Rejected Princesses: Tales of History's Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics

by Jason Porath

  Although she possessed a generally good business sense, in the end Mary’s oversympathetic heart betrayed her. On top of dealing with constant theft, she went into severe debt from liberally taking IOUs from her “boys”—army officers who would leave without repaying her at the end of the war. Without the backing of any larger agencies or wealthy benefactors (of which, it must be said, Florence had both), Mary went bankrupt.

  Florence flourished after the war. She used her prominent role in Crimea as a springboard to establishing nursing as a respected profession and solidifying modern ideas of hygiene. So next time you wash your hands after going to the bathroom, or talk to a nurse who says you should do so more often, thank Florence.

  Mary met her postwar financial straits with characteristic cheeriness. When asked in a court proceeding on her debt what class of debtor certificates she possessed, she quipped, “First, to be sure! Am I not a first-class woman?”

  Eventually Mary’s financial situation did stabilize, although in fits and starts. She wrote a successful autobiography—the first by a British black woman, making her arguably the most famous black woman of the Victorian age—but its sales were ruined by the outbreak of the Indian War of Independence.* During this war, as well as the later Franco-Prussian War,* Mary once again attempted to lend her nursing services, but she was hindered by Florence in both cases.

  In an appropriately titled letter labeled “Burn,” Florence wrote to a member of Parliament that anyone who would employ Mary would enjoy “much kindness—also much drunkenness & improper conduct, wherever she is.” Unsurprisingly, Mary didn’t get the job.

  Therein lies the root of the modern take on the relationships between Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale as being one of conflict. When Mary’s story was introduced into British textbooks, many viewed it as taking away from Florence’s story—which, really, it shouldn’t. Is the world so small that it can’t accommodate the story of a pioneering iconoclast nurse and an enterprising caretaker? While they clearly didn’t get along in their lifetimes,* the traditions they represent do not have to forever be at odds.

  Gráinne “Grace O’Malley” Ní Mháille

  (1530–1603, IRELAND)

  The Pirate Queen of Ireland

  There has never been anyone else like Grace O’Malley in the history of Ireland. An honest-to-God combination of queen and pirate, she spent most of her life performing, in her words, “maintenance by land and sea.” Basically, she impounded ships, extorted money, burned down castles, and generally ran the Irish waters for decades.

  Known in her native Ireland as Granuaile, Gráinne Mhaol, and a terrifying variety of increasingly confusingly spelled names, she was born into one of Ireland’s only seafaring clans, the O’Malleys. She took quickly to the water, despite her father’s protests. As the legend goes, when her dad told her that her long hair was unsuitable for work on a boat, she showed up with a shaved head—earning her the nickname Gráinne Mhaol, or “Grace the Bald.” From there, she just kept racking up additions to her legend:

  • When her first husband was killed in battle, the invaders went on to pillage his castle, where she was staying. She greeted them in traditional Irish fashion, by stripping off the lead roof, melting it, and pouring it on their heads until they rather sensibly buggered off.

  • After a nearby clan killed a close confidant (and possible lover) of hers, Granuaile waited until the clan went on pilgrimage. Ever the holy woman, she then swooped in, killed every last one of them, sailed to their ancestral home, and seized it.

  • When the Earl of Howth refused to give her lodging (as he was supposed to, since she was a fellow clan leader), she kidnapped his grandson. She turned down all ransom offers until the earl finally relented and offered her lodging.

  • She eventually remarried, to a man she chose for politics as opposed to love. At the end of the first “trial year” of the marriage, she locked him out of his own castle and took it for herself. (They later reconciled.)

  • According to legend, she ran a cable from the mast of her main ship through a castle window and tied the other end to her bedpost. That way she would know if someone was making off with her boat.

  • When she gave birth to her son Toby, it was while sailing one of her (squalid, unsanitary) pirate ships—hence her son’s nickname, “Toby of Ships.” The very next day her ship was attacked by Algerian pirates. She put down her baby, jumped out of bed, grabbed a musket, and joined her men in the battle.

