100 Nasty Women of History Page 6

  Where are the lady pirates in our children’s stories? Where are the strong, empowered lady pirates who don’t need no man pirates?

  We need more lady pirates.

  We need to take to the seas.

  GIRLS, STUDY YOUR NAVIGATION, IT IS TIME TO TAKE TO THE SEAS.

  Why don’t we know that the most successful pirate in history was a woman? Why when we think of pirates do we dress up as goddamn Johnny ass Depp instead of ass-kicking, cool-ass bitch Ching Shih? I’m livid. These are questions someone must answer post-haste.

  That’s what you need to know about Ching Shih.

  Women who were geniuses despite the fact that they were girls

  (everyone knows that girls can’t be geniuses)

  20

  Hypatia

  c. AD 355–415

  Hypatia lived thousands of years before Internet trolls existed, so sadly nobody ever informed her that actually girls are really bad at maths because their brains are too frilly and emotional, and also that she was an ugly slut. And so, without this crucial warning, she became the greatest mathematician and astronomer of her time.

  Hypatia was born in 355 AD in Alexandria, Egypt. She wrote on geometry and number theory, which I know nothing about because alas, I have been told my brain is too frilly and soft and strawberry-flavoured to ever understand such matters. Hypatia’s father was also a mathematician and astronomer, and the last known member of the Alexandrian Museum, that great institute of learning and scholars and pretty walkways that contained, once upon a time, the Library of Alexandria. Together, Hypatia and her father strived to preserve the work of ancient Greek nerds in these troubled times in Alexandria, as Christians, Jews and pagans battled over who God(s) liked best.

  Listen, we’re all mad about the Library of Alexandria burning down. How dare they! Those were good books. Someone should have at least thought to do a backup on the Kindle of Alexandria.10 Ancient people were so dumb!

  The library had been founded in 295 BC with the aim of collecting all the books in the world, just for the bants. While the main library with its hundreds of thousands of books was destroyed as a result of some Caesar fuckery in 48 BC, the library’s ‘overflow’ section with tens of thousands more was housed at the Serapeum temple until Hypatia’s time when some further fuckery abounded.

  In 385 AD Saint Theophilus was made bishop of Alexandria. He had apparently been a gifted student and scholar himself, but unfortunately he was also a bit of a silly twat. He was violently opposed to anybody not a Christian, and set about destroying all the non-Christian shrines of North Africa, with the blessing of the Roman emperor Theodosius II. To this end Theophilus razed the Serapeum in 391, a temple dedicated to the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, i.e. the wrong god, taking with it perhaps the last of the books that had been part of the legendary Library of Alexandria. Jesus would have been thrilled. He would have been like, ‘Yes, this is exactly what I was after, thanks man, here, be a saint.’

  Anyway that’s where all the books went. RIP centuries of human knowledge. If it weren’t for all the fuckery, we’d have teleportation by now, and you’d never have to pee in a plane toilet again, and worry when you flush it that you’ll get sucked out of the plane and tossed into the air at 30,000 feet with your pants round your ankles.

  If your job is to be a famous intellectual, it’s a pretty bad sign when the society you’re living in destroys all its books. But since Hypatia was so popular among her students, one of whom was mates with Theophilus ‘the dickhead’ himself, she was left alone for a while despite her pagan-ness and her uncouth interest in science. So she continued with her witchy, mathsy studies, her teaching, her philosophising, her flouncing about Alexandria being smarter than everyone, and, of course, Pilates twice a week. In the end, though, Christian zealots gonna Christian zealot, and Hypatia was brutally murdered by a Goddy gang under the reign of a new bishop, Cyril, who was an ignorant fuck.

  Jesus would have absolutely been on board with murdering a mathematician, the bloodthirsty guy. ‘Exactly what I meant!’ he would have said to the gang of Christian zealots. ‘Keep up the good work, see you boys in heaven!’

  21

  Fatima al-Fihri

  c. AD 800–880

  If you’re a fan of knowledge, medicine, numbers, education, or human progress, you should give thanks to a woman. (Surprise! Bet you didn’t see that coming.)

