100 Nasty Women of History

by Hannah Jewell

  Anyway, Rosa theorised that in order to survive and carry on growing forever, capitalism would have to embark on an imperial project, rampaging across the globe and penetrating new markets in new countries and filling them up with its shit, until the whole world is fucked and the environment has been destroyed and everyone’s dead from war.

  This is exactly how she saw World War I: an imperial project that would set workers against each other in war when really they should be standing together in international solidarity. She embarked on a speaking tour against the war, calling for workers to sabotage the state in protest, for instance by participating in strikes to halt transportation and industry. The state was not having this, and she was arrested. She was still in prison when the war was lost and the Kaiser deposed.

  The Social Democrats took power. But Rosa and her fellow far-lefties such as Karl Liebknecht, with whom she co-founded the Communist Party of Germany, were far from satisfied with the Social Democrats’ actions once in power. They were mostly unhappy about what they didn’t do: they didn’t reform the economic system, as they had in Russia, though they had created a parliamentary democracy.

  Another important Rosa theory was about the spontaneity of revolution. She believed that you could not orchestrate a revolution, or direct it once it’s happening, without destroying it entirely. This was one of her critiques of Lenin’s handling of the 1917 Russian Revolution – that and the use of state terror.

  A second revolution began sweeping Germany in 1919, started by some rogue elements in Rosa’s party. It was, in her opinion, far too soon for another revolution. But, of course, what was started could not be controlled, and she realised she had to go along with it. The Social Democratic leadership under Friedrich Ebert set about destroying this revolution, and did so by unleashing a citizen’s militia known as the Freikorps against them. Both Rosa and Karl Liebknecht were beaten and killed by the Freikorps, and Rosa’s body was thrown into a canal. She was 47.

  Ironically, the Freikorps were basically an early form of the Nazi party, who, in the next generation, would then turn against the Social Democrats, and give us Hitler. Two thumbs down, Friedrich.

  Historians will tell you that you’re not supposed to speculate about how history would have turned out differently if this or that event had never happened.29 Luckily, I’m not a real historian. What if Rosa hadn’t been killed? What else would she have done? Her murder would tear the German left apart for years to come – could a more unified left have prevented the rise of national socialism? Am I saying that Rosa Luxemburg could have stopped the Nazis? No, I’m not committing to that argument because I’m ending all of these sentences with a question mark? Good.

  In any case, there’s a lot to learn from Rosa Luxemburg. Not that you or I are planning anything. No siree! Nothing to see here!

  98

  Constance Markievicz

  1868–1927

  Anybody who knew the Irish revolutionary Constance Markievicz as a child would not have expected her to live the life she did. She was born in 1868 to the aristocratic Gore-Booth family, and was a member of the wealthy landowning Anglo-Irish elite. In the tenant farming system of the time, farmers paid rents to rich landlords who sometimes didn’t even live in the country. To be Irish and Catholic meant being a second-class citizen in your own country, in a poor and precarious situation. Constance, on the other hand, grew up in her family’s beautiful home of Lissadell Court in County Sligo, which had 48 rooms.

  Constance learned all the things a young lady of a high station should learn from her governess, nicknamed Squidge. She was beautiful and tomboyish and daring, and loved to ride horses, hunt, and sketch. She was clever and vivacious and happy and bold. Once, at a dinner given at her home, some important man or another, whose name we can happily ignore, put his hand on her leg under the dinner table. She picked it up, held it in the air, and announced to the assembled guests: ‘Just look at what I have found in my lap!’ We can only assume that the man then died on the spot. RIP, you old perv.

  The poet W.B. Yeats, who would visit his relatives in the town near Lissadell, wrote that Constance ‘had often passed by on horseback going or coming from the hunt and was the acknowledged beauty of the county.’ He wrote a poem comparing her to a wild bird (in a good way). Years later, she would have lunch with Yeats in London, but a man at a neighbouring table, overcome by her beauty, would steal Yeats’ thunder by writing a sonnet dedicated to her on his tablecloth and cutting it out to present to her as he left. (And Yeats would be held responsible for the damage to the tablecloth.)

  Constance moved to Paris for a while to study art, and started wearing a ring to show that not only did she love art, but she was actually married to it, which is an incredibly ‘art student’ thing to do. Despite this marriage, she also met a dishy Polish count in Paris, Casimir Dunin Markievicz, who was tall and broody and had black hair and blue eyes, and so she married him too, and became the Countess Markievicz.

  By all accounts, that could have been that for her life. She could have been hot and clever and funny and rich. But Constance was destined to be remembered for a lot more than being an annoying art student and the wild bird in a Yeats poem.

  From the 1890s on, Constance was becoming interested in two things: women’s suffrage and Irish nationalism. She began attending meetings of Sinn Féin after its creation in 1908. Sinn Féin’s goal was to make Ireland independent of British rule. Constance and other nationalist women founded a women’s newspaper called Bean na h-Eireann, ‘Woman of Ireland’, ‘advocating militancy, separatism and feminism’. Just like women’s mags today.