  • Granuaile was jailed by British authorities for two years. Once she left prison, she was immediately assaulted by a small army of sailors seeking revenge for earlier clashes with her. She overpowered them all and sailed off.

  That last point, her clash with England, was a harbinger of the main conflict of her life. Ireland at the time was a divided collection of 60 squabbling countries, a fact the English were quick to exploit. By playing the tribes off one another, slowly the English began to establish their own power base. In response, Granuaile and her husband united a huge number of clans under one banner and resisted the English. Contemporary documents describe her as “nurse to all rebellions in the province for this forty years.”

  The back-and-forth between her and the English governor Richard Bingham became increasingly brutal. Bingham orchestrated her second husband’s death. She killed two dozen of his soldiers and burned down a number of castles. He burned her lands, killed her cattle, and got one of her own sons to turn on her. She took to the sea and started living as a nomadic exile. The final straw came when Bingham discovered her extensive network of secret ports and impounded most of her fleet.

  At this point, when Granuaile was in her sixties and living on the lam, she concocted an amazing plan: she sidestepped Bingham and met with his boss, Queen Elizabeth. The meeting between the two elderly queens is, in itself, the stuff of legend. When Elizabeth offered the barefoot Irish pirate queen a silk handkerchief, she is said to have used it and then thrown it into a fire. Noting the horrified faces of the English court, O’Malley remarked that in Ireland they did not carry dirty things around with them.

  The meeting got Granuaile everything she wanted: orders for Bingham to leave her alone, official dispensation for her to run Irish waters, lower taxes, and—as a special treat—the privilege of delivering the news to Bingham personally. And so, at 65 years old, Granuaile began pirating again, and she continued to do so until her death.

  • ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •

  The baby at Granuaile’s side is using a handkerchief as a bib—a reference to both young Toby’s tender age and his mother’s general disrespect for Queen Elizabeth’s finery.

  The cliffs in the background are modeled after Ireland’s famous Cliffs of Moher, which Granuaile actually held in her dominion. They may be more familiar to some movie-watchers as the Cliffs of Insanity from The Princess Bride.

  Granuaile is seen here wearing a dress, despite its general impracticality on a seafaring vessel, because it was likely what she actually did wear. Not just because it was proper for a queen, but because even the men of the time wore similar outfits (i.e., kilts).

  The practice of a “trial year” for a marriage was not uncommon in olden Ireland, nor was divorce. At the end of the trial marriage, it was traditional for women to get back some of the dowry they’d brought into the arrangement. This was precisely the main reason why Granuaile took her second husband’s castle for herself—since it was her second marriage, she was not allowed a return on her dowry, so she took one for herself.

  “Stagecoach” Mary Fields

  (1832–1914, UNITED STATES)

  The Baddest Postal Worker in the Wild West

  Stagecoach” Mary Fields was not anyone’s first choice for a babysitter.

  At six foot two inches and in her fifties, Mary Fields was famous across Montana for many things—smoking cigars, getting into bar brawls, fighting off wolves to deliver the mail, habitually packing a pistol under her apron, and having a specially granted legal ex
emption allowing her to drink in saloons—but raising kids? Not so much.

  Which is really quite unfair. She loved children, and they loved her back. Even before she started offering her services as a babysitter for $1.50 a day, she had a long history of working with children. Both in her early life as a slave and her post-emancipation life as a free woman, she worked with nuns, helping with household chores and looking after little ones. Whenever she celebrated her birthday—twice a year, since she didn’t know the date—the town of Cascade, Montana, would shut down the schools so she could treat the local kids to a party.