  Fatima al-Fihri lived in the 9th century. Her family moved from present-day Tunisia to Fez, in Morocco, a city of growing population, wealth and importance in the medieval Muslim world. Her father was a wealthy merchant, and when he died he left Fatima and her sister Mariam a large fortune. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a massive infrastructure project, and so the girls took it upon themselves to build up their city. Girls and their daddy’s money, amirite?

  Mariam commissioned the al-Andalus mosque, which still stands today in modern Fez. As one Tripadvisor reviewer DaveRuss said of this beautiful, ancient, still-operational mosque: ‘Don’t bother!’ Fatima, meanwhile, took it upon herself to found what is considered the oldest continuously operating university in the world, al-Qarawiyine, in 859.

  Now, there’s really not much more known about Fatima or her family. The details have been lost in the sands of time, like the details of so many women’s lives. But that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t get to take up space in a history book. Here, Fatima, have some space:

  [THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK IN HONOUR OF ANCIENT WOMEN WE DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT BUT WHO WERE DEFINITELY THERE AND DID COOL THINGS]

  While we don’t know enough about Fatima, we do know a lot about her university’s legacy. Al-Qarawiyine put Fez on the cultural map; it served to unify the knowledge of the Islamic world, and facilitated the exchange of knowledge between Europe, Africa, and Asia. In the centuries after its founding, poets, mathematicians, jurists, and all manner of nerds came from around the world to think scholarly thoughts at al-Qarawiyine.

  It was after studying at al-Qarawiyine that Pope Sylvester II brought Arabic numerals to Europe. What are Arabic numerals, you ask? They’re these bad boys: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9, i.e., numbers. It’s thanks to this transfer of knowledge that we’re not all sitting round trying to work out what MCMLVII means. Other Europeans not busy murdering each other in fields, a favourite medieval European pastime, travelled to al-Qarawiyine and brought back knowledge of astronomy and logic and medicine and translated them into Latin and other European languages. While Europeans forgot about science and focused their energies on drinking mead and shitting where they ate, centuries of learning were preserved and developed and disseminated from within the walls of al-Qarawiyine.

  And so pals, if you like stars and reason and living past the age of 30, this is why you should thank Fatima al-Fihri. Women invented knowledge. Women invented the entire world. If you disagree, please write down your complaint on a piece of paper, dip it in your tea and eat it.

  22

  Wáng Zhēnyí

  1768–1797

  Wáng Zhēnyí was the kind of girl who could make anybody feel like trash. It wasn’t her fault, she just lived a life devoted to learning and produced a nearly inconceivable amount of work from a very young age. It’s not her fault we’re all trash. Why can’t we just sit down and learn things and work hard? Why must we faff about and stare at our phones as the hours pass away and we drift ever closer to our deaths?

  But as I say, this is not Wang’s fault. She was born in 1768 and became one of the most famous scientists of the Qing dynasty of China. Her grandfather was an avid book collector, said to have 75 bookcases’ worth in his home, in what must have been a huge windfall for whatever the 18th-century Chinese version of IKEA was. When Wang’s grandfather died, her family went to his funeral and stuck around at his place for five years, giving Wang enough time to read as much of his library as she could. She learned horse riding and archery, and confessed she liked to ‘practis
e martial arts while galloping on horseback,’ which to this day remains the best way to arrive at your office on a Monday morning.

  It wasn’t long before Wang had made a name for herself as a top-notch scientist. She focused on natural science and astronomy, coming up with important explanations of lunar and solar eclipses, as well as equinoxes and the number of stars in the sky. (It’s loads.) She conducted experiments in her home proving that the Earth was round and recreated the movement of the planets and the sun, by using a lamp as the Sun, a table as the globe, and a mirror as the moon in order to observe their relative motion and relationship to each other. She advocated for the adoption of the Western calendar, which she liked for its centring of the Sun, or rather her lamp.

  In her free time she also wrote dozens of books, including 13 volumes of poetry and a series of mathematical textbooks whose aim was to make the basics available to a wider audience. Sometimes the simplest concepts can be the hardest to explain well, as I discovered when a kid once asked me to explain what numbers were. I couldn’t do it, so somewhere out there is a teenager who still doesn’t know what numbers are. Sorry!

