by Jason Porath
Born Freda J. McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, Josephine had a tough childhood. As the one light-skinned (possibly half-white*) child in a desperately poor black household, she didn’t fit in even at home. Put out to work as a maid by an exasperated mother, she suffered hideous abuse from her employers—from beatings to scaldings to sexual assault. Her only refuge was the theater, where she became “Josephine.”
The theater was a perfect outlet for her intense energy. While Josephine’s family certainly didn’t appreciate her bringing snakes to funerals, and her first husband certainly didn’t enjoy getting hit in the face with a beer bottle,* onstage her wild dancing and cross-eyed clowning netted her legions of fans. Her fellow performers were often not among those fans—she had no compunctions about bolting onstage when it suited her, upstaging whoever was mid-act. While her behavior was far from polite, standing out catapulted her to stardom.
Josephine made her name in Paris, where she danced in skimpy outfits in some of the same venues that Mata Hari had graced years earlier. She constantly traded up to higher-profile gigs, often betraying friends in the process.* In a few short years, she was the first internationally famous black movie starlet, a distinction that brought with it enormous sums of money. According to one newspaper, she was the richest black woman in the world.
It’s difficult to capture the eccentricity of Baker’s life at its height. She owned countless animals—monkeys, cheetahs, a gorilla she dressed in human clothes and took for walks, even an ostrich that pulled her around in a carriage while she was on tour. She’d regularly visit the downtrodden of Paris and shower them with expensive gifts. She once crashed a new car, got out to sign autographs, and went home, leaving the wreckage for someone else to clean up.
Baker left even more wreckage in her love life. As befits someone who spent as much time as possible naked, she had untold scores of lovers, both male and female. After shows, she’d regularly take whoever struck her fancy to a hotel across the street, in full view of everyone. By the end of her life, she’d had four husbands,* two of whom were almost exclusively attracted to men. Almost. (As her son and chief biographer described it, she liked the challenge.)
After World War II broke out, Baker dropped everything and became a spy to help her beloved France. As an internationally famous woman with myriad connections, she was able to easily smuggle information across borders. Sometimes this was in invisible ink in the margins of her musical sheets, and sometimes she would just write on her hand.
The war lit a fire in her to do more with her life than perform, and she thereafter pursued the cause of civil rights fervently. She was the only woman to speak at the March on Washington, shortly before Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. This and other outspoken alliances (including a friendship with Fidel Castro) netted her a 1,000-page FBI file. She was determined to provide a shining example of racial equality and, unable to have children herself, did so by adopting 12 children of varying ethnicity—her “Rainbow Tribe.”
This next chapter of her life—Baker as mother—was troubled. She bought property in the south of France, a grand fairy-tale castle that she was determined to make into a theme park.* But with her plans only half-baked at best, and her career stalling, she soon began to run out of money. Despite many donations from wealthy benefactors, she was eventually evicted.
In the twilight years of her life, she staged a number of comeback shows, including one before a packed Carnegie Hall. Then in her sixties and increasingly prone to injury, she was no less audacious—she wore fishnets and revealing outfits all the way to the end. She died of a brain hemorrhage at age 67, leaving behind a legacy that even Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Angelina Jolie combined could not hope to attain.
Dhat al-Himma
(8TH-CENTURY ARABIAN MYTH)
Woman of High Resolve
You know you’re in for a treat when the name of a story’s protagonist, depending on your translation, means either “woman of high resolve” or “she-wolf.” You know it’s going to be even better when you learn that she earned that title only after a period in which she was known as “calamity of the soul.” The best is when you realize the story is thousands of pages long and yet she defeats bad guys in battle and rescues helpless men every couple of pages.
Dhat al-Himma was born into a rough situation. Her father and uncle, both high-ups in the Banu Kilab tribe (aka Kilabites—tragically, they did not fight tribes called Megabites or Gigabites), were arguing over succession. They had a bet that whoever had a boy first would gain control. When Dhat al-Himma (or Fatima, as she was initially named) was born, she was secretly given away because she wasn’t male. Her father then claimed that Fatima had been a boy, but died, thus keeping a claim on the throne, at the expense of poor Fatima.
