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

by Jason Porath

  Around Christmas, Bly finally received word that she was in a race with Bisland. Shortly thereafter, her progress ground to a halt when the boat was caught in a typhoon. The superstitious sailors, feeling McGinty’s presence was to blame, wanted to throw the monkey overboard. She did not allow it.

  Bisland blasted through the Middle East without incident and was on to France when she ran into bad news: she’d missed her next connection. As the travel agent who’d boarded her train told her, because of delays caused by an anal-retentive Italian customs agent, the top-of-the-line steamship that she was to board next was not able to wait for her.

  Scrambling to put together an alternative route, Bisland eventually hopped on a train to London. What she didn’t know was that the steamboat was actually waiting for her. The travel agent had given her false information. His identity, and the identity of whoever gave him his orders, was never determined.

  Now in a race she feared she’d lose, Bly too was facing impossible setbacks. Finally back on American shores after a brutal journey, she found that the entire Western rail system was shut down by the largest snow blockade in the history of the United States. Eastern California reported drifts up to 20 feet deep, and Nevada drifts were 30 to 60 feet deep. Dozens had already died, and some train passengers—including a correspondent for the World—escaped dire fates only by skiing to safety.

  Bly’s salvation came from her employer’s willingness to spend a ludicrous amount of money. In order to bypass the snow by sending her on a southern route through New Mexico, the World chartered a train and made sure it was given the right of way ahead of everyone. This included pulling stunts like sending the train over a barely finished bridge. The ploy worked, but proved hugely costly—more so than the rest of the trip combined.

  On January 25, 1890, 72 days after she’d left, Nellie Bly arrived back in New York City to thunderous applause. She’d beaten Bisland.

  The remainder of Bisland’s trip saw one calamity after another. After arriving in London, she found out that the ship she’d planned to take had been swapped out for a much slower one, owing to mechanical problems. Compounding this was the worst Atlantic weather in years on the return journey. She arrived in New York on January 30, having still beaten the 80-day deadline, but definitely in second place. Her editor went on the attack, blaming Bisland but also claiming that the World had sent the rogue travel agent who threw off her trip. Even after Cosmopolitan filed a lawsuit, the truth was never uncovered.

  After her win, Bly’s fame skyrocketed to new heights. The clothes she’d traveled in became a fashion trend. Kids were named after her. She had her own board game, her own songs. She went on the talk circuit. She was now one of the most famous women in the world.

  But with fame came a dark side. Finding herself unable to do undercover work because of her fame—and finding the niche filled by her numerous imitators—she switched to fiction writing, but did not succeed at it. Soon at odds with the entire publishing establishment (and depressed besides), Bly left New York.

  At 31, Nellie married a 73-year-old millionaire. She took over his metal manufacturing plant and became an inventor and leading industrialist. However, she proved a less-than-savvy businesswoman, and employee embezzlement sank the company. In her final years, she dabbled in journalism and charity work before dying at age 57 of pneumonia.

  Bisland took a very different path. At the height of the American press’s interest in her, she moved to London. There she settled into the intellectual circles she’d always adored and met her husband. They were together for 30 years, during which time she made her living writing books, including early feminist critiques. After her husband became ill, Bisland began volunteering as a nurse, then went on to offer nursing help during World War I. She too died of pneumonia, in 1929 at age 67. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York City—the same resting place as her onetime rival, Nellie Bly.

  Trung Trac and Trung Nhi

  (1ST CENTURY CE, VIETNAM)

  The Sisters Who Stomped China

  Way back in 40 CE, Vietnam was in one of the toughest spots in its history. Conquered by China 150 years earlier, it had recently been put under the purview of the cruel Su Ting.* The new governor levied heavy taxes, violently quashed dissent, and was, by all accounts, putting together a strong case for being Asia’s biggest sentient butthole. In the words of a 15th-century Vietnamese poem, “all the male heroes bowed their heads in submission; only the two sisters proudly stood up to avenge the country.”

  The sisters in question were Trung Trac and Trung Nhi. The daughters of a local lord, they had every reason to hate the Chinese. The sisters Trung had been oppressed by foreign overlords their entire lives, and their suffering had recently come to a head when Thi Sach, the beloved husband of Trung Trac, died at the hands of the Chinese.

  Overcome with rage, the sisters gathered together tens of thousands of soldiers—many of whom were led by other female generals—and expelled the Chinese. Among their lady allies were Le Chan, whose family had been killed when she refused to marry Su Ting, and Phung Thi Chinh, who gave birth in the middle of battle. According to legend, after having her baby, Phung strapped it to her back and continued fighting. In all, the Trung forces took 65 strongholds from the Chinese.

  Thereafter, the Trungs established a new kingdom, with Trung Trac on the throne. They abolished the cruel laws and onerous taxes they’d previously lived under, but their rule, sadly, was short-lived. The Chinese general Ma Yuan came back three years later with an enormous army and overwhelmed the fledgling Vietnamese nation. The Trungs either died in battle or committed suicide, depending on the source.

