100 Nasty Women of History

by Hannah Jewell

  Here’s the long version:

  Josephine Baker was many things at once. She was contradictory. She was American, but she was French. She was an artistic genius, and a tawdry clown. She danced topless, and aspired to be a respected actress. She was kind and selfless, except when she was arrogant and self-absorbed. She started out desperately poor, and later she dripped with diamonds. She grew up stealing coal from moving trains, and later in life wheedled jewels from wealthy men – and then sold those jewels to buy food and coal for the poor of Paris. In her later years, she was saddled with debts and bankrupted.

  She slept with men and with women. She was funny, and she was completely mad. She slept all day and danced all night for as many shows as could fit into the hours of darkness. She’d go out in fur coats with nothing underneath.

  She couldn’t sing, but she wanted to, so she learned. She pretended not to be married when she was, and pretended to be married when she wasn’t. She said that every man she ever loved was her husband (which was a lot of men). She loved fine clothes and extravagant fashions, but not as much as walking around the house naked (even when visitors came to call).

  She ran a nightclub in Montmartre where her pet goat Toutoute, and her pig Albert, ran free among the motley crowd. She walked her cheetah, Chiquita, down the Champs-Élysées on a leash, and briefly had a pet gorilla whom she dressed up like a man.

  She was once driving through Paris and crashed into a lamp post, got out of the car, calmly signed some autographs, then went home in a taxi.

  She was a queen in Paris, but was refused entry to hotels in New York City for being black. America rejected her, and it broke her heart.

  She performed in the 1930s in German and Austrian and Hungarian theatres while nationalists protested outside, calling her the ‘indecent black devil’. She didn’t care much for politics, but became a political activist, met with dozens of world leaders, and travelled to every corner of the globe.

  She used people, and also lay down her life for others. She praised Mussolini, and then rejected fascism more completely and utterly than many French civilians during the war. She was an unreliable, unpredictable, uncensored type of woman, who also made a totally discreet, calm, and level-headed spy who carried secret messages pinned inside her bra and kept her cool under pressure. She secured false passports for Jews fleeing the Nazis, and sometimes claimed she was part Jewish (she wasn’t).

  She had an endless stream of lovers, but preached to American servicemen to stop sleeping with women while stationed in North Africa, in order to limit the spread of venereal disease.

  She was terrified of loneliness, but so unafraid of bombing raids that she’d rather keep eating her ice cream than hit the ground. She was an absolute diva, but performed for soldiers outside in the freezing cold if there wasn’t enough room for them all to see her perform indoors.

  She sometimes performed in blackface and at home she bleached her skin. She played to racial stereotypes, and fought against racism. She spoke before 250,000 people at the March on Washington in 1963 with Martin Luther King.

  She would announce her retirement from show business and then be back on tour. She decided to become a nun. Then she changed her mind after a week.

  She loved children but she couldn’t have them – so she adopted 12 children from around the world. She kept them in her enormous chateau, where visitors could come and observe the ‘Rainbow Tribe’ coexisting in racial harmony. She had good intentions, but sometimes they went very wrong.

  She died after one last, exuberant show in 1975, at age 68.

  To be honest, that wasn’t even the long version. The actual long version of Josephine’s story lasted 68 years and would probably take 68 years to do it justice.

  She was the ultimate nasty woman, and lived too much life to fit into a short space. So read about her. Read her memoirs, which she filled with brazen lies, which you’ll forgive her for because she’s Josephine Baker and she’s wonderful.

  The trouble is, Josephine Baker lived with so much passion and spirit and elegance and obscenity and pain and pleasure that if you think about her for too long, you’ll get a headache and possibly start to cry out of either joy and/or incredulousness, depending where you are on your menstrual cycle, if you have one. Find a performance of hers to watch online, and you’ll see what I mean.

  Women who punched Nazis

  (metaphorically but also not)

  86

  Sophie Scholl

  1921–1943

  I fear this is going to be a less fun chapter. If you were expecting to get a laugh out of every last tale in this book, I’m sorry to be the one to have to remind you: life is bad, the world is bad, history is mostly terrible, and once upon a time, there were Nazis.

  Sophie Scholl’s story is a unique combination of wildly inspiring and completely devastating. She and her brother Hans were leading members of the White Rose, a small group of young Germans, mostly students at the University of Munich, along with their curmudgeonly professor, who worked to resist Hitler during WWII. Together, they embody the height of youthful idealism and courage, and their eventual defeat reveals the depths to which a fascist regime will sink to maintain absolute control.

  Sophie was born in Forchtenberg, in southern Germany, before moving with her family to nearby Ulm, where she grew up along with her siblings. Her family was incredibly close-knit and loving. Their father, Robert, despised Hitler and the national socialists from the start, something that sounds like an obvious thing to do nowadays, but at the time was unusual. Even his children were swept up in the initial excitement of national socialism. Sophie’s brother Hans joined the Hitler Youth before it was compulsory to do so, and Sophie joined the girls’ equivalent – a source of tension in their household.

  In 1936, however, Hans went to Nuremberg to represent the Ulm branch of the Hitler Youth at an enormous rally intended to incite ever more fervent nationalism among youth like Hans. Instead, he returned from the event completely disillusioned by what he’d seen.

