by Jason Porath
The efforts of Pankhurst and her allies came to an abrupt halt with the start of World War I. Patriots at heart, the militant suffragettes rallied around the flag, volunteering their help to the war effort.
This made for odd bedfellows: one of Pankhurst’s chief allies was wartime prime minister Lloyd George, whose country house the WSPU had bombed mere months earlier. It was a surprisingly successful partnership. The suffragettes proved a vital workforce and fund-raising group for the government. Pankhurst lobbied for their work to be compensated at pay equal to that of their male counterparts, to some success.
In 1918, due in no small part to the suffragettes’ help with the war effort, Britain granted certain women over the age of 30 the right to vote—enough to quiet much of the movement.
In the absence of a good focus for her energies following the passage of women’s suffrage, Pankhurst grew increasingly difficult and isolated. She had always been a borderline tyrant in her political life, regularly causing political schisms and excommunicating former partners, but after the war she brought this chaotic approach to her own family. Once her daughter Sylvia, who had long been a trusted lieutenant in the WSPU, had a child out of wedlock, the socially prudish Emmeline cut all ties with her. Sylvia joined her sister Adela, whom Emmeline had angrily (and successfully) suggested immigrate to Australia, on Emmeline’s persona non grata list.
Emmeline died in 1928, after years of failing health. Her legacy remains a complicated one. While her presence at the time undoubtedly did much to publicize the cause of women’s suffrage, it’s uncertain how much effect, positive or negative, her actions had on the process. Nevertheless, she was an utterly unique figure, and a month after her death the vote was extended to all women over 21.
• ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •
The women in the image are dressed entirely in purple, white, and green—the colors of the WSPU. Additionally, Pankhurst herself is wearing a medal marked “H24”—a reference to her prison cell and the time she served. Everyone was ordered to dress as properly as possible in order to present themselves as “law makers, not law breakers.”
The scene takes place outside of 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s office. This brawl did actually take place—first at the House of Commons, with 300 women, and several days later at Downing Street, with 200 women.
Other visible suffragettes here are jujitsu instructor Flora “the General” Drummond (on the back of the policeman, dressed in her military regalia) and Sylvia Pankhurst (wrestling a policeman to the ground on the left).
The jujitsu-practicing suffragettes referred to their martial art as “Suffrajitsu,” which is pretty great.
Marjana
(ARABIAN MYTH)
The Slave Girl Who Killed Ali Baba’s 40 Thieves
Most people have heard of “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves”—but it turns out that title is somewhat truncated. The rightful name, which includes the most crucial element of the tale, is “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves Killed by a Slave Girl.”
That slave girl would be Marjana.
The story starts with the familiar elements. Money-bereft pauper Ali Baba is out herding his goats when he spots 40 thieves riding toward him. Bravely hiding himself in a tree (leaving the poor goats to the thieves, the story notes), he witnesses the thieves approaching a rock. They intone “Open sesame,” and the rock opens up, revealing their swanky hangout (awash in treasure and accented by a skylight—they clearly had great interior decorators). Once they leave, Ali sneaks in, steals a bunch of gold, and takes off.
Once he gets home, Ali Baba sets about burying his treasure. His wife insists on weighing it and visits Ali’s well-off (but pretty shady) brother Qasim to borrow a scale. Qasim’s wife coats the scale with sticky wax so that when it’s returned to her a coin will be stuck to the bottom. She realizes Ali is now rolling in the dough and tells Qasim.
Qasim confronts Ali, extorts the location of the cave from him, and heads off to steal some gold for himself. Unfortunately, Qasim can’t remember the password (he tries “Open barley” and various other grains) and is promptly killed by the returning thieves. They cut him up into four pieces to scare off future invaders. Realizing too late that his corpse is going to stink up their hangout, they leave it and head out to kill some time.
You may notice that nobody in this story is vaguely competent. That’s about to change.
At the behest of Qasim’s wife, Ali sets off to find Qasim—despite how terrible he’d been to his brother. Upon fetching Qasim’s four-part corpse, Ali realizes he is in way over his head. So he prevails upon the one person he knows who can fix everything and who thankfully happens to be in Qasim’s employ: his slave, Marjana.
Upon realizing her master is dead, Marjana immediately sets about making it look like he died of natural causes. The next day, she visits the local apothecary and asks for medicine for her poor, ailing, of-course-not-dead master Qasim. Soon after that, she approaches the apothecary again, this time even more upset, wailing that her master is so sick he cannot possibly leave the house. She makes sure a lot of people hear her doing this.