  But to many adults and even some children, Mary was no more than her roughest edges. Echoing the more pointed public sentiment on her, one child wrote in an essay that she “drinks whiskey, and she swears, and she is a republican, which makes her a low, foul creature.”*

  All of which was true, save the foul creature bit. While Mary was a warm and loving person, she also liked to get her drink on and wasn’t about to take lip from anyone. For example, she worked at the local mission for over ten years,* during much of which time she served as the foreman for its construction efforts. Some construction workers didn’t take well to working for a woman—so Mary quickly resolved the situation by punching the dissenters in the teeth. This rancor escalated until she was fired. According to legend, the bishop had to let her go after finding bullet holes in his laundry from one of her construction worker duels.

  Once she left the mission, she tried several other jobs. She tried emphasizing her kinder nature by setting up a restaurant. Unfortunately, it went under within a year, because she’d serve meals to anyone, even those unable to pay.

  After the restaurant, she became a postal carrier, one of the first women in the nation to do so. This was an utterly terrifying job. The temperature in Montana could dip to 45 below zero, and snowstorms would force Mary to leave her coach stranded in the snow, heft the mailbags over her shoulder, and walk upwards of 10 miles to town. On one occasion, a blizzard overtook her and she had to walk back and forth all night to keep from freezing to death. On another, she was attacked by a pack of wolves and her vehicle was knocked over—so she stayed up all night, fighting them off. But she never missed a delivery in her eight years on the job.

  And this was while she was in her sixties, mind you.

  In her seventies, Mary’s life quieted down some, but not much, when she retired from postal work and started a laundromat. Still essentially kind, she spent much of her time growing bouquets of flowers for the Cascade baseball team, giving them to players who made home runs—but she’d also slug anyone who had a bad word to say about the hometown team. When a laundromat customer neglected to pay his $2 bill, she, by now a senior citizen, knocked him flat with one punch and declared his laundry bill paid.

  Years after her death, Mary Fields was eulogized by fellow Montana resident Gary Cooper, one of the biggest movie stars of the time, with a glowing biography reprinted across a number of magazines. In it, he described her, quite accurately, as “one of the freest souls to ever draw a breath, or a .38.”

  • ART NOTES •

  Mary’s regular uniform, as depicted here, was all men’s clothing, save an apron and a skirt.

  In the background, you can see a heap of dead wolves around a knocked-over stagecoach, as well as the laundromat customer, flat on his butt.

  The chicken is a callback to her time with the nuns. During that period, she was in charge of 400 chickens. One day, she found that a skunk had killed 62 of her brood, so she in turn killed it with a hoe and carried it to the mission, a mile away. When the bishop asked, “Did the skunk spray you?” Mary replied, “Oh no, Father, I attacked and killed him from the front, not the rear.”

  Yennenga

  (EARLY 12TH CENTURY, BURKINA FASO/GHANA)

  The Warrior Who Just Wanted to Have Kids

  Once upon a time, there was a princess of the Dagomba named Yennenga.* Her father, the king, was utterly delighted with her—and why wouldn’t he be? She was a powerful warrior and a skilled leader of the royal guards, so brave she was described as a lioness “with stubborn chin and flowing mane.”* She made his granaries and treasuries overflow with the goods brought back from her raids. She was so beautiful that praise singers compared her to an “open parasol” and a “gingerbread palm.” She was so perfect, in fact, that he could not find a single man worthy of her: each suitor who came by, he decided, was too fat, or too thin, or too smart, or too dumb, or . . . you get the idea.

  But Yennenga was a teenager. And what do teenagers do? They rebel.

  Yennenga’s rebellion took an unusual form: a huge field of okra. After planting the vegetables, she let them go bad, untended in the open. She then brought her father to the rotting field of produce and said, “This is what you’re doing to me. I just want to settle down and marry, just want to hear a child laugh. But I’m withering on the vine.” Her father listened closely, taking her viewpoint under careful consideration, and then did what fathers since time immemorial have done with rebellious teens: locked her in her room.

