100 Nasty Women of History

by Hannah Jewell

  Soon after graduating, Laura took a job at the St Louis Republican, which is not a man who lives in Missouri and supports limited government, but rather, a newspaper. The Republican sent her to DC to write on the Civil War and the politics and personalities of the day. She wrote under the pen name Howard Glyndon, perhaps to conceal her gender, perhaps to separate her reporting from past pro-Union editorials she had written in the name of reporting neutrality, or perhaps because Howard Glyndon is such a beautiful name.

  In fact, when a rival, Southern-supporting newspaper reporter decided to ‘out’ Howard Glyndon as not a strong, strapping man, but a young deaf woman, people didn’t really care. It just made her and Howard more famous. In fact, she became so famous that her poetry and reporting were read all over the country, and some guy in Minnesota founded the town of Glyndon in Howard’s honour in 1872. It would be at the point of towns being named after you that you might start to regret going by a pen name. She would publish her later books under the byline HOWARD GLYNDON with (Laura C. Redden), her maiden name, underneath it in smaller, parenthetical text. It is unknown whether residents of Glyndon, Minnesota today refer to their town as Glyndon Parentheses Laura C. Redden, Minnesota.

  At the time, there were no colleges for deaf women, so after the war Laura went to Europe and taught herself German, French, Spanish, and Italian, as you do. She got a job as the Europe correspondent for The New York Times, and later went on to other publications such as Harper’s magazine. She published books on politics as well as her poetry collections, and received fan letters from all over the country. She ended up, as everyone should, retired in California, her incredible career behind her, presumably trying to forget she ever hung out with John Wilkes Booth.

  34

  Gabriela Brimmer

  1947–2000

  Gabriela Brimmer, or Gaby for short, was born in 1947 in Mexico City, only a few years before my mother, who will take issue with the fact that someone born in 1947 could be in a history book. Sorry, Mum, that’s just how time works!

  Gaby’s parents had come to Mexico from Austria as Jewish refugees in the 1930s. Gaby was born with severe cerebral palsy, which prevented her from being able to speak. The only part of her body she could really use was her left foot. But with the help of her lifelong caretaker, Florencia Sanchez Morales, she learned to communicate by using her toe to point to letters on an alphabet board at her feet, and type on a typewriter. Gaby not only learned to write, but learned to write better than, well, most people.

  Gaby started her education at an elementary school for children with disabilities, but her mother Sari fought to convince the local public school that Gaby’s disability had nothing to do with her intellectual abilities. Sari shared her daughter’s poetry with the school officials, and after she passed the entry examinations, the school eventually had to accept Gaby. Doctors had told Sari that Gaby would not live past the age of ten, but not only did she outdo her able-bodied classmates in high school, but went on to attend the elite National Autonomous University in Mexico City to study Social and Political Sciences. After that, she became a journalist and a bestselling author, and launched a disability rights movement in Mexico. Wherever people doubted her intelligence due to her cerebral palsy, she would shut them down with a quick quip. In her 1980 autobiography, co-written with celebrated French-Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, we get a bit of Gaby’s take on her university days:

  Okay. I enrolled in the U.N.A.M. Fuckers! The teachers just as much as us, the students. So many courses that could have been useful but that weren’t in the least because in some of them the teachers were afraid to engage in interesting political discussions, and in the others all anybody talked about was theory. Why the hell do we – the students – have a mouth or any thoughts?

  Gaby wrote poetry her whole life – on her typewriter nicknamed ‘Che’ for Che Guevara – sometimes inspired, as so many of us are, by her angst about boys. Here she is in a poem complaining (lovingly) that one of her gentlemen friends was far too much of a whiner:

  Beloved, hate me, respect me,

  but be yourself through and through.

  Accept for once

  that life is harsh but beautiful

  and that the sun is shining

  for you.

  Her autobiography was so successful that it launched her to stardom in Mexico, and was the subject of the 1987 film Gaby – A True Story, which details her rise to becoming a published writer, and all the flirty glances that happened along the way. The film centres on the relationship between Gaby and her lifelong caretaker Florencia, an indigenous Mexican woman who accompanied Gaby throughout all her schooling, carrying her up and down stairs at the university and interpreting her speech in lectures. When Gaby eventually adopted a daughter, Florencia looked after her as well. Florencia enabled Gaby to fulfil her dream of having a child to break the quiet monotony of adult life. ‘Silence is what adults do, and we adults are boring,’ she wrote in her autobiography.

  Gaby became a celebrity in Mexico thanks to her writing and the film about her life, and today schools and streets are named after her in Mexico City. She founded the organisation Adepam, an acronym for Asociación para los Derechos de Personas con Alteraciones Motoras, or Association for the Rights of People with Motor Disabilities, in order to work towards the rights of disabled people in three main areas, as detailed in her autobiography:

  We shouldn’t be isolated or marginalized from the ‘normal’ world.

  Sources of work should be opened up for us so we can be financially independent, at least partly.

  The issue of cerebral palsy should be publicized, so we can demand our rights from the authorities, like any other citizen can.

  Gaby died in 2000 at the age of 52, having achieved so many of the dreams she wrote about as a girl, including her wish to have ‘a book come out about this cruddy life I’ve managed to lead,’ as she put it in her autobiography. ‘Then people will see what a human being whose body practically doesn’t function at all can do, somebody who is left only with a brain and her left foot to more or less live or survive in this crazy society that marginalises anyone who can’t “produce” scalable items for someone else to consume for no reason at all.’

  Here are the finishing lines of one more poem of Gaby’s to end on:

  What do you know of yourself?

  I only know one thing

  but I know it well.

  What?

  I am alive.

  Women who wrote dangerous things*

  *according to terrible men

  35

  Murasaki Shikibu

  c. AD 978–1014

  Murasaki Shikibu was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 978. She wrote The Tale of Genji at the start of the 11th century, which at over 1,000 pages in its English translation is considered the oldest full-length novel in the world. So let’s start out by thanking Murasaki for inventing the novel, without which, we would have nothing to do at the beach but try and get the sand out of our ears. The Tale of Genji was popular at the time, but became even more widely read with the advent of woodblock printing in the 17th and 18th centuries. The story is filled with romance and intrigue, which has caused Murasaki to be the subject of much moral agonising over the years. Some in the 17th century thought she must have been a chaste and devout woman and that the book was a criticism of romance and intrigue, while others thought she was a harlot and would go to hell for writing it. Some people just need to chill and enjoy a bit of romance and intrigue.

  Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji while a lady-in-waiting at the Japanese court. The story goes that the Emperor’s daughter was bored of everything she had to read, and gave Murasaki a royal order to write something magnificent, and so she retired to the Ishiyama temple and did. She understood Chinese as well as Japanese, which was unusual for a woman, and she incorporates this knowledge throughout the 54 chapters of the book which follow the main character, Genji – a courtier, a lover, and an absolute lad – through
his many romantic conquests.

  It’s possible that Murasaki joined the court when her husband died after just two years of marriage, having been presented with the option to either remarry or to join the women-only literary salon of the empress. What would you choose?

  Here’s how Murasaki was described by some clearly unloved man writing about her in 1658:

  At the time of Emperor Ichijo there was an attendant lady to Jotomon’in named Murasaki Shikibu, who was an intelligent woman. Her figure was extraordinarily beautiful, like a willow swaying in the wind … Her lips like a lotus flower, her breasts were [as if] bejewelled. Her figure was as beautiful as the plum and cherry blossoms spilling over in the sunset.

  Why are men like this? Why could he not just stop after ‘an intelligent woman’? Alas.

  36

  Ulayya bint al-Mahdi

  c. AD 777–825

  Even when not a lot is known about a woman in history, we should still honour her as best we can, especially if she wrote torrid love poetry. There are too many Arab women love poets to include them all, but I want to give a special shout-out to one anonymous poet who wrote this instruction to straight men everywhere for all time:

  You don’t satisfy a girl with presents and flirting, unless knees bang against knees and his locks into hers with a flushing thrust.

  Oh my!

  Or how about Dahna bint Mas-hal, from the 7th century, who complained to the governor (as you do) that her poet husband had not touched her or consummated their marriage, then chided her husband for his few feeble attempts at affection:

  Lay off, you can’t turn me on with a cuddle, a kiss or scent.

  Only a thrust rocks out my strains until the ring on my toe falls in my sleeve and my blues fly away.

  Ohhhh my!

  Here’s the 12th-century poet Safiyya al-Baghadiyya, writing about her own hot bod:

  I am the wonder of the world, the ravisher of hearts and minds.

  Once you’ve seen my stunning looks, you’re a fallen man.

  Yesss, Safiyya!

  Or finally this woman, known only as Juhaifa Addibabiyya, who made this complaint about her garbage husband:

  What a man you gave me, Lord of all givers.

  He’s a nasty old lump of wrinkles with shrivelled finger bones and a bent back like a croaking crow.

  What a sick burn. And it rhymes in Arabic!

  Anyway, this brings us to Ulayya bint al-Mahdi, about whom only a bit is known. She lived from 777 to 825, and was the daughter of al-Mahdi, the third Abbasid Caliph to rule the Islamic world from the empire’s seat in Baghdad. She was a singer and composer, like her mother before her, as well as a poet, and was brought up by her brother the Caliph Harun Arrashid after her father died when she was young. Her brother fostered her love of music and singing and poetry, but was less keen on the way she would brazenly identify her lovers in her poems, and so he asked her to be a bit more tactful by swapping their names for women’s.

  In one such poem, she wrote:

  Lord, it’s not a crime to long for Raib who strokes my heart with love and makes me cry.

  Lord of the Unknown, I have hidden the name I desire in a poem like a treasure in a pocket.

  And in another one:

  I held back my love’s name and kept on repeating it to myself.

  Oh how I long for an empty space to call out the name I love.

  Eventually her brother got over it and let her just name her lovers to her heart’s content. You apparently can’t keep a lover’s name from a poet forever. When her brother died, Ulayya was devastated and swore off wine and music in her grief, until, that is, her nephew Caliph Amin came to power and missed having her music at his parties, and so she returned to poetic courtly life.

  OK, one more from Ulayya before we go. But don’t forget that for every cool woman we do know about in history, even just a little bit, there were countless more women out there whom we’ll never know, but who did cool things and wrote lusty poetry.

  Love thrives on playing hard to get, or else it wears off.

  A bit of unmixed love is better than a cocktail.

  37

  Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

  c. 1651–1695

  As every woman knows, one of the most offensive things a young lady can do is be cleverer than the men around her. This was the crime that the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés committed in the 17th century in Mexico City. How dare she garner acclaim for her genius in Spain and the New World, and critique such little things as the church and the status of women? How could she be so selfish as to produce brilliant literary works when the men were just trying to get on with the Spanish Inquisition? It’s no wonder members of the clergy had to give her the sad news that her literary work was causing natural disasters. Sorry, Sister Juana. That’s just science.

  When the Spanish first arrived in what is now Mexico in the early 1500s, they found a thriving and educated civilisation. Naturally, they looked upon it and thought, ‘this won’t do at all,’ and set about destroying the native populations with that classic European combination of slavery, disease, rape, and starvation. Sor Juana was born in Mexico in 1651. She was a Creole – a Spaniard born in the New World – and also a mestiza, a person of mixed Spanish and indigenous heritage. She was of a privileged class in the hierarchical culture of New Spain, but not wealthy. Her mother, who never married her father, had earned the respect of her community by succeeding in the business of managing haciendas, but by the time Sor Juana was of age, there was no respectable route for a single woman of her class other than marriage or joining a convent. After a period of time chilling in court as a lady-in-waiting, she chose the convent.

  While becoming a nun may not seem like a glamorous choice, the convent in Sor Juana’s time was basically a woman-run charitable institution and business with considerable autonomy from the church. Like a sorority with less matching minidress photo shoots and a lot more God. Juana ended up in the convent of San Jeronimo and Santa Paula, a posh convent where she had the time and space to study and build up the largest known library in all of Spanish America. Plus, as a bride of Christ, she didn’t have to marry an IRL man, who as we all know, can be terrible.

  But no amount of female autonomy in Sor Juana’s day could fully escape the watchful eye of that great exercise in male foolishness, the Spanish Inquisition. To the church in the 17th century, if you didn’t fit a very limited and very confined definition of womanhood, you were probably a witch. Seventy-five per cent of those investigated and/or killed by the Inquisition in Spanish America were women, because women are well known to be witchier than men. If you didn’t listen to the men around you and follow the strict religious commands of the clergy, you were probably a witch. If you became a celebrated poet and writer and philosopher, you were definitely going to make men suspicious. Sor Juana was all of these things, and so of course, was publically denounced by a handful of shitty clerics who thought that if she was not a witch she was at the very least a ~scandal~ of the church.

  To be clear: she wasn’t running around naked, having wild affairs, smoking cigarettes and getting wasted in the middle of Mexico City (as far as we know). In fact, she was very religious. Sor Juana believed that to be a good Christian and true to Jesus’s word, you had to not be an asshole. And fine, she may have written a bit of erotic poetry, but really, who hasn’t? No, what made her so ~scandalous~ was her audacity to write publicly about secular subjects like philosophy and science. And so the clerics naturally thought: Oh no, she likes science, she must be a witch!

  It hadn’t always been this way between the church and Juana. Juana was born in either 1648 or 1651, and for a time, she was a treasure of the church. She was a brilliant child who wanted to go to school so much that when she was only three she followed her sister to school one day, and lied to the teacher and said that her mother had let her. Knowing she was making this up, but thinking she was pretty cute, the teacher gave her lessons anyway, and little Juana had learned to read
before her mother even worked out what was happening. She went on to write carols and other religious writings that won her a prize from the church. As a young adult, Juana couldn’t go to university because of her gender, so she set about educating herself instead. When she decided to marry Christ instead of some trash man, it was seen as quite the ‘get’ for the church. But it wouldn’t be long before she began to make the religious establishment uncomfortable with her scandalous opinion-having.

  From the comfort of her Goddy sorority, Sor Juana continued to write poems and plays and satires and treatises and more. She took to criticising the behaviour of clerics, challenging the idea that clerics were equal to God in their status, and believed that all individuals could have a relationship with God. She reinterpreted doctrine that she found sexist so that it would suit better her understanding of the equality of women before God. She also argued that women were not, in fact, intellectually inferior to men – another thing some people still haven’t grasped in our current chaotic times. She wrote canticles (hymns) dedicated to great women of history like St Catherine of Alexandria. Perhaps best of all, she wrote a famous poem entitled Hombres Necios – ‘Foolish Men’, which was about how foolish men are. In a response to her public denunciation, she even wrote that though Jesus was a man, it was also ignorant men who were responsible for his death, just as ignorant men now pursued her unjustly, which is a pretty sick burn, tbh. ‘Oh, how many abuses could be avoided in this land if only the women were as well instructed,’ she wrote.