100 Nasty Women of History Read online

  When you apply to be a saint at the Department of Saints, you have to prove you did lots of miracles. Brigid proved that she should be both sainted and remembered as an absolute lad when she once turned water into beer for an entire leper colony. Sorry, Jesus, some people just prefer beer. Another time, she created enough beer for 18 churches’ worth of legends from one beer barrel. Today she is one of Ireland’s patron saints, and also now yours, you absolute bantersaurus. Anywhere you know that’s called Kilbride is named after her.

  One time, Brigid was hanging out with a church official and he went into a trance and accidentally made her a member of the clergy. So she was also a bishop for a while.

  Now, buzzkills might contend that Brigid didn’t actually exist, and rather, she’s been conflated with a Celtic goddess of the same name. But whatever the buzzkills might say, we can at least all agree the following tale is pretty great:

  Brigid, being a charitable type, wanted to build a convent, so she asked the King of Leinster, who, I dunno, was some fucking guy, if she could please have some land for it. They were in a nice spot, with a nice forest, a nice lake, and nice fertile ground – everything a girl could ever want for her convent. But, alas, the King of Pricks said no, and he laughed at her. Laughed! At the virginal Brigid. Imagine.

  So Brigid, not being one to crumble in the face of a roadblock like the King of Pricks, had a bit of a pray and a think. And she had an idea! She said, hey, kingo, how about you give me as much land as my girly little cloak can cover? And he was like, lol OK. Yeah, have at it.

  Brigid and her three gal pals then each took a corner of the cloak and walked in opposite directions, when, SURPRISE, BITCH the cloak extended for many, many acres.

  At this point the king, to be fair, was like, well, shit, God is real, and fell at her feet and gave Brigid and her gal pals lots of gifts and supplies, seeing them to be holy AF. He even became a Christian and stopped being a dick to the poor.

  Is any of this true? That’s between you and your God and your giant, magical cloak.

  3

  Sappho

  c. 640–570 BC

  The ancient Greek poet Sappho’s sexuality has been the subject of debate for more than two and a half thousand years, such is the anxiety of civilisation after civilisation over the idea that some women may have no interest in men, despite men being so endlessly interesting. Sappho wrote passionately about her desire for women, but it is also said that she once threw herself off a cliff due to heartache over some guy with a boat. However, we must not discount the possibility that she was merely trying to get away from him, and his boring boat too.

  Nearly nothing is known about Sappho, her parents, her day job, or what she looked like – according to competing histories she was either ‘beautiful’ or ‘very ugly’, which is true of most people depending what time of day it is, or what angle the selfie is being taken from. With so little information available about her, it would be irresponsible to assume something about Sappho as wild as the idea that she was straight.

  Sappho was born in 640 BC and lived long enough to complain about her knees in a lyric poem. She lived in Mitelene, the capital of Lesbos, an island long associated with women who are just good friends, and nothing more. Sappho’s world was one of pitched political battles between clans, and she may have run some kind of school for educating (Greek) chorus girls, or she may not have. But whatever job Sappho did to pay the ancient Greek electricity bill, in her spare time she busied herself with becoming one of the most gifted poets of all time.

  Sappho was greatly celebrated in her day, admired by Aristotle and Plato, and considered on a par with Homer. Scholars in Alexandria listed her among their Top Nine Lyric Poets You Have To Read Before You Die, and compiled nine full papyrus scrolls of her works, which were like old-timey books but harder to read on the beach. Her completed works comprised perhaps 10,000 lines of lyric poetry altogether. (Lyric poetry is poetry intended to be sung, perhaps accompanied by someone jamming out on a lyre.)

  While the fruits of male genius such as Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad survived to the present day so that bored year 13 students can pretend to have read them for their A Level English class, nearly all of Sappho’s work has been lost to the floods, fires, and fanatics of time. Whether or not the early Christian church had a hand in her works’ destruction is yet another unknown in the story of Sappho, but at least one Christian critic called her ‘a sex-crazed whore who sings of her own wantonness,’ which also happens to be my Tinder bio.