  Shortly thereafter, Yennenga fled on horseback, dressed as a man. After riding for weeks, she came across a solitary elephant hunter named Riale, who, thinking her a man, welcomed her into his hut. They sat up for days, talking like fellow elephant-hunting bros. However, her disguise didn’t hold up forever, and once the truth was revealed, Riale let her in on a secret of his own: he too was runaway royalty. His father, king of the Mande, had been killed by Riale’s brother in a coup. Rather than take on the odorous task of killing his own brother, Riale had run away to live in exile.

  Shortly thereafter, the two fell in love—after all, how could Yennenga have resisted a guy who hunted elephants with nothing but javelins and arrows? They named their son Ouedraogo (“Stallion”), after the flight his mother had taken from her homeland.

  When Ouedraogo turned 17, Yennenga decided that he should meet her father—his grandfather—so that he might have a connection to his ancestors. In spite of the 20 years that had passed, Yennenga was scared that her father might still be angry at her . . . or worse yet, not remember her! But when they saw each other, it was like no time at all had passed, and her father welcomed her back with open arms.

  Ouedraogo learned much from his grandfather, who taught him “a thousand and three things.” The first thousand things, every ruler knows. Part of the standard ruler introductory kit. The last three, though? To see beauty in the world and say it is ugly; to get up in the morning and do what you cannot do; and to give free rein to your dreams, because those who dream too much become victims of their dreams.

  Ouedraogo founded the first Mossi kingdom in what is modern-day Burkina Faso, and his sons started many more tribes—all of which recognize Yennenga as their common ancestor. To this day, both Ouedraogo and Yennenga are common names in Burkina Faso, and a great many streets and buildings are named after Yennenga herself.

  Annie Jump Cannon

  (1863–1941, UNITED STATES)

  The Astronomer Who Heard the Stars Calling

  Annie Jump Cannon’s middle-class Victorian-era biography could have easily gone something like this:

  • Mom teaches her piano.

  • She gets a high school education.

  • Marries some dude.

  • Babies everywhere.

  • The end!

  But thankfully for the field of astronomy (and humanity at large), Annie led a less conventional life:

  • Mom says “screw piano” and sneaks Annie up to the attic to stargaze. By her teens, Annie has memorized a working map of the night sky.

  • Seeing how much she likes school, her parents send her to college (!).

  • When some beaus come callin’, Annie nopes off to study astronomy in grad school.

  • Stars everywhere.

  • The beginning!

  Annie’s story begins in earnest around age 33, when she became a Harvard Computer. The Harvard Computers were an all-female team of a
stronomy analysts who worked for Edward Pickering in the early 1900s. As the story goes, Pickering, as head of the Harvard Observatory, became so fed up with a (male) grad student’s incompetence that he hired his maid to prove that even she could do better—only to find out that she was a bona fide genius. After that, he hired only women, reasoning that they were better at detailed work.

  At the time, though, they were largely referred to as “Pickering’s Harem.” Sigh. Early 1900s academics, you suck.

  Annie quickly became a phenomenal astronomer. Tasked with classifying stars based on a huge catalog of astronomic spectography, Annie quickly realized that the classification system they were using was woefully inadequate—so she made her own. Whereas previously all stars had been lumped into categories of A, B, and C, she came up with the classification system of O, B, A, F, G, K, M, R, N, S,* which has been remembered for years now with the mnemonic of “Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me right now, sweet.” By 1910, Annie’s system had become the de facto standard, and with minor modifications, it remains so to this day.

  Annie became scarily good at her job. At the peak of her career, she could classify three stars per minute, which led to her cataloging upwards of 350,000 over her lifetime. For reference’s sake, Williamina Fleming, the aforementioned bona fide genius, cataloged only 10,000. Not only was she fast, but Annie remembered all of her work. When offhandedly asked for a photo of a specific star, she instantly knew, out of tens of thousands of plates, the exact one to pick up (Plate I 37311).