100 Nasty Women of History

by Hannah Jewell

  100

  Jayaben Desai

  1933–2010

  You are a man, a clever man, a clever business man. You have cleverly earned yourself some money, or cleverly inherited the money that your father so cleverly made, or perhaps his father, and that is why you cleverly opened a factory in the 1960s. Now, it’s 1970s Britain. The youths are listening to all manner of alarming musical genres and their hair has grown long and threatening, and it is of your opinion that they should cut their hair and get a job and contribute to this country, the disco-dancing scroungers.

  Your lovely factory in north-west London is a fine place to work. You develop the film of people’s photos by mail order. It’s a perfect system, and you turn a tidy profit.

  And your employees! How they love you. They are mostly of South Asian origin, and you call them ‘my ladies’ and they can’t get enough of it. Sure, they have to ask permission to use the toilet, and yes, it’s true, if they don’t work fast enough you may threaten to fire them – but after all, you’re the boss, and how else will they learn? They should just be happy to be there! If they don’t like it, they can leave and work in someone else’s factory, or maybe they can be clever enough to open a factory of their own.

  One day, you tell an employee she has to work overtime. She says she won’t do it. You say she has to – you’re the boss, after all, and you make the rules, because you are very clever and deserving. You call her and her friends ‘chattering monkeys’, and this 4'10'' woman tells you:

  ‘What you are running is not a factory, it is a zoo. But in a zoo there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your fingertips. Others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager.’

  That woman is Jayaben Desai, and she’s about to make your life very difficult for the next two years.

  Jayaben Desai was born in Gujarat, India in 1933, and after marrying her husband Suryakant in 1955, moved to what is now Tanzania. The pair lived comfortably off Suryakant’s income as the manager of a tyre factory, but with the persecution of Asians in East Africa in the 1970s, the couple eventually moved to London.

  In London, the couple and their two children found themselves suddenly on the bottom rung of society. Jayaben’s husband worked as an unskilled labourer, and she sewed in a sweatshop before taking work at the film processing plant of Grunwick. After two years of working there, she had had enough of the gruelling conditions and in August 1976 stood up to her bosses. Although she wasn’t part of a union, she walked out, and in the days that followed led a walkout of a hundred of her colleagues. They were fed up with long hours and low wages and demanded the right to be members of a recognised union and to negotiate better conditions for themselves. She told her bosses: ‘I want my freedom.’

  In the weeks that followed, Jayaben’s walkout developed into a strike backed by trade unions and supporters from around the country. The Grunwick management would not budge, and nor would the women, who were offered reinstatement to their jobs if they dropped the whole union thing. Police arrived at the picket lines; more than one person was struck by a manager in a car on his way into work.

  The mostly white, male postal workers in the local Cricklewood sorting office decided to join the ‘strikers in saris’, refusing to deliver Grunwick’s post, which was a pretty crippling move for a company that operated by mail order. ‘You don’t say “no” to Mrs Desai,’ one postal worker explained. This tiny woman, who stood on the picket line with her handbag under her arm, was truly a force of nature.

  The women seemed on the verge of a victory when a group stepped in to oppose them called the National Association for Freedom, or NAFF, a slightly unfortunate acronym. The Grunwick dispute had captured the attention of the entire nation, and was taken up on one side by the unions in support of the protesting women, and on the other by Conservative politicians in Westminster under the leader of the opposition, Margaret Thatcher, in defence of Grunwick’s management. NAFF organised the delivery of Grunwick post across the country to break the postal workers’ ban on its mail. Meanwhile the Labour government, under much pressure, appointed an inquiry to look into the situation, which found that the women should get their jobs back and be allowed a union. The Grunwick management, however, ignored the inquiry’s findings.

  Jayaben was determined to carry on, even as the Trades Union Congress and other backers began to distance themselves. Once a cause célèbre of the left, now the backers saw the impossibility of victory and were nervous about negative national attention. ‘Would Ghandi give up?’ Jayaben asked the workers.