  What remains of the works of the greatest woman artist of antiquity is about 650 fragments, containing only 70 complete lines. This means that while we can read lots of people’s opinions about her work that she was the Gosh Darn Best, only tiny pieces of her work have made it all the way to the 21st century – though every now and then, a new fragment pops up on a freshly discovered scrap of ancient papyrus. Reading her work can feel like trying to make a phone call when there’s terrible signal, and also the person you are calling died thousands of years ago.

  Here is a taste of her intense love poetry, which was perhaps written to be performed by a chorus:

  He seems to me as lucky as the gods,

  that man who sits on the other side

  from you and listens closely while you speak sweetly

  and laugh wonderfully – truly, it sets off

  my heart trembling in my breast;

  when I glance for a moment at you

  no words come:

  but my speech is in pieces, and at once

  a thin fire comes creeping under my flesh,

  and my eyes see nothing

  while my ears whir

  with noise.

  Sweat pours down all over me, fear

  seizes me completely, I am greener

  than grass, and I feel like I’m nearly dead ...

  But everything can be endured, for even a poor man ...

  And then NOTHING! What about that poor man?? What happened? Is he OK? When is the next episode?

  In another scrap of surviving work, Sappho invented the concept of bittersweet love:

  Eros, the limb-loosener, once again shakes me up

  a sweet-bitter pathetic creature

  Next time you feel something bittersweet, be angry but also happy at Sappho and her gal pals.

  It’s a terrifying prospect for a writer: that of all your life’s work, only 70 lines will remain. What if the 70 lines that sum up your life were part of an angry tweet thread complaining to Ryanair about a delay? Well, it could also be a comfort to think that someday the Internet will be destroyed in a colossal fire, taking every last embarrassing thing with it.

  What I’m saying is, Sappho was a lesbian, so get over it, and always back up your work.

  4

  Seondeok of Silla

  ?–AD 647

  Korea’s first female sovereign was Seondeok, who ruled the Kingdom of Silla from 632 until 647 AD, which as everyone knows was a solid time in Korean history. There are many legends surrounding her, the first of three Korean queens from the Silla period, a time when female heirs could succeed to the throne as well as male ones.

  Once, when Seondeok paid a visit to a temple, a young admirer named Jigwi travelled to wait for her arrival and catch a glimpse of the beloved queen. But before she arrived, he fell asleep under a pagoda and missed her entire visit. Classic Jigwi! Luckily for him, Seondeok was pretty chill, and left a bracelet on his chest as he slept. When he woke up and discovered the bracelet, as the legend has it, his heart was set so ablaze that the pagoda literally burned to the ground, which is pretty romantic but also a bit of a health and safety nightmare. That was somebody’s pagoda! Men have no respect for other people’s property. They think that just ’cause they’re in love they can burn down anybody’s pagoda they like.

  Beyond setting hearts aflame, Seondeok’s 15-year reign laid the foundations for the eventual uniting of the kingdoms of Korea into one, thanks to her careful diplomacy. She was an open-m
inded, logical, and compassionate ruler, who revealed her wisdom to her people in three key prophecies, the first of which will make you say ‘Hmm.’

  When the Tang emperor Taizong sent her family peony seeds from China, Seondeok apparently said, ‘Oh that’s nice, shame they won’t have a smell though,’ and people asked her, ‘BUT HOW DO YOU KNOW?’

  She replied, ‘Well lads, the picture on the packet doesn’t show any bees attracted to the flowers.’ And when the peonies grew and didn’t have any scent, she was like, ‘Told you fucken so.’

  Hmm.

  Her second prophecy was a more militarily significant one (unless you’re a bee I guess). One winter, the Jade Green Pond at Yeongmyosa Temple was chock full of frogs croaking their little hearts out at the totally wrong time of year. The people were like, ‘But why?’ And Seondeok was like, ‘Enemies are near.’ She sent troops at once, who discovered enemy forces in the valleys surrounding the capital. 500 of her foes were killed, and Seondeok was like, ‘RIP.’