Soon thereafter, Fatima was taken captive by a rival tribe. However, she didn’t kowtow to her new guardians. Instead of doing the normal activities expected of women, she busied herself with learning horsemanship (at one point she broke a wild horse just by shouting at it), forging weapons out of reeds, and practicing swordplay.
All of these skills came in handy when one of her captors began sexually harassing her. The first time he came by she complained to the tribal chief. The second time she chased him off with rocks and complained again—this time getting special dispensation to retaliate if he tried it again. (“I was just joking around,” he retorted.) The third time she pulled him from his horse and killed him with his own sword.
This murder, committed in broad daylight, unsurprisingly brought forward a batch of new problems: namely, the harasser’s family felt they were owed something for his death. Because the chief had okayed it, he was on the line for a thousand camels. It’s at this point that Fatima comes to be known as “calamity of the soul.”
“Chief,” she said, “don’t worry. Just give me some armor, a sword, and a horse, and I’ll take care of things.” Take care of things she did: soon she came back with 4,000 camels that she’d taken in a raid. Pretty quickly Fatima was put in charge of running raids.
Over the next several years, she became infamous for her raids, reunited with her father (after defeating him in battle and taking him prisoner), and rejoined the Kilabites. At this point, she came into the final evolution of her name, Amira (princess) Dhat al-Himma (“woman of high resolve”)—which is likely a corruption of Delhemma, or “she-wolf.”
Unfortunately, once she was reintegrated into her birth tribe, her uncle became hell-bent on marrying her off to Hadith, the son he’d managed to produce. Yes, he wanted her to marry her first cousin. Her level of enthusiasm for the match was somewhere between “nil” and “zilch.” She told her father that “only my sword, my coat of mail, and my battle gear will lie with me,” and if her father mentioned it again, she’d go live in the desert.
Hadith, apparently not being of the “no means no” school of romance, decided to challenge her in battle for the right to marry her. She beat him handily, knocking him off his horse. It was only after Hadith and his dad got a caliph to intervene with a religious argument that Dhat al-Himma was finally convinced. This was because she was extremely devout—for a period during her captivity, she was actually known as Shariha the Pious (she had a lot of names).
So she did get married to Hadith, but refused to even sleep in the same bed as her new husband. Hadith, being a grade-A a-hole, drugged, raped, and impregnated her. When Dhat al-Himma woke up, she was scorched-earth furious. She immediately tried to kill Hadith, and was only narrowly stopped by her father. She let Hadith go, but swore then and there to end his life.
Don’t worry, it happened.
She gave birth to a mysteriously dark-skinned son, whom Hadith promptly disowned. She took her son, Abd al-Wahhab, under her wing and taught him martial arts, going so far as to disguise herself and attack him in the night (as you do). When she decided he’d become a great warrior, she let him loose to do his first great deed: kill his contemptible father and grandfather.
Told you
it would happen.
From there, Dhat al-Himma went on to decades of adventures with her son and a trickster pal named Abu Muhammad al-Battal. She defeated countless warriors (male and female), disguised herself to sneak into enemy camps, and even endured numerous wounds and instances of torture. Her primary antagonist was a duplicitous judge named Uqba, whom she finally saw publicly executed.
Is the story of Dhat al-Himma fully true? No. But it isn’t fully false either. Her story gets at the basic truth of the day and covers the transition from the Abbasid dynasty to the Umayyad. Was Dhat al-Himma real? Hard to say, but in the minds of the generations that grew up on her story, it didn’t matter: she was an awesome, sword-slinging, pious heroine.
• ART NOTES •
Dhat al-Himma is here pictured swinging into battle. This was one of her trademarks—unlike her straightforward son, Abd al-Wahhab, she would sneak up on her enemies.
