Historical Heroines

by Historical Heroines- 100 Women You Should Know About (retail) (epub)

  Two survivors were found with a rather shoddy boat but the Amazon was not hospitable, and one of the guides drowned when he reached out to grab a hat. The rising waters meant they had to abandon ship leaving them to the mercy of poisonous snakes, wild animals and mosquitoes. Joaquin was sent to look for help.

  As they languished, Isabel’s young nephew died from infected bites followed quickly by the maids and her brothers. Another maid wandered into the rainforest never to be seen again. As Isabel drifted into a diseased sleep, her companions died around her. When she awoke, probably delirious she cut her brother’s shoes off his feet and made them into sandals before attempting to carry on through the jungle.

  She was eventually discovered nine days later by some tribal people wandering half-naked save for a ripped shawl or shirt and the sandals. She was delirious and ill and barely knew which way was up. She tried to reward the indigenous rescuers with her gold necklaces but the Christian missionaries took them – another stunning act of mercenary betrayal.

  Finally in July 1770 they took her to the ship that had been waiting in Cayenne for years and she came face to face with Jean again. They lived the rest of their lives in France and died within months of each other in 1792, as the greatest lovers so often do.

  Isabella of France, Queen of England (1295–1358)

  Wow. Where to start. Let’s just say that Isabella didn’t have an easy time of it.

  For daring to stand up for herself, to challenge the status quo, to assert herself and not simply be, as was expected, a wife, mother and queen, she was labelled as a she-wolf. A ravenous, ruthless, rapacious, violent animal. Granted, she did facilitate the murder of her husband in favour of her son. But still. Let’s not be picky.

  Such name-calling is a systematic pattern in history, repeated for any woman daring to stand up to the status quo. If not labelled a wolf, then perhaps a witch or maybe a whore. Tough choice. (A quick suggestion when learning about Isabella, don’t take ‘Braveheart’ literally.)

  Anyhow. Marital bliss is always going to be a challenge when your husband prefers the company of men. As we know from recent royal precedent, three in marriage can make things terribly crowded. Although, to be fair, let’s remember that Isabella of France, or Isabella the Fair, was only 12 on 25 January 1308 when she was handed over in a long-standing arranged marriage to the 23-year-old King Edward II of England.

  Daughter of Jeanne of Navarre and Philip IV of France, Isabella’s wedding in Boulogne was full of pomp and circumstance but it was downhill very quickly after that. Edward decided to favour his lover and knight-of-his-life Piers Gaveston with all his attention. He made him Earl of Cornwall, married him to his own niece to ensure he remained in the royal sphere and, as legend has it, gave him jewellery from Isabella’s own wedding dowry.

  To compound things even further, Isabella and Edward’s coronation was a mess. The newly crowned queen was completely upstaged by Gaveston, who not only carried the coronation crown and made a pig’s-ear of organising the event but had his own coat of arms entwined with the king’s in the celebratory tapestries. Ouch.

  Isabella might have been young, but knew enough to know that she was being usurped. Still, the truth is indeed often stranger than fiction. She remained loyal to her husband. It’s not a simple black-and-white case of Isabella hated Edward. The few existing letters between them demonstrate a very real affection, with Isabella calling him ‘my very sweet heart’ or ‘mon tresdoutz coer’.

  Edward III, their first child, was born on 13 November 1312. They had three others, John, Eleanor and Joan. Later on in their marriage, after Gaveston had been killed by barons enraged by his arrogant behaviour over the years, from lording it over them to seizing their lands, Edward moved onto a new favourite, Hugh le Depenser the Younger. Hugh made Gaveston look like Mary Poppins in comparison. And a woman can only take so much.

  In 1325 Isabella had travelled to France to help secure a peace treaty and settle the conflict between Edward and her brother Charles IV of France. Firmly under Hugh’s thumb, Edward had confiscated her lands. Sometime later in that year Isabella decided to stay put in France, with their son, the young Prince of Wales. This was an outrage. But she’d had enough and wasn’t going back to England.