  For her third trick, Seondeok predicted the date of her own death, despite being in perfect health at the time, and requested to be buried in a place that many decades later proved to be prophetic in Buddhist tradition. So that was pretty cool.

  In her years of rule, Seondeok promoted culture and welfare in her kingdom. She built important Buddhist temples and the pagoda of Hwangnyongsa, which was nine storeys tall and 80 metres high, for a time the tallest wooden structure anywhere in the world. Only its foundation stones remain today, presumably because some guy’s heart was set ablaze in its vicinity, burning it to the ground. Ugh, men.

  5

  Khayzuran

  ?–AD 789

  Born in Yemen, Khayzuran was captured as a slave and brought to the palace of Caliph al-Mahdi in Baghdad, the seat of the Abbasid Empire that ruled the Islamic world from the 8th century until 1258, when the Mongols conquered the city. If you don’t know much about Baghdad other than what you’ve heard on the news in recent years, wipe your mind free of those perceptions and begin again in the year 775, as al-Mahdi came to power, the third Abbasid caliph.

  Baghdad in this time, and for centuries after, was lit.1 Well-regulated markets offered trade from India, China, and basically everywhere else. People came from all over and shared scientific and literary knowledge. Baghdad has from its start been book-obsessed. Educated Baghdadi citizens frequented libraries and bookstores and read works from around the world translated to Arabic in one of the translation schools of the city.

  Now forget what you think you know about harems. If you have vague memories of the word or paintings of women lolling about half-naked, know that these images come from the minds of horny white European men, the kind of men who nowadays visit a Middle Eastern country for a week and thenceforth hold court in all social gatherings about the mysteries of the Orient. In reality, the harem was the private sphere of women in an imperial court, and was a highly political place. Throughout this book we’ll meet quite a few powerful women who started out as slaves in the harem but ended up ruling empires through the work of their own wits, their alliances, their education, their skill at political intrigue, and, sure, their beauty.

  When Khayzuran was brought to the palace at Baghdad, her impoverished family came with her, and their fate would be altered beyond their wildest imaginings. Khayzuran became the wife of al-Mahdi, and manoeuvred their sons to be named his heirs in spite of an earlier marriage. As the wife of the caliph, Khayzuran was an active and public face of state affairs, and arranged excellent positions in government for her much-elevated family.

  When al-Mahdi died in 785, Khayzuran’s two sons were away from Baghdad, but she acted quickly to assert her family’s claim to power. To quell any unrest in a sudden power vacuum, she disbursed two years of pay to the army. You wouldn’t be interested in a coup if you’d just received two years’ salary, would you? Khayzuran called back her sons, and arranged for dignitaries and power brokers to swear allegiance to the elder son, al-Hadi.

  Unfortunately for all involved, al-Hadi turned out to be a garbage son. (There’s one in every family, and if you don’t know who yours is, it’s you.) He was also jealous of his younger brother, who was obviously less of a shitbag and better liked than he. Al-Hadi felt very threatened by his mother, who had cultivated a powerful network of advisers and officials who visited her regularly in the palace. ‘It is not in the power of women to intervene,’ he had the nerve to say to his own mother who birthed him, ‘in matters of sovereignty. Look to your prayers and your prayer beads.’

  Well, instead of looking to her prayer beads, Khayzuran *may* have gotten involved in murdering her trash son instead. Was it her who did it? Who’s to say! Whoever it was, they *may* have sent sexy ladies to his bedroom to girlishly smother him with pillows, putting a sexy end to al-Hadi’s rule after just over a year.

  It seems that al-Hadi had probably been plotting the deaths of his mother and brother. Once, he sent his mother food with instructions for her to ‘eat it up because it’s sooooo soooo yummy!’ but she fed it to her dog first, who promptly died. So better to get in there first when you’re playing the murdering game, I suppose.

  And so Khayzuran’s second son, Harun, who didn’t suck, came to power. Khayzuran continued managing her own affairs of state just fine, and Harun trusted his mother for advice in matters of policy. He happily divided responsibilities and power with her, and presided over a glorious court.