  In fact, the story about the Trungs, the earliest folk heroes of Vietnam, changes rather a lot depending on the source and has evolved significantly over time. Early versions stressed that their motivation was primarily to avenge Trung Trac’s husband and made them so frustratingly modest that multiple people were required to encourage them to take the reins. Su Ting’s level of villainy is also highly variable, ranging from merely raising taxes to sacrificing his own children to save his own life. Modern versions, especially ones published after Vietnam’s 1976 reunification, emphasize how everyone in Vietnam, including the Trungs’ mom, got in on the revolution—a call to arms to get behind the same cultural identity.

  Regardless of the specifics of the actual history, the sisters Trung are some of the first Vietnamese figures in recorded history, and some of the most highly revered. Moreover, as their role has expanded in the popular consciousness, they’ve become perennial idols to Vietnamese girls everywhere—and a reminder to everyone that a pissed-off woman is nothing to trifle with.

  Yaa Asantewaa

  (C. 1830–1921, GHANA [ASANTE CONFEDERACY])

  Queen Mother of the Golden Stool

  The war started because of a pair of pasty English butt cheeks.

  Said cheeks were attached to Sir Frederick Hodgson, colonial administrator for the Gold Coast and culturally illiterate scumwad. The setting was a meeting between him and the Asante Confederacy. After nearly a century of conflict between the British and the Asante, Hodgson deftly extended a diplomatic bridge of understanding by demanding to rest his sweaty rear on the Asante’s most sacred cultural artifact, the Golden Stool. He graciously barked, “Where is the Golden Stool?! Why am I not sitting on it at this moment?!”

  After the meeting (in which he was not allowed to sit on the stool that represented the very soul of the Asante), many of the shocked Asante leaders left wordlessly. Not so with Nana Yaa Asantewaa.* Shouting that she would not listen one more second to the British, she laid down a challenge to her fellow leaders: “If you, the chiefs of Asante, are going to behave like cowards and not fight, you should exchange your loin cloths for my undergarments.”*

  The war* against the British started five days later, with Yaa Asantewaa in charge of the armies.

  The British absolutely had it coming, as their relations with the Asante Confederacy represented
the most despicable nadir of their worldwide colonial efforts. Years earlier, after multiple wars, Prempeh I (the head of the Asante Confederacy) had begun working with the British wholeheartedly, agreeing that the Asante would become a British protectorate. Far from welcoming this news with open arms, the British replied with a series of baffling and brutal acts: they arrested Prempeh I and his closest 30 advisers, exiling them 4,000 miles away in the Seychelles. The British then refused to hear from any Asante-hired lawyers.

  The English brutishness continued well beyond these acts. They actually dissolved the Asante Confederacy, destroying the hard work that had brought together its component nations. In subsequently negotiating treaties one on one with each of the subnations, the British inflamed old hatreds and turned the factions against each other. The British went on to give missionaries free rein to proselytize, wrecked the Asante economy,* and demanded compulsory (read: slave) labor from the Asante on work projects designed by and for their foreign overlords.

  A telling example of the British opinion of the Asante came in a newspaper editorial from 1873. The author said that, “if by any lucky chance [the British governor] manages to catch a good mob of savages in the open, and at a moderate distance, he cannot do any better than treat them to a little Gatling [gun] music.”

  Yaa Asantewaa was acting far differently than most Asante women in her desire to fight. While women were highly respected in Asante society, they usually served as diplomats and judges. Their traditional contribution to war was to perform ritual dances and shame war-dodgers into suicide with insulting songs (a tradition reminiscent of the “sitting on a man” custom detailed in Nwanyeruwa’s entry). For a woman to take control of Asante armies, for the first time in history, was to shame the entire country’s men into fighting. It was a testament to the Asante’s true hatred of the British.

  Much to the shock of the British, Yaa Asantewaa’s warriors thoroughly trounced the colonialist soldiers. Although the British were much better armed and trained, the Asante took tremendous advantage of the terrain. They would stage ambushes, snipe from trees, and, most effectively, stage blockades. The Asante routinely built massive wooden structures that the British could not shoot through. From behind these walls, the Asante would fire their rifles through small openings, then lie flat on the ground and reload—leading the British to return fire at the wrong area.

  Unfortunately, the blockades, while a great source of strength, also had severe downsides. Limited mobility and a fractured communications system made each blockade an island unto itself. The blockade commanders could not easily signal for reinforcements, coordinate attacks, or go on the offensive.

  For five months, from April to September 1900, the Asante fought the British in earnest. They laid siege to the capital city of Kumasi for a month and a half, cutting telegraph wires and freeing prisoners. However, when British reinforcements arrived in mid-July, the tide turned. On September 30, the Asante fought their last major battle and were defeated. Although the British conquered the Asante, the Golden Stool remained hidden for decades. After the war, Yaa Asantewaa was captured and exiled to the Seychelles, where she died 21 years later.