  The aims of the suffragists and the nationalists were often at odds. Suffragists criticised nationalist organisations for not taking their women members seriously, and nationalists criticised those suffragists who wanted to participate in the British parliament that they believed should have no say over the governing of an independent Ireland. Constance believed in both movements, but thought the fight for an independent Ireland should come first. So she especially wasn’t a fan of those suffragists who bloody loved the empire.

  In a 1909 lecture to the Students’ National Literary Society, Constance rallied the students to her way of thinking: ‘Arm yourselves with weapons to fight your nation’s cause. Arm your souls with noble and free ideas. Arm your minds with the histories and memories of your country and her martyrs, her language, and a knowledge of her arts, and her industries. And if in your day the call should come for your body to arm, do not shirk that either.’ Needless to say, giving speeches like these put Constance on the British authorities’ radar.

  In those years Constance also founded a pro-independence boy scout troupe, took them camping, and taught them to shoot. She dropped her Countess title, preferring to be known as the much less formal Madame Markievicz, and began to abandon her society obligations and pleasures. Her elite friends didn’t mind to see her go, now that she was so involved in the unseemly realm of politics, working side by side with the poor, providing food for striking families in 1913, and generally getting her hands dirty in a way they thought an elegant lady should not.

  On Easter Sunday, 1916, Constance, her nationalist pals, and an army of volunteers prepared for revolution. Constance was the first person to publicly proclaim the new Irish Republic, reading the text of its Proclamation to gathered onlookers on the steps of Liberty Hall in Dublin on the eve of the revolution. The document declared that the new republic would include equal suffrage. However, it was only signed by men, because unfortunately women were unable to write their names until the pen-maker Bic invented the ‘Bic For Her’ pen in 2012.30

  At midday the next day, Constance and her company of the Citizen Army took St Stephen’s Green, asking the park-goers on that sunny day if they could please vacate the park because it was needed for an uprising. Constance’s branch of the nationalist movement had thought that the timing of the revolution, during World War I, would mean the British would not direct their full mil
itary might to quash an uprising. Boy, were they wrong! British troops arrived and fought the rebels, who were vastly outnumbered, into submission.

  Constance took part in the fighting, at one point exchanging fire with British officers who had been having a nice lunch at a hotel overlooking the park when the revolution kicked off under their noses. They tried to shoot her, but she kept popping out from behind a tree to shoot back at them, which is a pretty annoying thing to happen when you’re trying to have a nice lunch. In later years, Constance would also be accused of shooting a constable dead – however it’s unclear if she was even present at the green when he was hit.

  Constance was second-in-command of her battalion. At the end of a week’s standoff and full-on trench warfare, it retreated into the College of Surgeons, where they would get word that the leaders of the uprising had surrendered. Defeated, Constance emerged from the college, kissing her gun before she handed it to the waiting British captain in surrender. The Captain offered her a lift to the prison, as she was a lady, but she refused, and marched with her fellow revolutionaries – both men and women – to her own imprisonment.

  Constance was the only woman to stand trial for the uprising, in a secret military tribunal before a judge whom she described as ‘a fuzzy little officer with his teeth hanging out to dry’. She recounted the experience in a letter to her sister: ‘I told the Court that I had fought for the independence of Ireland during Easter Weekend and that I was ready now to die for the cause as I was then.’ She was found guilty and sentenced to death by being shot – but this was commuted to penal servitude for life because she was a woman. Devastated as her fellow revolutionaries were executed one by one, she told her captors: ‘I wish you had the dignity to shoot me.’

  Over the decade following the Easter Rising, Constance would be imprisoned and released by the British three times, as the tides of revolutionary fervour and Irish politics ebbed and waned. In 1918 she became the first woman elected to the House of Commons, though as a member of Sinn Féin she never took up her seat. At times Constance was reviled by her contemporaries, and at others, held up as an unparalleled national hero. She was bitterly disappointed when in 1921 the Irish Republic she had been fighting for since 1916 was replaced with the Irish Free State, which tied Ireland to the British Commonwealth along with countries like Canada and Australia. Constance wanted the whole British Empire to burn, and the new consensus was unsatisfying to her as a radical.

  But in 1927, sick and reaching the very end of her life, Constance would see clearly the support she had gained from the Irish people when they came to sing and pray outside her hospital room. ‘It is so beautiful to have had all this love and kindness before I go,’ she said. When she died, thousands lined the streets to watch her funeral procession.

  99

  Luisa Moreno

  1907–1992

  Everything good you have in this life you only have because of somebody else. You may think you have pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps, without a single person to help you, but somebody had to invent those bootstraps, and somebody had to make them in a factory, and somebody had to organise the people who worked in that factory so that they’d be paid fairly and not be killed on the job. Yes, I know that logic doesn’t fully make sense, but the idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps never made any physical or metaphorical sense to begin with, and anyway my point is we all owe our well-being to the work of people like Luisa Moreno. ‘One person can’t do anything,’ she once said. ‘It’s only with others that things are accomplished.’