  When the war started, Sophie, too, grew more disillusioned with every piece of news she received from her friends fighting at the Eastern front, including her boyfriend, Fritz. In his letters she read of military failures and atrocities committed against the Jews which told a very different story to the state-sanctioned press reports at home. And so Hans and Sophie came round to their father’s way of thinking, and their family dynamic returned to a peaceful and loving state. Sophie wrote to Fritz about her parents’ love for their children: ‘This love, which asks nothing in return, is something wonderful. It is one of the most beautiful things that has ever been given to me.’

  Sophie was a great lover of nature and learning, and yearned to join Hans at the university in Munich. First, though, she had to complete her national service as a kindergarten teacher and factory worker, which she despised, knowing that she was contributing to the war machine. She also couldn’t stand the other girls at the factory, who were only really interested in talking about boys and clothes, and who also happened to be a bunch of fucking Nazis.

  Eventually, Sophie joined the university in 1942 to study Philosophy and Biology. While there, she learned by accident that Hans and his friends had formed a group to resist Hitler. They had managed until that point to keep it secret from even their own families. She insisted upon joining.

  The primary action of this group, which called itself the White Rose, was to distribute leaflets denouncing the regime across their university, across Munich, and across Germany. They created the leaflets in a secret atelier with a typewriter and a duplicating machine (an old-timey photocopier). These were their only weapons against an utterly ruthless state.

  In the course of their underground work the group distributed six different leaflets, with earlier versions encouraging passive resistance to the regime, along with long interludes discussing philosophy and obscure, pretentious references – you know, the kind of thing every university student loves to talk about. As th
e months went on, and with the help of their professor Kurt Huber, the leaflets grew clearer and more urgent in tone.

  The group had to have absolute trust in each other. For context, this was a society in which friends, neighbours, and even family members would report each other to the Gestapo, the German secret police, for having the wrong ideas about Hitler. Children were meant to report their own parents should they hear any anti-Nazi rhetoric at home. In 1939, a factory worker who spoke up in protest against the dismissal of Jewish workers was immediately shot to make an example of what would happen to those who disagreed, disobeyed, and disrupted the ideological work of the regime.

  Creating leaflets was no easy task in 1942 Munich. White Rose members would buy small amounts of paper and a few stamps at a time in order not to raise suspicion about their need for these scarce and rationed resources.

  Then, they would take suitcases full of their anti-regime leaflets – just about the most incriminating thing you could be found with in Nazi Germany short of a large banner saying ‘Hitler is a wanker’ – and travel alone on trains to different cities, always careful to sit in a separate part of the train from where they had left their suitcases in a luggage rack. Once in a new city, they would stuff postboxes with the letters to reach another part of the country. In this way, the Gestapo would not know where the letters were coming from. Along their incredibly dangerous journeys, they also managed to recruit small numbers of supporters in other cities and at other universities to begin leafleting work of their own. Sophie acted as the group’s treasurer and helped to distribute the leaflets.

  Living in constant fear of being caught, and in constant despair at the state of their country, the group had to keep up appearances of being quite relaxed about their lives. They took walks in the day, attended concerts in the evening, and printed their leaflets at night. Hans and the group’s other young men were sent for a period to the Russian front to work as medics in the very war that they hated.

  The sixth leaflet of the White Rose was written by their professor, Huber, who was more conservative than his protégés and hated the Nazis for what he saw as their misuse of the military, and their destruction of the German state that he loved. He wrote a fiery critique of the defeat of German forces at Stalingrad on February 3rd, 1943, an event that sent shockwaves through a people used to endless propaganda about victory after glorious German victory.

  It would be their last leaflet.

  On the morning of February 18th, Hans and Sophie went together to the University of Munich with a suitcase of these leaflets, and stacked them in piles outside classrooms and in corridors all around the main atrium of the university, shortly before classes were due to let out. They were just about to leave the scene when they realised they still had leaflets left in their suitcase that could incriminate them. They hadn’t put any on the top floor of the atrium, so they climbed the stairs with the last of the leaflets.

  Just at the moment the bell rang and students began to stream from their classrooms, Sophie pushed a pile of the papers from the top of the atrium so that they would flutter down onto the heads of their classmates and lecturers. In their conservative university, in a city where Hitler had received some of his earliest support, the inflammatory leaflets fluttered like so many white petals from a tree in spring.

  Hans and Sophie, with their now-empty suitcase, tried to blend into the crowds of students who flooded the atrium and were shocked at what they’d found. Before they could make their escape, however, they were stopped by a janitor who claimed he’d seen them drop the flyers. The head of the university called the Gestapo, who at first could not believe that these calm, respectable-looking students could have had anything to do with such dangerous ideas.

  Taken to police headquarters, Sophie and Hans were separated and interrogated. After initially denying everything, the Gestapo gained enough evidence to incriminate them, at which point each claimed that they and they alone were the White Rose, in order to protect their friends.