  Edward II dug his Louboutin heels in and refused to get rid of Dispenser. So Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, Baron Wigmore, one of Edward’s own generals, took up arms and invaded England, where she had her revenge. Hanged, drawn and quartered, Le Despenser met his grisly and gruesome end on 24 November 1326.

  Captured and imprisoned, it was too dangerous for Edward to be left alive. He was murdered at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Edward was held down and a hot rod forced up his posterior via a cow’s horn, essentially burning out all of his internal organs. A calming colonic it was not. (However recent research does suggest that this famous story might not be true, that the murder was faked and Edward escaped.)

  Hot rod or not, Isabella installed her teenage son, Edward III, in his father’s place, making herself and Mortimer regents until 1330. Ruthlessness clearly ran in the family and the son was smarter than the father; just three years later Edward III executed Mortimer and banished his mother for life.

  Dying at the age of 62, Isabella was buried at Greyfriars church in London, wearing the same sumptuous red cloak she had been married in, clasping the casket bearing the heart of the husband and king she had deposed.

  Dr James Barry (1790s–25 July 1865)

  Dr James Barry was born in Ireland as Margaret Ann Bulkley, daughter to Mary-Ann and greengrocer Jeremiah. Determined to pursue a medical career, her life changed after her father was imprisoned for debt in 1803. Taken in and helped by her uncle, artist James Barry, whose name she assumed, she lived her life as a man, sailing from London to Edinburgh in 1809 to earn a degree at the city’s medical school.

  She had the full support of her mother in her endeavour, who took on the charade of ‘aunt’ to her ‘nephew’. Her disguise, only revealed on her death, actually makes Dr James Barry the first woman in Britain to practise medicine, albeit one disguised as a man, perhaps illustrating the extraordinary lengths women were prepared to go to – had to – in order to achieve their ambition.

  Dr Barry joined the British army in 1813 and became the Surgeon General, serving in India and South Africa. Not one to rest on her laurels, she was also Inspector-General of Hospitals in Canada, as well as serving in Corfu, the Crimea, Mauritius, Jamaica and St Helena. She was posted to South Africa in 1816, became closely acquainted with its governor Lord Charles Somerset and mysteriously disappeared for a full year, around 1819. This is when some historians believe she gave birth to a presumably stillborn child, before returning to South Africa, where she is credited as being the first British surgeon to perform a Caesarean section in Africa where both mother and child survived the procedure.

  Her true gender was uncovered after her death from dysentery on 25 July 1865. Housemaid Sophia Bishop, tasked with preparing the body for burial, disregarded the deceased’s last wishes NOT to undress the body and made her startling discovery.

  Such was the incredulity at the news that the British army sealed all related records for a century. Whether it was because of the scandal of her fooling the Establishment for so many years or the shock that a mere woman had scaled such incredible career heights, is for you to decide. The likelihood of her having conceived a child was given further weight by the fact that the body bore stretch marks, obviously associated with pregnancy and childbirth.

  Dr James fought a duel with pistols, was known to speak her mind and got into a war of words with Florence Nightingale, who later wrote of the altercation:

  I never had such a blackguard rating in all my life – I who have had more than any woman – than from this Barry sitting on his horse, while I was crossing the Hospital Square with only my cap on in the sun. He kept me standing in the midst of quite a crowd of soldiers, Commissariat, servants, camp followers, etc., etc., every
one of whom behaved like a gentleman during the scolding I received while he behaved like a brute … After he was dead, I was told that (Barry) was a woman … I should say that (Barry) was the most hardened creature I ever met.

  Rather ironic, considering they were both passionate about health reform in their own way. Dr James also acquiesced to a request from Napoleon to treat the son of his private secretary.

  She is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery under the name of James.

  Jeanie Cameron of Glendessary, West Highlands (1695?–1773? or 1724?–1786?)

  Anyone interested in the alleged lover of Bonnie Prince Charlie, famous for leading the Jacobite rebellions against the English in 1745–6, will discover there are a few Jeanie (or Jennie) Camerons lurking in the pages of history – her story having a nasty case of multiple personality disorder. As the name Jean Cameron is as popular as mince and tatties in Scotland, these mistaken identities are not so surprising.