  The moral of this story, children, is to listen to your mother, or you’ll end up dead.

  6

  Subh

  ?–999

  Subh was born some time in the 900s AD. It’s not clear exactly what year she was born, and it’s not polite to ask. She was captured as a slave in the Basque region during battles to consolidate the western branch of the Umayyad Empire’s control of Andalusian Spain. Her name was originally Aurora, and Subh has the same meaning in Arabic – the dawn. As we saw with Khayzuran, the way women exercised power in a caliph’s palace was through working her way up the ranks of the harem, marriage, and the installation of garbage sons who were easily manipulated and/or murdered. You know, your standard princes and princesses fairy tale stuff.

  Subh married the caliph al-Hakam, who was a nerd. Like all nerds with money, al-Hakam spent vast fortunes on books, collecting and copying and rebinding them, and, presumably, putting them in a large tub and swimming in them. In the days before Kindles, this meant sending out emissaries across the world to seek out books and purchase them for enormous sums. Also because he was a nerd, al-Hakam destroyed all the wine in Cordoba (boo), encouraging his people’s pursuit of learning, poetry and science instead of getting wasted all the time, which is pretty solid life advice to be fair. He built up the University of Cordoba to be perhaps the greatest in the world, ranking quite high on the league table based on student satisfaction.

  Subh had captured al-Hakam’s attention not just for being a babe, but for her witty wordplay and her knowledge of history and religion. As al-Hakam got older, he just wanted to chill with his bathtub full of books, and left matters of state to Subh instead. Which is fair enough; ruling a massive empire isn’t for everybody.

  Busy with her political machinations and the management of the empire, Subh took on a secretary, Ibn Amir, who was 26 years old, hot, smart, and helpful. At this point he and Subh may have had a thing. How old was she? Wow, that’s a really rude thing to ask, leave her alone already. But anyway, did they or didn’t they? It could just be a rumour spread by Subh’s enemies. Or was there even a three-way thing going on? Or a four-way thing including the books? We just don’t know, but in any case, why should only men get to sleep with their secretaries? Girls, we won’t have full equality until everyone’s sleeping with their hot male secretaries.

  Ibn Amir, as well as being a sexy side piece, was also ambitious. Like career girls in every film that has ever been made about career girls, he wanted to work his way to the top, and that he did, becoming hajib, or chief advis
er. Meanwhile Subh had managed to change the laws of succession to ensure her son Hicham, who was either nine or eleven when al-Hakam died (it’s rude to ask) would become the next caliph instead of al-Hakam’s brother, and she could rule as his regent while he was still a child. Subh ruled publically, and not behind the scenes from the harem. The young Hicham, ever his father’s son, was also a nerd, so Subh and Ibn Amir encouraged his nerdiness and his study of mystical religious things, all the better to carry on ruling Cordoba themselves.

  But soon enough, things got sticky between Subh and her side boo, Ibn Amir, as these things always do. He wanted to break the glass ceiling that had so long held back male secretaries, and rule the empire himself. The power struggle between the two colleagues and/or tumultuous lovers reached a fever pitch. Ibn Amir convinced Hicham to sign a document which said ‘I’m just a little nerdy nobody, I can’t rule a thing!’ or thereabouts, and assumed power himself. It was the first time in the Islamic world that a non-caliph ruled, (though not in the sense of being totally awesome.) Subh had kind of set a precedent for this, by normalising her role as regent. What I’m saying is, don’t trust hot men.

  After ruling Cordoba for two decades until her boo betrayed her, Subh disappeared from political life, and spent her later years much the same way many old ladies do, commissioning large infrastructure projects. She directed the construction of bridges and mosques and hospitals and more. In the end, she died in 999, probably looking great for her age, whatever that was.

  7

  Hildegard von Bingen

  1098–1179

  Hildegard von Bingen was a 12th-century polymath, composer, and dirty nun. OK she was actually very religiously conservative and really into virginity and all that, but everybody loves a naughty nun, and she at least wrote some dirty things, so let’s start with her description of the female orgasm: