100 Nasty Women of History

by Hannah Jewell

  In Bulgaria and then back in France, Zabel found work with an Armenian newspaper and set about the grim task of documenting what was happening back at home, collecting testimonies of death marches, deportations and destruction from those Armenian refugees who had managed to escape. Zabel wrote under a male pseudonym, worried about the safety of her remaining family in Istanbul. She said in letters that the work nearly drove her to madness, yet without it, that history, however horrible, could have been lost. As it is, the Turkish government has to this day denied that the Armenian genocide took place, making such testimony all the more powerful.

  In 1932, Zabel was invited to become a lecturer at Yerevan State University in Armenia, which had by then become part of the USSR. She had high hopes for life in Armenia but once again, the relentless awfulness of history caught up with her. In 1934, Moscow hosted the first Soviet Writers Congress, which gathered writers from across the USSR, for the unofficial purpose of allowing Stalin to work out who needed to have an eye kept on them. Zabel attended, and despite her initial enthusiasm for the Soviet project, ended up on Stalin’s shit list. A few years later, when Stalin began to actively persecute Armenian literary figures, arresting writers as well as their families, Zabel was in danger again.

  Zabel was arrested and thrown in prison where she was not allowed to read books or newspapers or listen to the radio, and so instead she hosted prison literary salons in which she discussed French literature from memory, as you do. It is not known exactly when or where she died during her imprisonment, but she left behind her ten books, countless letters and articles, and of course the testimony she gathered of the genocide.

  For Zabel, writing was a deeply political act, and her novels dealt with women’s place in society among other injustices. ‘Literature is not an adornment or a pretty decoration,’ she explained, ‘but a mighty weapon or a means to struggle against all matters I consider unjust.’

  48

  Mirabal Sisters

  Patria Mercedes Mirabal Reyes 1924–1960

  Bélgica Adela Mirabal Reyes 1925–2014

  María Argentina Minerva Mirabal Reyes 1926–1960

  Antonia María Teresa Mirabal Reyes 1935–1960

  There were four Mirabal sisters, so this section really has four women, meaning this book actually has more than 100 women in it, which just goes to show that women can’t do maths. Minerva, Patria, and María Teresa Mirabal gave their lives in the fight against the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled officially and unofficially between 1930 and 1961. The fourth sister, Dedé, decided not to take part in their radical activities. If you would like to criticise her for this, please ensure you are living under a brutal dictatorship first.

  Trujillo, who had a stupid Hitler moustache and a fat, round head, had been an army cadet before becoming the commander-in-chief of the Dominican army, and eventually president. The US had occupied the DR between 1916 and 1924 in the name of ‘stability’, like how it recently occupied Iraq and Afghanistan and now they’re really stable. When Trujillo became president in 1930, the US liked him because he wasn’t a communist, and they thought he was, as the saying goes, strong and stable. What did stability under Trujillo look like? Kidnappings, disappearances, murders, rape. You know, all that stable stuff which is so preferable to … what was it again? Oh yes, communism.

  Trujillo’s reign was terrible for women. He would send ‘Beauty Scouts’ around the country to find women and invite them to his parties or, failing that, to kidnap them. Listen, if you have to send your underlings to find women, you’re doing it wrong, and also you’re a sexual predator.

  One day, the second-youngest and fiercest Mirabal sister, Minerva, was scouted and made to attend a party with Trujillo and her sisters. Trujillo propositioned her, and she refused his attentions. Trujillo, belonging to the school of thought that when you’re a star they let you do it, carried on creeping on her. So what did she do? Well, the legend goes that she slapped him in the face. And this wasn’t just any face: this was a face like a piece of old ham cut from a pig who hated his life. It was the face of a dictator who had killed people for less.

  Minerva and her sisters left that night, but Trujillo would imprison and torture their father in retaliation, and then spend the next decade trying to get revenge for the harm done to his ego. He had made an enemy of the Mirabal sisters for life.

  Minerva and her sisters enjoyed a comfortable middle-class upbringing, and were even allowed to attend university at a time when that wasn’t the done thing, because as we all know, when women go to university they get ideas about assassinating dictators and socialist revolution. Which are very un-stable things, which Minerva in particular would take a keen interest in.

  When Minerva returned for her second year of law school following the slappy party incident, she found she had been banned from classes unless she gave a speech about how great Trujillo was, which is the kind of petty thing only a man who looks like a crumpled, crusty sock would desire. She was eventually allowed to complete her courses – but was not allowed to practise law. Another time, when Minerva and her mother were staying at a hotel, they were locked in their room and told they would not be allowed out until Minerva agreed to sleep with Trujillo. Have you ever heard something more pathetic? But I guess that’s what you would expect from a man with a personality like an angry, horny weasel. Minerva and her mother escaped.

  Minerva had had enough, and so naturally began a movement to topple the dictator. María Teresa and her husband joined her quickly, and Patria joined after witnessing the June 14th massacre, when Dominican expatriates attempted to return to the island and take power but were all killed. Patria, who had been unsure about her little sisters’ activities, then knew she had to do whatever it took to free her country. ‘We cannot allow our children to grow up in this corrupt and tyrannical regime,’ she famously said. ‘We have to fight against it, and I am willing to give up everything, including my life, if necessary.’