  James Ray, an English historian who followed the Jacobite army in 1745 to their eventual defeat at Culloden, wrote an account of the rebellion. In his work (of fiction?) A Compleat History of the Rebellion he waxes lyrical about Jeanie in a tale so saucy and scandalous it would have made Jackie Collins blush.

  It’s probable that Mr Ray had been influenced by a Grub Street novel and other tabloid articles. Perhaps, bored by the fighting and bloodshed, the press had leapt upon the news that Miss Cameron had brought 300 Cameron men to support the Jacobites as proof of a scurrilous love affair and shocking behaviour.

  James Ray took these stories and gave them the veneer of respectable academia in his history book. Here Jeanie’s life is far from boring. Apparently blessed with the look of a slut, what was a girl to do except run wild and engage in several affairs with unsuitable men. Like a Hollywood brat, she was indulged and spoilt by her doting father only to repay him by falling pregnant with a footman’s baby. This was either forcibly aborted or miscarried and to prevent the Cameron good name sinking into the Highland bogs, she was told to ‘get thee to a nunnery’.

  The nuns were no match for her excessive sexual appetite and she was impregnated ‘by the Church’, and the baby was aborted through the supernatural hands of her dead father. She is then credited with further trysts including an incestuous interlude with her brother that sends his wife to an early grave, before encountering her bonnie prince. A true Scots telenovela.

  Following her brother’s death, she inherited guardianship of her nephew and his estate. It is she who replaces her nephew to join the king’s men. She then brazenly approaches Charles declaring that she was manly enough to fight by his side. If Charles was charmed and delighted by her, he soon forgot her when he fled from Falkirk and she ended up in an Edinburgh dungeon. And it is here the story splits personality. Official records show that a Jean Cameron was indeed caught and interred at the castle’s pleasure as evidenced by official records. So when the leader of the English troops, the Duke of Chamberlain, reads a list of prisoners he lends his authority to the idea of the fighting dervish Jeanie Cameron by writing to the Duke of Newcastle proclaiming her capture.

  And to ape Chaucer here begins the story of the milliner. Richard Griffith who was also arrested at Stirling claimed this Jean was actually a milliner from Edinburgh, mistakenly identified as the Scarlett Jean. Apparently her time in the dungeon worked out in her favour as all the Edinburgh ladies stampeded her shop when she was released hoping for some scurrilous gossip about the prince. Further stories rose from this phoenix’s fire suggesting the milliner’s shop was a front for Jacobite espionage. You couldn’t make it up … oh, wait, yes you could.

  And as the Cameron house of cards comes tumbling down further sources claim she was nearly 50, so clearly too old and decrepit for the Young Pretender Charles, and that she never joined his troops at all. No toy boys for Jeanie then.

  In most accounts those Jeanies all fell on hard times, reduced to begging and a pauper’s death. A more likely version suggests that the real Jeanie Cameron did indeed support the Stuarts and was at that fated Glenfinnan ceremony, but she left and returned home. Rather instead of fighting fiercely at their side, she presented the Jacobites with some cattle to sustain them. She then had to retreat to East Kilbride where she lived out the rest of her days as a respectable and well-bred lady.

  Jezebel, Queen of Israel (9th Century BC)

  Calling someone a ‘Jezebel’ isn’t a compliment. Even today the meaning inherent in the name of this Phoenician princess echoes through the ages, denoting wanton, lascivious, man-eating, murdering mayhem. (Although, if you check, there are magazines and perfumes named in her honour.)

  Was Jezebel as bad as all that? Or was she written that way as a stark warning to other women to not outstep the traditional, male-dominated bounds of their lives?

  Jezebel’s notorious story is depicted in the Book of Kings. Married off to King Ahab of Israel as part of a political alliance, it’s a fair assumption that she has a reputation of biblical proportions. And in contrast to other women of the Book, she is given a powerful voice. She speaks. She schemes. She raves. She trades insults with her enemies.