The knee to Uqba’s face is dislodging a secret cross necklace, revealing him as a Christian. In contrast, Dhat al-Himma has a crescent on her helmet.
The wolf in the background quietly untying al-Wahhab and Battal seemed like an appropriate sidekick to someone whose name depicted her as a she-wolf.
Many of the mob attacking her are warrior women.
Alice Clement
(1878–1926, UNITED STATES)
Detective. Movie Star. Suffragist.
Chicago in the early 1900s was a rough town. With gangsters like Al Capone running the place, the populations of all manner of criminals surged, including one group that the police were unprepared to handle: women. With the public outraged over images of the all-male police force manhandling female shoplifters, fortune-tellers, pickpockets, and the like, the mayor ordered the cops to hire women.
Little did they know they’d get Alice Clement. A star detective who became one of their greatest assets—and one of their biggest headaches—their gun-wielding, jujitsu-practicing “female Sherlock Holmes” was unlike anyone they’d hired before.
Which isn’t to say she started out like that. The environment they operated in was tremendously difficult on the new female employees. During training, a male policeman hazed them by tossing a white rat into their midst to see how they reacted (nobody moved). During a press conference, a reporter asked a sexist question, using old-timey slang for “arrest”: “How would you make a pinch? Use tweezers?”
But Clement rose above it and made a name for herself as a uniquely female detective. The newspapers of the day engrossed themselves with descriptions of the massive wardrobe she used for undercover disguises. They delighted in descriptions of her sleeping with a gun under her pillow and traveling with shackles and handcuffs in her overnight bag, and they especially reveled in her unconventional personal life. By 1918, she’d divorced her first husband and remarried, having a female pastor perform the ceremony.
While Clement started her career by catching pickpockets—at one point claiming to have stopped a gang of them in which the average age was eight years old—her real glory came in combating “mashers.” Mashers were a plague of sexual harassers rampant at the time. A typical example would be Joseph Withers, whose “acting school” included lessons on making a “knee skirt,” which newspapers described as an “intricate achievement consisting in elevating the garment to the point mentioned.” Clement tossed his butt in jail.
While she was very successful at arresting mashers, the legal system, in a depressing sign of the times, often found her at fault. Years into her life as a detective, when one of her arrestees was acquitted on grounds of entrapment, Clement retorted, “What would you expect from a jury of men?” Two years later, though, her patience had grown thin. When a judge dismissed yet another masher and blamed her for flirting with him, she hit the judge in the head with a blackjack, threatened to file a defamation suit, and announced she would not rest until she received an apology. It’s unclear if she ever got one.
This was far from the only time that she got into fights with legal figures. By 1919, she’d become so famous in the newspapers for her daring arrests—they printed accounts of her many, sometimes fictional adventures, casting her in a similar mold as muckraking journalist Nellie Bly—that she wrote and starred in her own movie. Dregs of the City was a sensational look at a fictional Alice Clement saving a naive country girl from a shady opium den. But on the eve of its opening, the Chicago PD, annoyed by her showboating ways, prevented it from being released.
Clement’s response was possibly the most audacious act in a life already dripping in chutzpah: she sued the city, earned a three-month furlough, and went on a road trip to promote the movie anyway.
This, shockingly, did not endear her to the powers-that-be, and in 1926 she was demoted to a menial post at the West Chicago police station. She left shortly thereafter and began a precipitous medical decline. Typical for Clement, who did not want anyone to see her weakness, she had kept her diagnosis of diabetes from even her close family. She died of the disease that year, December 26, 1926.
• ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •
The PSYCHIC sign (and the CLOSED sign underneath it) is a reference to a case in which Clement shut down a fraudulent psychic. She pursued the psychic alone into a building, only to quickly find a pistol against her chest. Smacking it out of the way, Clement ran to the back door to let in reinforcements and shortly thereafter apprehended her assailant.