  Wang was also fiercely opposed to traditional values that prevented women from receiving an education. She said that men and women ‘are all people, who have the same reason for studying,’ which of course we all know is putting off finding a real job, getting discounts on rail fares, and being able to sleep in most days. Why shouldn’t women get to be students, too?

  In one of her many poems of the classic ‘ci’ style, which adhere to strict patterns of meter and rhythm and numbers of characters, Wang asked the question:

  It’s made to believe

  Women are same as Men;

  Are you not convinced

  Daughters can also be heroic?

  Wang was only 29 when she died, having produced a mind-boggling amount of work. Most people haven’t even gotten out of bed by age 29. Shout-out to you, Wang, and thanks for making us all feel terrible.

  23

  Jang-geum

  15th–16th centuries AD

  Jang-geum was the first known woman doctor in Korean history, who lived in the early 16th century, a time when a woman studying medicine was totally unheard of, let alone a woman treating the king. I suppose if you’re the only one who can cure a man, they bend the rules. ‘Hmm, on the one hand I’m very ill and only you can save me. On the other, you seem to have a vagina. Whatever shall I do?’ Such a dilemma honestly.

  In her position as royal doctor, Jang-geum was apparently so important to the king that she rose to become the third-highest-ranking member of the Court. As with any cool woman in history, some cheeto dust-covered haters contend she didn’t exist, but non-cheeto dust-covered scholars point to multiple references to a ‘female doctor’ in the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, a great beach read written in the 16th century if anybody’s looking for one. In one such shout-out, the king Jung-jong, who ruled from 1506 to 1544, says that, ‘No one knows my illnesses as well as Jang-geum.’

  Thankfully, though, it only took this one line of reference to the doctor to inspire a top-rated Korean TV drama in 2003. The show Daejanggeum or Jewel in the Palace, which funnily enough was my nickname growing up, depicts the rise of Jang-geum from a lowly commoner to the person with the most intimate knowledge of the king and all his gross bodily ailments. The TV drama has brought Jang-geum back to life and transformed her into a household name in Korea.

  So girls, if you want to be remembered beyond your lifetime, learn the grossest secrets of someone in power, and make sure you get a mention in the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty.

  24

  Artemisia Gentileschi

  1593–c. 1653

  An extremely glamorous woman once remarked to me that wasn’t it a shame that whenever we talk about female artists, we only ever talk about Artemisia Gentileschi, and not all the other Baroque Italian female painters. Oh yes, I nodded in the manner of someone who could rattle off a Baroque Italian female painter for every letter of the alphabet. Yes, what a shame it is! Yet here we are, about to talk about her again. My apologies to all extremely glamorous women out there, but Artemisia is just so, so good. And I couldn’t be bothered to look up the others. But it’s nice to know there were loads of other Baroquettes, as they are known to no one.

  When Artemisia does get talked about, though, she is often described first and foremost as a victim of rape whose art apparently reflects a kind of fiery vengeance she held against men. When she was 17, Artemisia was raped by one of her father’s associates, who then tried to argue in a much-publicised trial that she had not been a virgin. He did this in order to damage her reputation, much in the same way that nothing can damage a person’s reputation like being stolen from or murdered. (How can we be so sure a murder victim hasn’t been murdered before?) Artemisia then went on to paint one of her most famous works, Judith Slaying Holofernes, which depicts a woman sawing off a man’s head. We shouldn’t assume this was a direct response to what had happened to her, however, because it would be ridiculous to assume that being raped is the only reason a woman would want to paint a man having his head thwacked off, or give special care to the blood splatters, as she did.