  But with the end of TUC support and the Grunwick management’s complete intransigence in the face of rulings and recommendations that the women should be allowed a union, the dispute ended in defeat for the women in 1978.

  In the election of 1979, which brought Margaret Thatcher to power, Grunwick became the centre of debates raging through a changing Britain. A new brand of Conservatives pointed to the conflict to argue that the unions had too much power. Meanwhile, Jayaben had been left disillusioned with the unions. A few years before she died, she said, ‘Trade union support is like honey on the elbow; you can see it, you can smell it, but you can never taste it!’

  She did not, however, regret the day she walked out of her job demanding better treatment for herself or her co-workers, or the two years that followed in which she travelled the country rallying support from all sectors of British society. Speaking after the defeat of their effort, Jayaben reminded the strikers of what they had accomplished:

  ‘We have shown that workers like us, new to these shores, will never accept being treated without dignity or respect.’

  They had shown that they would not simply be grateful for whatever they were given. They had shown that they could win the support of white workers. They were poor, and small, and female, and immigrants, but they were powerful and unafraid to demand they be treated as such. Britain could not simply expect a cheap, replaceable and submissive source of workers from its former empire – at least not on Jayaben’s watch. While people older than millennials (they exist!) may remember seeing the Grunwick strike on the news, most don’t remember the name of Jayaben Desai, who stood up to extremely powerful forces without fear.

  ‘They wanted to break us down,’ Jayaben told the strikers, ‘but we did not break.’

  Conclusion

  Many of the women in these pages couldn’t be more different from each other. They are, after all, separated by their backgrounds, their politics, vast oceans and thousands of years.

  If they all gathered together in one place it could make for a very awkward dinner party. Julie D’Aubigny would stab Mercedes de Acosta with a sword as they both tried to flirt with Hedy Lamarr, who would just ignore them because she was excitedly talking about maths with Emmy Noether and Hypatia. Josephine Baker and Coccinelle would get naked and dance on the table while Nana Asma’u and Hildegard von Bingen blushed furiously and muttered prayers under their breath.

  Ida B. Wells and Frances E.W. Harper would greet each other as old friends and excuse themselves to the kitchen because they had a lot of gossip to catch up on. Sappho and Ulayya bint al-Mahdi would languish in a corner on some cushions, whispering dirty poems and cackling to each other. Noor Inayat Khan would swap spy stories with Policarpa Salavarrieta, and Rosa Luxemburg would be hiding in a closet plotting the downfall of capitalism with Alexandra Kollontai and Luisa Moreno. Everyone would avoid Qutulun as she kept challenging people to wrestle, except Lozen, who’d distract her then steal one of her horses and gallop away into the night.

  Sojourner Truth would make a rousing speech that brought the room to tears, and Susan La Flesche Picotte would kindly invite Margery Kempe to go upstairs for a cup of tea and a medical check-up to try and find a cure for her incessant wailing. Wáng Zhēnyí would be getting her mind blown by Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin filling her in on 200 years of astronomy. Lucy Hicks Anderson and Pancho Barnes would produce the smu
ggled liquor, and Gladys Bentley would play the piano all night while Miriam Makeba sang. Annie Smith Peck would climb up on a cabinet and refuse to come down, shouting about how she held the altitude record for the party. Tomoe Gozen would accidentally almost murder someone, and the whole thing would be shut down by the cops when Zenobia, Ching Shih and Artemisia of Caria tried to invade the next-door neighbour’s house. Nellie Bly would write a tell-all memoir about the whole disastrous evening.

  Actually, that sounds like the greatest party ever.

  So yes, they are a diverse bunch. But before you get to know these women as individuals, and learn their battles and their theories and their hopes and their dreams, you first have to know that they existed at all. Women have been there all along. They’ve been there, and they’ve been doing things! They’ve been relentlessly doing stuff, whether you knew about it or not!

  This book is full of women who conquered, and flourished, and enjoyed their lives too much for the comfort of those around them. But it’s also full of women who failed. Who tried to make change, and couldn’t. Who had to admit defeat and adapt to the dangerous world which rose to crush them, change them, or even kill them.