  Luisa Moreno was born in 1907 in Guatemala into wealth and privilege. Her father was a powerful coffee grower, and her mother had that elusive job of wealthy women everywhere: a socialite. When Luisa was of the age to take up higher education, she was furious at the rulings preventing women from attending university. So she gathered up her fellow wealthy and influential girlfriends to lobby the government, foreshadowing her long life of rabble-rousing.

  Before launching into a successful labour-organising career, though, Luisa would have to get her aimless poet years in, as we all must. She ran away to Mexico City at the age of 19 to live her best bohemian life and consort with artists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. She wrote poetry, supported herself as a journalist, lived a dreamy life, then married a painter (red flag, ladies!) who in later years would prove to be a bit of a shit. Luisa got pregnant, and the couple moved to New York City in 1928, to fulfil Luisa’s wish that her baby would be a ‘Latin from Manhattan’, a rhyme worth moving country for.

  Once in New York, Luisa and her underwhelming man found themselves belonging to an entirely different station to that which they enjoyed in their hobnobbing days in Mexico City, and their fancy socialite days before that in Guatemala. They lived in a tenement in Spanish Harlem, and had money trouble. Luisa got a job as a seamstress to support the whole family. Living and working in poor conditions, broke and trying to raise a newborn baby, the natural course of action, from Luisa’s point of view, was to join the Communist Party, get her co-workers together and launch a union. Some people make good organisers, others crumble at the idea of arranging their own birthday party. Luisa was a good organiser. While the women seamstresses led the negotiations and lobbying of their employer, their husbands did the husband jobs of organising fundraisers and weekly dances in support of the union, and looking handsome at dinner parties. Behind every strong woman is a handsome, helpful boy!

  Luisa’s natural talent as an organiser caught the attention of the wider American labour movement, and she soon got a job for the American Federation of Labor, the AFL. The AFL at this time was organising workers across the country, but it was afraid to work in Florida because of the intimidation of labour activists by that most embarrassing set of racists, the KKK. Thankfully this organisation of grown men who like to dress up as ghosts and murder people has since been eradicated, and in no way, shape or form supports a sitting president, because that would be absurd and the American people wouldn’t stand for it.

  Despite knowing the threat that would face her, and because they were too chicken to go themselves, the AFL sent Luisa to Florida. She left her husband behind, who had since revealed himself to be an abusive drifting piece of river garbage, and set about mobilising the Latino and African American cigar-rolling workers of Florida. Luisa had left the Communist Party by then, but was more devoted than ever to organising workers. She negotiated a contract for more than 13,000 workers in Florida, then went and did the same in several more states across America. As we think back on what these negotiations must have looked like between the under-five-foot-tall Luisa and furious captains of industry, we can only hope she entered the meetings, put her feet up on the bosses’ desks, calmly lit a cigar and began, ‘Look here mister, this is how it’s gonna be …’ This fact cannot be historically verified, and therefore cannot be assumed to be untrue.

  Over the next few decades, Luisa travelled the country, forsaking her own right to a pleasant and settled family life in order to improve the conditions of literally hundreds of thousands of American working-class people. She ended up in Los Angeles organising cannery workers primarily composed of Mexican and Jewish women, fighting discriminatory hiring practices and winning the women better pay and hours and even on-site day-care, and earning herself the nickname of the ‘California Whirlwind’.

  While in California, Luisa joined a group of community organisers working to expose the racism of the Los Angeles criminal justice system. They called themselves the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, organised in response to the LAPD’s arrest of hundreds of young Latino men in a trumped-up reaction to the murder of a young man, José Díaz, whose body had been found in the Sleepy Lagoon reservoir. It was the biggest mass conviction in California history, and an obvious attempt to harass and imprison young people of colour in Los Angeles rather than prosecute a crime. The police never even questioned the two men last seen with José. Amid racial tensions raised around the case, the so-called Zoo
t Suit Riots broke out, a series of white attacks on mainly Mexican American men and others seen wearing zoot suits, which supposedly took up more fabric than was acceptable to use during wartime. The police allowed this violence to go unchecked, and even got involved themselves – all while the white-run press cheered the white gangs along, and deemed the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee ‘communists’ and ‘trained rabble-rousers’. Which, yeah, they were, so what? As Luisa joined with leaders from other communities to fight discrimination, the police and the FBI attempted to divide and conquer.

  Eventually, it would be the accusation of communism amid the rising Red Scare in 1940s America that led to the end of Luisa’s American career. In 1950, Luisa was deported after being declared a ‘dangerous alien’ by the House of Representatives’ incredibly-named ‘Un-American Activities Committee’. It’s funny what gets to be called American and un-American, given that the United States was literally founded by ‘trained rabble-rousers’. And so Luisa, the first Latina elected to a high-ranking position in the American labour movement and who would probably have made a great president, was instead deported to Guatemala with her husband.

  ‘They can talk about deporting me,’ Luisa said defiantly, ‘but they can never deport the people that I’ve worked with and with whom things were accomplished for the benefit of hundreds of thousands of workers – things that can never be destroyed.’

  And that, friends, is where your damn bootstraps come from.