  Her legacy has evolved in the years since. Ghana (the location of the former Asante Confederacy) was the first African nation to declare independence from England, and its government latched on to Yaa Asantewaa’s image as a national symbol. In their rush to venerate Yaa Asantewaa, Ghanian politicians have smoothed over many of her rougher edges. She is portrayed as only fighting for the confederacy as a whole, with little mention of her intention to position her subnation of Edweso over others after the fighting. As with so many political figures in so many nations before her, the historical record has rarely gotten in the way of political maneuvering.*

  Her fame has spread even beyond the borders of her native Ghana. All over the world, but particularly in the United States, as historian T. C. McCaskie points out, black women have taken to identifying with Yaa Asantewaa, with some even going so far as to name themselves and their children after her. Across the Internet, people sell T-shirts and posters depicting her, and white men who’ve never even been to Ghana include her in books about unconventional heroines.*

  • ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •

  The gourd and spilled water here are a reference to Yaa Asantewaa’s practice of pouring out water for magic rites to give her troops an advantage in battle.

  Her outfit is based on the ceremonial war dress (batakarikese) that she’s seen wearing in one of the few surviving pictures of her.

  Although she did apparently raise and fire a gun in one of the early meetings of chieftains, most assume she did not actually participate in battle, instead handling the logistics and strategy from a distance.

  Gertrude Bell

  (1868–1926, IRAQ [MESOPOTAMIA]/ENGLAND)

  Mesopotamia’s Uncrowned Queen

  After World War I, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled and Britain began drawing new borders for the Middle East, the administrators hit a snag. The British barely had any maps of the area, and nobody could say with real confidence what tribes lived where, or with whom they had ongoing feuds. Into this mess came an unexpected champion, bringing detailed maps and a nigh-encyclopedic knowledge of the region: explorer/archaeologist/badass Gertrude Bell, described as “one of the few representatives of His Majesty’s Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection.”

  Before the war began, Gertrude Lowthian Bell had already lived a life utterly alien to most women of that time. She’d adventured on horseback for years through the Bedouin camps, royal palaces, and bustling marketplaces of the Middle East—always by herself, save for the helpers she’d hire. And this was after a short career as the world’s greatest female mountaineer, during which she was successful enough to have a Swiss mountain (Gertrudespitze) named after her. The woman who would come to draw the boundaries of Iraq and fiercely safeguard the artifacts of its history even became an adviser to none other than Winston Churchill. She was, to quote one biography, “the most powerful and respected woman of the British empire.”

  Bell did not come from humble origins—far from it. Born into England’s sixth-richest family, this “social hand grenade” didn’t allow anyone or anything to hold her back. In the Victorian era, when doctors warned that too much thinking would hurt a girl’s brain and make her barren (claims that date back to Christine de Pizan’s heyday centuries earlier), she not only went to college but also received the highest academic marks possible. She would berate male teachers when she felt they needed it and made herself a hero to her female friends.

  After graduation, Bell fell in love with the Middle East and would spend almost two decades traveling there extensively. She accrued some serious skills: fluency in Arabic (in a myriad of dialects), Farsi, French, and German; proficiency in Hindustani and Japanese; expertise in cartography and archaeology; and mastery of photography. Between 1905 and 1914, she took almost 7,000 photos with her trusty (if finicky) Kodak camera, capturing on film for the first time numerous landmarks that had never been mapped or visited by Westerners. She was beloved by virtually every local she met, many of whom took her to be a literal queen. When she was given a rare hostile welcome and held hostage by one powerful tribe, she demanded to be let go and they did just that.

  In such a lifetime of accomplishments, Bell’s early career in mountaineering could almost be overlooked were it not for her unbelievable achievements in that arena. In an era before specialized clothing and gear, she scrambled up rocky cliffs in only her undergarments and showed unreal calm in hazardous circumstances: for instance, when she was trapped by an avalanche for more than a day and sure she would not make it down alive, she kept her cool and somehow escaped.

  Despite her rough-and-tumble lifestyle, she kept a very feminine appearance. Unlike her contemporary Jane Dieulafoy, she never wore pants or attempted to disguise her gender—instead, she flaunted it. Although often residing deep in the desert, she was up to date on fas
hion and even kept a collection of fine china available for meals with dignitaries. Which is not to say she was squeamish: she did not flinch at drinking muddy water or local delicacies like camel’s milk.

  Bell’s relationship to her own gender was, however, fairly complicated. Frustrated by the lack of serious concern by the women of the British aristocracy (“the devil take all inane women,” she wrote), she was very active in anti-suffrage circles. While she thought herself the equal of any man, she did not feel all women were. And despite her unconventional activities, she personally was quite socially conservative. Both times she fell in love in her life she refused to break the rules of propriety. Her father forbade her to see the first man; the second was trapped in a loveless marriage that Gertrude refused to violate, despite the husband’s desire to do so. Gertrude died a virgin.

  Around 1915, she put her energies toward the formation of the nation that would become Iraq. Recruited to the position of Oriental secretary by the British High Commissioner of Iraq, Bell was the only woman in a cabinet of men. She was clearly one of the most experienced on the cabinet. A young T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, once tried impressing her with his accomplishments. She responded by calling his methods of archaeology “prehistoric” and taking him under her wing to show him how things should really be done.