  The women called their movement the Movement of the 14th of June in commemoration of the massacre, and the sisters’ code name was Las Mariposas – the butterflies. Together, they sat around the table at Patria’s house and planned sabotage actions and a plot to assassinate Trujillo with bombs at a cattle fair he was set to attend.

  Somewhere along the line, somebody was a snake and betrayed the plot to the authorities. The sisters were arrested and imprisoned. It wasn’t a good look for Trujillo to be holding the sisters, who were just simple innocent wives and mothers after all, so in time he released them, but continued to hold their husbands. He moved them to a remote prison, to lure the women into a trap. At the end of 1960, on their way to visit their husbands, the women were stopped in their car and beaten to death, their bodies dumped in their car and pushed off a cliff to make it appear to be an accident.

  People weren’t stupid, though. Of all the crimes Trujillo had committed over the decades, this was the one that roused the public consciousness against him and sealed his fate. Not even the US liked Trujillo any more, as stable as he may have been, which, to be perfectly clear, wasn’t stable at all. The death of Las Mariposas mobilised the rage of Dominican women, and in May 1961, Trujillo was assassinated in his car by a group of seven Dominican men. They did it with weapons supplied to them with CIA approval, as the US had finally changed its mind about supporting Trujillo’s murderous regime.

  Dedé, the surviving sister, took in the children of her lost sisters, and spent the rest of her life until her death in 2014 spreading their story. Some of the sisters’ children are now in government in the DR. In 1999, the UN commemorated the sisters by naming November 25th the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

  On this day each year, remember the butterflies.

  49

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  1759–1797

  There are two things to discuss when it comes to Mary Wollstonecraft: her brilliant philosophical mind, and the fact she shagged her way across
Europe. We’re going to start with her politics and philosophy, and then move on to the sex stuff, as God intended.

  Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, in 1759. She was from a middle-class family, but her awful abusive father drank away what money the family had, leaving Mary, her mother, and her six siblings in a precarious position. Mary was the second oldest, and her brother, Edward, was her mother’s favourite and was educated far beyond Mary’s few years of schooling. Mary was rightfully annoyed at her brother’s spoilt position, and the fact that she was considered troublesome for displaying the same qualities: ‘Such indeed is the force of prejudice that what was called spirit and wit in him,’ she wrote later, ‘was cruelly repressed as forwardness in me.’ Parents, do not cruelly repress the spirit and wit of your daughters! Just don’t.

  Mary and her sisters had to go to work to support themselves and their family, but the only occupations open to women at the time all sucked ass. You could be a teacher, you could be a governess and raise some rich person’s garbage children, or you could do needlework, and that was close to being it. Mary sucked at being a governess, as well as a teacher, and when she and her sister opened a girls’ school in Newington Green, London, it struggled and failed. Although nowadays the site of the school is a Pokéstop, so that’s good news at least.19 20

  Anyway, there was another way women could make money in the 18th century: writing. Mary got a job writing for the boringly-named periodical the Analytical Review about everything from travel to satire to politics. She published her first work in 1787, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, and was so pleased with herself that she wrote in a letter to her sister: ‘I hope you have not forgot that I am an Author.’ (I’m pretty sure these boasting rights are the only reason to write a book.) By the 1790s, she was the most famous female political writer in Europe, having shot to fame for her biting reply to the conservative writer Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. She critiqued his apologia for the French aristocracy who had had their asses handed to them in her Vindication of the Rights of Men. She was a fierce defender of the French Revolution, at least in its early years before things got more behead-y. She captured the mood of the time with optimistic spirit: ‘Reason has, at last, shown her captivating face … and it will be impossible for the dark hand of despotism again to obscure its radiance.’ Suddenly, Mary was more than the founder of a Pokéstop: she was one of the most important philosophers in a time absolutely crammed with important philosophers.

  Gather round now, and say it with me: WOMEN WERE THERE IN HISTORY! THEY DID THE THINGS MEN DID! THEY INVENTED THE WORLD! There is no reason you shouldn’t know about Mary Wollstonecraft, the way they teach you in high school about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine and all those other Enlightenment fuckers who were her friends and contemporaries, whose names you dutifully memorised the night before the test, and then forgot. You should have had to memorise and forget Mary Wollstonecraft, too. She deserves to be taught to bored 17-year-olds who are mostly thinking about boning each other but will at least retain a vague familiarity of her name moving on. This is what education is for. This is what Mary would have wanted. But no, of course we can’t teach children that women can be, and have been, leading intellectual figures. The girls might get ideas, and think that they, too, might be incredibly smart. It’d be chaos.

  Mary’s most important work was without a doubt A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Enlightenment thinkers were all about vindicating things. ‘The civilised women of the present century, with a few exceptions,’ she wrote, ‘are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.’ Mary Wollstonecraft would not have been a fan of reality television in the 21st century. Unless there was some kind of show where women pit their intellectual virtue against one another, and instead of winning a muscled man called Brooks, you win a tenured professorship. Someone please create this show. It can be called The Bachelorette of Arts.