  Sophie’s interrogator tried to get her to confess that her actions were not her responsibility, but rather, she had been led astray by her brother. To claim this might have saved her life, but she denied it, and told her interrogator she expected to receive the same sentence as her older brother. ‘I would do it all over again – because I’m not wrong,’ she told him. ‘You have the wrong world view.’

  At this point, Sophie and Hans’ parents had no idea that they had been arrested, or even that their children had been organising resistance to the regime through the White Rose. Their children had lived up to their parents’ ideals after all, and now it would cost them the ultimate price.

  The details of Sophie’s last days are known to us thanks to her cellmate, Else Gebel, a political prisoner who was roomed with Sophie in order to prevent her attempting suicide. Else said that Sophie remained totally calm throughout her interrogations and captivity, only breaking down at the news of the arrest of their fellow White Rose member, Christoph, who was a husband and a father. Christoph had warned the younger members of the group that they had been getting too reckless, employing increasingly bold resistance actions such as writing anti-Hitler graffiti across the city each night. Christoph was implicated in their activities when the Gestapo discovered a seventh leaflet written in Christoph’s handwriting.

  The day before the trial of Hans, Sophie and Christoph was sunny and warm. ‘Such a beautiful sunny day, and I have to go …’ Sophie said to Else.

  On Monday, February 22nd, Hans, Sophie and Christoph appeared before one of the most cruel and terrifying of Hitler’s judges, Roland Freisler, who was known to scream and shout tirades against defendants. The trial was planned by Himmler himself, who ordered a secret and quick execution of all three, rather than a public hanging, which he feared would create martyrs out of these young people whose leaflets had created a spark of fear in the heart of the regime. They had to disappear quietly.

  One by one the three young people were brought before Freisler, and jeered by an audience of loyal party officials.

  Having finally heard the fate of their children, Hans and Sophie’s parents rushed to Munich and managed to force their way into the courtroom, where their father Robert cried out to the party loyals assembled to watch the proceedings: ‘There is a higher justice! They will go down in history!’ before being pushed outside to await the verdict.

  The verdict was, as planned, death for all three. Christoph had begged for mercy as a father with a sick wife, and been denied leniency. Hans declared to Freisler and the courtroom: ‘You will soon stand where we stand now!’ Sophie was quiet and calm.

  The three did not know that their deaths would come not in a few months’ time – and not after a long enough time to give the Allies a chance to win the war. They would be executed that same afternoon, at 5pm, just three hours after hearing their fate.

  On the wall of his cell, Hans wrote a line of Goethe: ‘Despite all the powers closing in, hold yourself up.’ Christoph wrote in a last letter to his wife, Angelika: ‘I am dying without any hate.’

  The guards, breaking the rules, allowed Hans and Sophie to see their parents one last time. To try and console her about the fact that her life was to be cut so short, Sophie said to her mother: ‘What are those few years anyway?’

  The guards allowed the three prisoners to share a cigarette before their execution.

  As he went to the guillotine, Hans yelled: ‘Long live freedom!’ Sophie remained calm and poised till the end.

  The janitor who had caught Hans and Sophie was rewarded with a promotion and 3,000 Reichsmark, the equivalent of about £13,000 today. This was the price of three lives – as well as the lives of the several other members of the White Rose who had fled, but were tracked down and arrested one by one. Roland Freisler, the judge, would die in an Allied bombing attack on the people’s court in Berlin.

  During her captivity, Sophie had said to her cellmate Else: ‘What difference does my death make if our actions arous
e thousands of people? The students will definitely rise up.’

  But they didn’t rise up. In fact, some students at the university of Munich held a rally in appreciation of the janitor who had caught them.

  News of the White Rose’s actions and murder would, however, reach the outside world. A White Rose leaflet smuggled out of the country made its way to the US and The New York Times. The Allies would end up dropping tens of thousands of copies of their sixth and final leaflet across Germany.

  We will never know if we could have been as brave and good as the White Rose, because we can only hope that we will never have our courage tested in quite the same way. I told you this wouldn’t be a fun chapter! My soul hurts now. Does yours? Nope, this wasn’t a fun chapter at all.

  There’s not much else to say to help ourselves feel better about one of the greatest horrors history has ever known, but at the very least, we can try and make sure it never happens again.

  87

  Hannah Arendt

  1906–1975

  Hannah Arendt was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, today honoured by being one of the only women widely taught in university philosophy courses, if it is indeed an honour to be scrutinised by 18-year-old budding philosophers, who are known to be sweaty and tiresome.

  Hannah was born in 1906 in Germany to a Jewish family. She studied in the 1920s under the famous philosopher Martin Heidegger, and when she was 19 and he was 36 (and married), the two embarked on a tumultuous romance. After about a year, Hannah cut things off, citing her need to focus on her philosophy career, one of the all-time most common reasons that girls dump boys. They kept up their correspondence as philosophy pals, however, for the rest of their lives. In the 1930s, things became awkward between them, to say the least, when Heidegger briefly became a bit of a Nazi, proving that brilliant philosophers are often also idiots. He later called his foray into the Nazi party ‘the greatest stupidity’ of his life, but didn’t exactly apologise for it either. So if you think your ex is embarrassing, at least he or she was (hopefully) never a Nazi.