s trashiest soap operas. Able to feed and dress herself, and looking and feeling altogether less of a FRIGHT from the benefit of some money, Louise also received the good news that her novel An Australian Girl in London, that is, her proper writing, would be published.

  The reviews were excellent. ‘If all Australian girls are like Louise Mack,’ one reviewer wrote, ‘the more of them who come to London the better it will be for London and the world.’ She had made it as a proper writer – though the public still scrambled for her serials, which she continued to write by pacing around her apartment, dictating thousands of words of ridiculous plot a day to a typist.

  After a six-year stint in Italy working for an English language paper, and reliving what it felt like to be alone among Italians, Louise returned to London in 1910 to continue her reign as the Queen of Romance. Her preposterous stories were published in the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, and translated into French, Italian, and German.

  When war broke out in 1914, the time came for Louise to prove herself as an entirely different kind of writer: a war correspondent. She went to her fiction editor, Harmsworth, and asked to be sent to the front. He agreed, thinking a woman might provide a good ‘human interest’ take on the war – a line still familiar to many women journalists today.

  As it turned out, her incredible bravery and risk-taking would deliver a lot more than a ‘human interest’ angle, as she reported from places that her fellow male correspondents had fled in (justifiable) fear. Louise managed to travel inside German lines risking certain death should her identity be discovered.

  Louise was one of only two correspondents to get to and witness the bombing of Aarshot in Belgium by German forces. ‘It seems to me that the End of the World will be very like this,’ she wrote of the experience.

  Then in Antwerp, Louise took notes with a pencil and notebook while bombs rained on the city. ‘When it comes to fear and curiosity, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred curiosity wins,’ she wrote, describing what it was like to feel the urge to report under such circumstances. ‘You are not callous because you are curious … you are curious because you are alive … because you have a right to see and hear all the strange and wonderful things, all the terrors as well as the glories that make up human existence. Not to care, not to want to see, to know, that is the callousness beyond redemption.’

  As German forces approached Antwerp, Louise met three English correspondents who implored her to leave with them. She decided not to, instead disguising herself as a Belgian servant in the very hotel that the Germans would soon occupy. And so she worked behind the bar in the dining room where she could overhear the victorious Germans in conversation and so complete her story. When one
officer became curious about the silent barmaid – who could not speak without revealing her true identity – the Belgians of the hotel, who were protecting her, locked her in her bedroom for the entire next day so that she would not be exposed.

  Finally, she disguised herself as the Belgian wife of one of her allies in the hotel, and strode through the corridor with him and his children all the way outside and into a waiting car to take them to safety.

  Her book on the whole ordeal, A Woman’s Experience in the Great War, was published in 1915, and remains a gripping and terrifying account of the horrors of that war. Nothing could be further from the ridiculous romantic serials she’d used to pay the bills in London. Luckily for Louise Mack, though, she could write just about anything.

  44

  Beatrice Potter Webb

  1858–1943

  This chapter is not about Beatrix Potter, beloved author of Peter Rabbit, but Beatrice Potter Webb, the seminal sociologist. Sorry, I know! But we’re here to learn some cold, hard facts, and not facts about lovely woodland creatures, but about the empirical study of poverty.

  Beatrice was born in 1858 in Gloucestershire, the eighth of nine sisters born to a wealthy railway magnate, which was the profession of all wealthy Victorian fathers. Were you even a wealthy Victorian father if you weren’t a railway magnate? No. Beatrice also had a brother, who died young, devastating their mother who only ever wanted a boy. Beatrice was the emo one of the family, who enjoyed hiding from her relatives and reading books in a pile of hay with only a cat for company, as we all do. She didn’t like Jane Eyre, though, and complained, ‘The author’s conception of love is a feverish almost lustful passion,’ which is actually the best thing about that book and says a lot about Beatrice’s personality.