  She’s depicted as a wanton, scheming, heartless seductress and prostitute. And those are just the good points. But women with any sense of independence or sexuality were depicted as such. As were any women who worshipped false gods or idols. Or those who meddled in political affairs – no place for a woman. (They didn’t call it the time of the Patriarchs for nothing.) Then there’s any biased agenda that the writers of the Bible stories might have had. And there’s no mention of her straying sexually from her husband either. That said, without doubt she was ruthless, as tough as nails and had a lot of blood on her hands.

  The daughter of King Ethbaal of Tyre, she attempted to wipe out the Jewish religion, murder its priests and install her own faith, worship of Baal, the pagan god of fertility. Upon her marriage to King Ahab she brought with her hundreds of her own priests and attempted to convert her husband. Their idolatrous behaviour proved anathema to the Jewish priest Elijah. He called for a competition between the two gods on Mount Carmel: whichever deity could create fire to destroy a sacrificial bull would be known as the true God. The Jewish monotheistic God won – and Elijah went on to slaughter hundreds of Baal priests. Jezebel is incandescent with rage and threatens to kill him. Elijah, in no uncertain terms, legs it.

  Her husband decided he wanted a plot of land adjacent to the royal palace for a garden. The only problem was that it belonged to someone else, a landowner called Naboth, who refused to give it to the king. So the king sulked. He had a proper bottom-lip-quivering, pouty sulk. And Jezebel isn’t happy. So she does what any loving wife would in the face of such a crisis; she schemes, forging Ahab’s signature on royal proclamations, and has Naboth falsely accused of treason by the people of the village. He is duly stoned to death and Jezebel triumphantly claims the land for Ahab, having stamped down hard on this little episode of rebellion.

  Elijah comes back to the story and in true prophetic style, predicts that Jezebel will be ravaged by a pack of wild dogs. In short order, the king dies, their first son follows suit and their second son Joram takes the throne, only to be challenged and murdered by his own military commander Jehu.

  Jehu proceeds to pursue Jezebel, intent on killing her too. But she doesn’t run. Quite the opposite. She waits at her bedroom window, beautifully dressed, kohl make-up artfully applied to her eyes and her hair adorned. The defiant last act of a queen facing certain death or the panicked actions of a femme fatale desperate to use her feminine charms to change her murderer’s mind?

  It’s a moot point, as her eunuchs throw her out of the window and her body is eaten by wild dogs. Hers is a cautionary tale indeed to other women tempted to follow in her footsteps, rule their husbands or have an opinion that goes against the traditional, monotheistic and patriarchal belief system.

  Kalpana Chawla (1 July 1961–1 February 2003)

  Kalpana means ‘imagination’;
born and raised in Karnal, Haryana, India, Kalpana’s story is both inspirational and tragic, of an incredible life of achievement cut short far too soon.

  The youngest of four children and the first Indian-born woman in space, Kalpana (KC to her friends) died alongside her six team members on the space shuttle Columbia as it exploded on re-entry to earth in 2003. She was only the second Indian person in space.

  Passionate about science and space and inspired by India’s first pilot, J.R.D. Tata, she completed a course in aeronautical engineering at Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh, before moving to the US in 1982. What follows is an unbelievable list of academic achievements: a Master of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas and a doctorate in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado, topped off with a PhD, all before marrying Jean Pierre Harrison in 1988, the same year she started work at NASA. She became a naturalised citizen in April 1991 and joined the NASA Astronaut Corps in March 1995.

  In 1997, on board the space shuttle Columbia, she was responsible for the Spartan Satellite. Her second and final mission was also on board the STS 107 Columbia; the launch was delayed several times before finally taking off in 2003. The crew spent sixteen days in space, conducting scientific research and experiments.

  The shuttle was due to land at Kennedy Space Centre on 1 February, but due to a briefcase-sized piece of the wing breaking off at launch it was unable to protect itself from the immense heat of re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. NASA decided against telling the crew of the imminent danger of re-entry. All seven (Commander Rick D. Husband, Pilot William C. McCool, Payload Commander Michael P. Anderson, Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut, Mission Specialists David M. Brown and Laurel B. Clark) died as the shuttle de-pressurised and disintegrated over Texas.