  But other than, well, the ancient murderers I’ve included for the fun of it (shout-out to my girl Empress Wu) they were fundamentally good and smart and brave. We might not have known their stories before now because their goodness and their smartness and their bravery either wasn’t valued or was too threatening to win the recognition of history’s conquerers.

  So should you find yourself on the receiving end of the disapproval of someone more important or more powerful or supposedly smarter than you, stop and wonder what their motive might be.

  You may find you’re more powerful than you think.

  Old People Glossary

  Welcome, old(er) readers! I am so happy that you have joined us. Despite the infinite wisdom of your many years, you may have found yourself at a loss when faced with some of the more youthful turns of phrase in these pages. Not to worry! I have collected some of my repeat offences against language to try and explain them to you. You’ll note that the entries in this glossary appear in no particular order, because the universe is random and life is ultimately meaningless, and I hoped to reflect that. Also I accidentally wrote it this way and was too lazy to rejig it to be alphabetical. Classic millennials! Anyway, here you are. Go ahead and bookmark this page for future reference, you old scoundrels!

  Boo (n.) – Your husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend or partner or person you drunkenly snogged once in your teens and later thought back on with at least a little fondness.

  ‘Come to brunch with me tomorrow! Bring your boo.’

  Side boo (n.) – The person other than your husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend or partner with whom you have a romantic, usually illicit dalliance. Shame on you!

  ‘Sorry, I can’t bring my boo to brunch because he found out about my side boo and dumped me, lol.’

  Lol (abbr.) – Lol means ‘laughing out loud’. It does NOT mean ‘lots of love’, despite what every dad in the world seems to think. An all-caps ‘LOL’ might mean you have actually made a small noise of delight, whereas ‘lol’ means you have merely smiled in your mind but not on your face, or possibly that you are furious with the person you have said it to. If it is a complete sentence with a full stop – ‘Lol.’ – there is an added level of self-aware childishness or irony, perhaps following an inside joke, or a sex joke. Lol.

  ‘Lololololol.’

  Messy bitch (n.) – A messy bitch is a person who delights in scandal, as embodied by Joanne Prada or ‘Joanne the Scammer’, a character on Twitter invented by Brenden Miller who is known for being ‘THE messy bitch who lives for drama.’ If this explanation has only made you more confused, I am sorry. You get to own property, and millennials get Joanne the Scammer. That’s the deal.

  ‘George Osborne is a messy bitch who lives for drama.’

  Sick burn (n.) – An excellent insult. To deliver a truly sick burn, you must cut deeply into someone’s ego using your superior, brutal wit. Onlookers to your sick burn will either go ‘Ohhhh!’ or suggest your victim applies ice to their burn, which is a terrible turn of phrase because you should NEVER put ice on a physical burn.

  ‘Sick burn, bro.’

  Meme (n.) – The word ‘meme’ was unfortunately coined by that great bell-end of our time Richard Dawkins to signify a piece of information or concept that spreads across society. Nowadays it’s easiest to understand a meme as a viral Internet joke. Sometimes memes are funny, sometimes they are not funny, sometimes they are racist, and sometimes they mean absolutely nothing and go viral anyway.

  ‘I don’t understand this meme with the pigs and the oats, can a young person please explain it to me?’

  Lit (adj.) – When something is lit, it’s lively, it’s happening, it’s kicking off, it’s the place to be.

  ‘Twitter is gonna be lit when the nukes get fired.’

  Tbh (abbr.) – This stands for ‘to be honest’, but for whatever reason, has a slightly different feel to it when in its abbreviated form. It can be placed at the beginning of a sentence as if to introduce a confession or guilty thought, or at the end to signify something that everyone obviously already thinks, though these are not strict rules.

  ‘You should quit your job tomorrow tbh.’

  ‘Tbh I should. I just want a million pounds tbh is that so much to ask?’

  ‘You deserve it tbh.’

  IRL (abbr.) – This stands for ‘in real life’. In our modern, high-tech, fast-paced, high-fallutin’ world, it is necessary to have a quick way to distinguish things that have happened on the Internet from things you saw and touched and spoke to in the real, living, breathing, terrible world.