  The painting depicts a story from the sort-of-biblical Book of Judith in which old Judy herself murders an Assyrian general, who was about to destroy her hometown, after getting him drunk, which truly raises the question, how can we be sure that Holofernes didn’t want to be murdered? If he didn’t want to be murdered maybe he shouldn’t have drunk so much. Anyway if you compare Artemisia’s painting to the same scene painted by Caravaggio, he shows a very reluctant Judith who’s quite creeped out by the whole ordeal, which is exactly what a man would think – that Judith didn’t relish the splatters of blood. In Artemisia’s version, though, she’s just loving every minute of it. She’s getting the job done ’cause she’s a cool, calm professional lady with a task to complete, and nothing’s gonna get in her way, certainly not a river of hot, bubbling blood. In an age before action films could sate the bloodthirsty masses’ need for a bit of gore, Artemisia was merely giving the people what they wanted. And she was incredibly good at it.

  Artemisia was such a successful painter that she was able to live off the proceeds of her painting, every art student’s thwarted dream. And unlike the male painters of the day, who apparently never got to see boobs IRL, Artemisia painted real boobs in all their glory, swinging in the wind, not looking like small, hard bowls placed upside down on a table.

  Rather than thinking of Artemisia as a victim, we should think of her as a boss bitch who was one of the finest painters in Italy, man or woman. Even if she did want revenge, everyone knows that the best way to get it is to become rich and famous for your unrivalled talents, which she certainly did.

  25

  Raden Ajeng Kartini

  1879–1904

  Raden Ajeng Kartini was born on 21 April 1879 in Mayong, on the island of Java in Indonesia. Today, April 21st is celebrated in Indonesia as Kartini Day, which is your first hint that she’s kind of a big deal to Indonesians. Her family was aristocratic – ‘Raden Ajeng Kartini’ is like ‘Lady Kartini’ – and her father worked with the Dutch colonial government. However, Kartini utterly rejected the concept and practices of the Javanese aristocracy.

  ‘I think nothing is so ridiculous, nothing more silly than people who allow themselves to be honoured on the basis of their so-called “high birth”,’ she wrote to her pen pal, the Dutch feminist Stella Zeehandelaar. ‘What value is attached to being a count or a baron? I cannot with my simple mind comprehend it.’ (Girls: let’s incorporate ‘I cannot with my simple mind comprehend it’ into our day-to-day sarcasm.)

  From the age of 12, Kartini was kept inside her family compound for a full four years, as was demanded of a girl of her status upon reaching puberty. She was totally miserable, but spent the time reading and educating herself. From her childhood, Kartini was already shaking off expectations of high-born girls, especiall
y as she saw that certain traditions of the Javanese aristocracy such as polygamy and arranged marriage could be harmful to women. She wrote to Stella: ‘I was a “kuda kore”, a wild horse, because I rarely walked but constantly jumped and skipped about. And why else did they scold me? Because I often laughed out loud and unashamedly (!!!) bared my teeth.’ The exclamation marks are all hers: Kartini was simply not having it.

  But Kartini didn’t save all her scorn for her traditional upbringing. She also rejected Dutch colonialism and the racism upon which it was founded – though more so in her private letters than her public articles and statements: ‘Why is it that so many Hollanders find it unpleasant to converse with us in their own language?’ she asked Stella. ‘Oh, now I know, Dutch is too beautiful to be uttered by a brown mouth.’

  Kartini also believed that the way forward for Indonesians of all classes was progressive education. In 1903, Kartini wrote a memorandum to the Dutch colonial government titled ‘Educate the Javanese!’ advocating mass education and the education of women. She was a proper intellectual, and someone who didn’t let the confining circumstances of class and gender prevent her from lobbying the powers that be.

  Kartini did a lot in her life, as she acknowledged to Stella: ‘Sometimes I wish I had two sets of hands to be able to do everything I wish to do.’ One of the things Kartini advocated for was better medical care and midwifery – but she herself would die in childbirth in 1904, at the age of 25. Kartini’s writings, however, live far beyond her short life. Her ideas formed parts of platforms of future Indonesian nationalist movements, and her thinking on gender was far ahead of her time. She saw that the turn to nationalism would be accompanied by an uprising of women to demand their rights, much to the bother of men: ‘When the battle of emancipation of our men is in full flight,’ she wrote, ‘then the women will rise up. Poor men, what a lot you will have to put up with.’ Poor men indeed.