  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was an international bestseller, with the wives of gentlemen passing it round and debating its ideas that, hey, maybe women are people, and if they appear ‘weak and wretched’ it is because society made them so. Not all women were fans of Mary’s critique of gender. One evangelical writer, Hannah More, explained in a letter why she had not read it: ‘There is something fantastic and absurd in the very title … there is no animal so much indebted to subordination for its good behaviour as woman.’ Good one, Hannah!

  Other detractors decried Mary’s appearance, because as we all know, how you do your hair determines whether you’re a good writer or not. Mary would wear plain, unfashionable clothes with her hair loose around her shoulders, leading some to call her a ‘philosophical sloven’, which would make for a great Tumblr username nowadays.

  Mary was committed to equality above all, not only between sexes, but between social classes. With the decline of the feudal system and the rise of capitalism in England, Mary warned that ‘the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.’

  Some of Mary’s sickest burns of her career were levelled at Rousseau. She admired his philosophy of reason, but she couldn’t stand for his ideas about women. He believed that women were naturally inclined to servitude and born ‘to submit to man and to endure even injustice at his hands.’ One merely had to look at the toys children played with, which of course they selected in a vacuum without any cues from the society around them about what they should enjoy, to see the natural order of things: ‘Boys want movement and noise, drums, tops, toy-carts; girls prefer things which appeal to the eye, and can be used for dressing-up – mirrors, jewellery, finery, and specially dolls. The doll is the girl’s special plaything; this shows her instinctive bent towards her life’s work.’ Yes, exactly, this is why little girls grow up to be mothers, and little boys grow up to be drums.

  He also deduced with all his magnificent reason that women should only be educated insofar as it helped them look after men at home, and, you know, maybe make a small, containable amount of witty conversation at dinner. Otherwise, they should rely entirely on their husbands’ brilliance.

  ‘To reason on Rousseau’s ground,’ Mary responded, ‘if man did attain a degree of perfection of mind when his body arrived at maturity, it might be proper, in order to make a man and his wife one, that she should rely entirely on his understanding; and the graceful ivy, clasping the oak that supported it, would form a whole in which strength and beauty would be equally conspicuous. But, alas! husbands, as well as their helpmates, are often only overgrown children; nay, thanks to early debauchery, scarcely men in their outward form – and if the blind lead the blind, one need not come from heaven to tell us the consequence …’

  This was a very sick burn in 18th-century Enlightenment circles.

  RIGHT, TIME FOR SOME SEX!

  You’ve already heard that Mary Wollstonecraft was a ‘philosophical sloven’. She was also, it turns out, a bit of a libertine – at least by 18th-century middle-class English standards. Really her great scandal was that she had, like, three boyfriends total, and maybe a girlfriend too, so who are we modern harlots to judge her?

  Mary’s first great love was Henry Fuseli, who sounds like a pasta but was in fact a man. A married man, no less. They met in 1788. He was a painter and writer, which should have been a big red flag, but Mary fell passionately in love for three years. Unable to live without him any longer, Mary asked Henry’s wife, Sophia, if she could live with them and be Henry’s ‘spiritual spouse’. Sophie was, uh, not cool with this, and so Mary moved to France alone, as one does to deal with heartbreak and make radical friends.

  The French Revolution was in full swing, in its fun prison-storming years rather than its scary guillotine-y years. She met an American Captain Gilbert Imlay, fell in love again, and got preggers. As things got more guillotine-y, though, Gilbert left France on ‘business’ and left her alone and pregnant to fend for he
rself. She had the baby, named her Fanny (lol), and wrote with pride to her friend that, ‘My little Girl begins to suck so MANFULLY that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the Rights of Woman’. Nice one.

  While the whole being-abandoned-while-pregnant thing should have been another red flag, the heart wants what it wants, and Mary’s heart still wanted this fuckboy Gilbert. He sent her on a trip to Scandinavia to sort out some business drama for him and she happily obliged, but when she returned to him in London, she found him with a new mistress. There was nothing left to do but throw herself off a bridge into the Thames, where she was thankfully rescued.

  Fucking Gilbert. At least she got a beautiful literary work out of it, writing A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, a collection of fictionalised letters detailing heartbreak and despair.

  Eventually, though, Mary would meet her equal in William Godwin, the philosopher and historian. They had met previously at a dinner party and had a loud argument about religion. Five years after their contentious meeting, Mary brazenly turned up at his home with a Rousseau novel to discuss. They became lovers, and wrote erotic letters to each other, which were mostly about blushing and probably too ensconced in allusion and metaphor to produce any 21st-century boners. It did the trick for them, though, and soon Mary was pregnant again. They married, shocking all their friends, who hadn’t realised Mary had never married that absolute waste of space, Gilbert.

  The couple were happy as can be, enjoying each other’s company, playing with Mary’s first child, and engaging in intellectual debates and whatever it was that made them blush so much. It was all cut short, though, after Mary gave birth to their child, and died of an infection. William was bereft, and wrote to his friend: ‘I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again.’ If only they had found each other sooner and had more time, instead of the years with Gilbert. If only women’s healthcare didn’t suck, then and now.