  ‘Hahaha I just did an IRL lol.’

  Tinder (n.) – This does not refer to wood that you burn in a wholesome snowy cabin, but rather, a phone application where people decide if they want to have sex with each other based on a few photos and whatever few lines they have used to describe themselves in their ‘bio’. Misguided gentlemen use the app to send photographs of their penis to people they’ve never met.

  ‘If Romeo and Juliet met on Tinder instead of IRL things probably would have turned out a lot better for them tbh.’

  Dragged (v.) – If you are being dragged, or receiving a dragging, you are being criticised publically for poor behaviour, and you probably deserve it.

  ‘Drag him! DRAG HIM!’

  Buzzkill (n.) – Something which has suddenly changed your mood from light-hearted and cheerful to miserable about the bitterness of life and the horrors of the world.

  ‘I was reading this funny book about women in history when suddenly there was a whole bit about Nazis and it was such a buzzkill tbh.’

  ‘Nazis are the worst kind of buzzkill tbh.’

  Lean In! (a command by a rich woman) – The phrase Lean In was coined by a Facebook executive, Sheryl Sandberg, who made it the title of her book about how ~career ladies~ can best fight their way to the top of corporations to achieve unfathomable riches and glossy hair. On the one hand, as a concept, leaning in can put a lot of pressure on women to change their behaviours to better suit a sexist workplace, and is only really relevant to the top socio-economic echelons of society. On the other hand, it’s fun to imagine yelling at a woman who has been dead for a thousand years for murdering her enemies.

  ‘Lean in, Empress Wu!’

  ‘Lean in, Ælfthryth!’

  ‘I tried to lean in and ask for more money but instead I got fired, lol.’

  ~putting these things around stuff~ (punctuation) – This cannot be properly explained, it is simply an ~aesthetic~. It can be used to note your self-awareness at employing a phrase that is either hackneyed or ~fancy~ or both.

  ‘My friend Harriet travels a lot for work because she’s a very glamorous ~career woman~.’

  Amirite? (abbr.) – An abbreviation of ‘Am I right?’, to be read in the sty
le of a slightly sleazy stand-up comic who has run out of things to say. Amirite? Yeah, I am!

  ‘Sounds like my ex-wife – amirite fellas?! The guy in the back, he gets it!’

  Narc (n.) – Literally a narcotics agent, but can really mean anyone who takes your drugs away. A person who is a buzzkill.

  ‘I can’t believe some narc called the cops on my bitchin’ party.’

  NBD (abbr.) – This stands for ‘no big deal’. It usually means that something was a HUGE deal to you, but you’re trying to pretend you’re chill about it.

  ‘Yeah, my tweet got like 15 likes, nbd.’

  Slide into DMs (v.) – To send someone a direct message rather than tweeting them publically. Implies lustful intent. Can also be used metaphorically for offline scenarios.

  ‘Romeo slid into Juliet’s DMs like: “My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, because it is an enemy to thee; Had I it written, I would tear the word.”’

  Bants (n. or adj.) – Short for banter. A thing can be bants, a person can be bants, or a person or thing can reveal a distinct lack of bants, which is always a great disappointment. A person may decide to do something foolish ‘for the bants’, which is almost never a good idea.

  ‘And Juliet replied, “What man art thou that thus bescreen’d in night so stumblest on my counsel? If you’re going to slide in my DMs like this you’d better bring the bants.”’

  Emo (adj. or n.) – Emo is both a genre of super-emotional music, and a ~way of being~. If you are emo, you feel things deeply. You are not OK. Nobody understands you. You probably have lots of eyeliner and/or black hair straightened into a colossal fringe and I dated you when I was 16.

  ‘Who among us did not experience an emo phase?’

  Metal (adj.) – Like emo, but with metal music. Can be used to mean that something is hardcore. If you have never heard heavy metal, go into your kitchen and drop all your pots and pans on the floor while screaming. That’s what it sounds like.