In another case, she found a teamster who was beating a horse for no reason. After she informed him that she was a police officer and that he was to cease this animal cruelty, he responded by calling her a liar and threatening her. Clement proceeded to grab her revolver, slap him a half dozen times, and hustle him into a police wagon. Of the event, he reportedly said, “Gee, that dame packs an awful kick in her left.”
As an outspoken and prominent suffragist, she was one of the few in the United States to meet Emmeline Pankhurst. One of the only surviving photos of Clement is actually a group photo with Pankhurst.
One of her cases saw Clement deducing that a young woman had not died randomly but had been murdered by her aunt. Clement figured out that the aunt had poisoned her niece’s dulcimer strings, as she would lick her fingers between plucking the instrument. When Clement confronted the aunt, she killed herself in front of Clement with a pen knife.
Shajar al-Durr
(C. 1220–1257, EGYPT)
The Sultan Who Ransomed a King
Shajar al-Durr had quite the résumé: Muslim sultan who ruled in her own name, stopped the Seventh Crusade dead in its tracks, captured one of the most powerful monarchs in the world and ransomed him back to his own freakin’ country, and, finally, died in rather embarrassing fashion when killed by a group of shoe-wielding assailants.
But that’s jumping ahead. Shajar started life as a Turkic servant, purchased for the sultan of Egypt. Evidently she excelled in that role, as within a year she and the sultan were married with a child. For a while, life was pretty rad for Shajar.
Unfortunately, things took a turn for the crappy when the sultan became ill and died. He could not have picked a worse time to do it either: Louis IX of France had just begun invading Egypt as part of the Seventh Crusade, with the aim of toppling the sultan’s dynasty and using Egypt as a springboard to sack Jerusalem. At this time, France was one of the most powerful countries in the world, and Louis IX was an intimidating ruler, beloved by his people.
So, with a dead husband and an invading army marching on Cairo, what did Shajar do? First she hid the fact that the sultan had died, by saying he wasn’t feeling well and refusing to let anyone into his chambers. Then she quietly took the reins of the country and, with the help of her late husband’s chief commander, prepped for war.
In short order, they stomped out the invaders and took Louis IX prisoner, in an incredibly humiliating defeat for the French. Louis IX had been so certain of his victory that at the beginning of his invasion he sent an incendiary letter to the sultan. This letter served absolutely no diplomatic pur
pose, but simply detailed how Louis was going to crush the sultan. Even if the sultan were to convert to Christianity, Louis crowed, he would still track him down and kill him “at your dearest spot on Earth.”
Well, so much for that plan. Instead, the French forces, heady on a few minor victories, rushed into a town they thought was empty—only to be slaughtered by soldiers and townsfolk who were lying in wait. Concurrently, Egyptian soldiers had carried their boats over land and dropped them behind the French ships in such a fashion as to block French reinforcements. Then the Egyptians torched the Crusaders’ ships with Greek fire. The Egyptians took Louis IX hostage and killed the majority of his forces. Thus ended the Seventh Crusade.
It is hard to state how soul-shattering this outcome was to the French people. To many, the defeat signified that God had forsaken them—some Crusaders actually converted to Islam afterwards. When word of the defeat spread throughout France, it spawned an uprising known as the Shepherds’ Crusade: tens of thousands of farmers lost their minds, left their homes, and headed toward Egypt to rescue their king. They weren’t big on organization, though, and within a couple months they were running around France throwing priests into rivers and setting things on fire instead. Mistakes were made.
In the end, Shajar al-Durr negotiated a treaty to return the captured monarch to his country for 400,000 livres tournois—about 30 percent of France’s total annual revenue.
Stop and think about that. That would be like the president of the United States being captured while on a tour of Iraq, then ransomed back to the US for $5 trillion. That’s borderline unfathomable.
And all of this was orchestrated by a woman. In a Muslim country. In secret. Over the first couple months of her rule.