After that rumor has taken hold, Marjana approaches Baba Mustafa, a tailor in the marketplace. She bribes him to come to the house, sew up Qasim’s four parts into one, and keep quiet about it. For good measure, she blindfolds him and spins him around, so he won’t know where she’s taking him. After bringing Baba Mustafa back, she performs cleansing rites on Qasim’s body, arranges to get a coffin, and finds priests to carry out the burial.
Her plan works. Qasim is buried honorably, and Ali Baba takes Qasim’s widow as a second wife. (“My wife won’t be jealous,” he says, a claim that is never verified.) Ali’s family moves into Qasim’s house, and Ali gives Qasim’s business to Ali’s hitherto-unmentioned son.
(No, it is never explained how and why Marjana knew to do all this. Maybe she had done it before? Maybe she had done it many times before.)
Meanwhile, the thieves realize someone absconded with their morbid house decor—someone who knows about their secret cave. They send one of their own into town to find out who.
Unfortunately for the Ali Baba household, said scout approaches the tailor Baba Mustafa immediately—and more unfortunately, Baba Mustafa turns out not only to be a total blabbermouth but also a total freak of nature when it comes to his sense of direction. The thief has not talked to Mustafa for 30 seconds before Mustafa brags that he is such a good tailor, he sewed up a four-part corpse the other day. When pressed as to where he did this, Mustafa can’t rightly say, since he was blindfolded. However, when the thief blindfolds Mustafa again, he is able to remember the exact direction to Qasim’s house, where he deposits the thief. The thief marks the house with white chalk and returns to his compatriots.
Marjana soon comes across the chalk. That’s odd, she thinks to herself. For good measure, let’s just mark up all the other houses on the street with the same marking.
When the thieves come by the next day, they cannot identify the correct house. They leave in a rage and kill the spy they’d first sent in for incompetence. They then send in a second spy, who repeats the steps of the first—bribes Mustafa, blindfolds him, gets led to Qasim’s house, marks it up with a tiny red mark. Marjana finds the red mark and again marks up every house on the street. The thieves, stymied again, kill a second member of their group.
The captain of the thieves (the Thief Chief, if you will) realizes that his minions are, perhaps, not too bright—and that at the rate they’re going, he’s going to run out of henchmen. So he decides to take matters into his own hands. The Thief Chief bribes and blindfolds Mustafa, who by now is quite wealthy. Mustafa leads the Thief Chief to Qasim’s house, and the Thief Chief proceeds to demonstrate his mental acuity by actually memorizing where it is.
He continues his mental gymnastics by hatching a plot: he has his underlings get 38 jars and 19 donkeys. He fills one of the jars with oil and the rest with his sword-wielding thug compatriots. He then disguises him
self as an oil merchant and approaches Ali, asking to stay the night. Ali does not recognize him, and graciously allows him in. The Thief Chief sets up the 38 jars in the stables and instructs his men to wait the night in their cramped enclosures. In the morning, he will toss some pebbles at the jars, at which point they are to cut themselves free and commence murdering.
The Thief Chief did not, of course, reckon on Marjana.
In the middle of the night, while prepping food and laundry for the next day, Marjana runs out of oil. One of the other servants suggests that it’s fine to take a bit of the oil merchant’s wares, so she decides to do just that. However, as she approaches the first jar, the thief inside whispers, “Is it time?” Putting together that (a) there is a guy inside, (b) he is here to kill them, and (c) the merchant is running the show, Marjana imitates the Thief Chief’s voice and says, “Not yet.” She does so with every jar until she finds the jar of oil.
She then boils the entire human-sized jar of oil and pours its horrifying contents into each of the 37 other jars, killing all the assailants in as gruesome a manner as possible.
Early in the morning, the Thief Chief tosses some pebbles at the jars of human barbecue, to no response. Finally, he casually saunters over and inspects the contents, only to be confronted with the reality that everyone he loves is dead and he is alone on this earth. He runs off. Marjana watches him go. Marjana has no need for sleep. Marjana has evolved beyond it.
When Ali Baba gets up, Marjana informs him that his garage is now full of toasty corpses. She also tells him that she thwarted two previous chalk-related attempts on his life as well. And then she serves him breakfast because, let us not forget, taking all night to murder three dozen trained assassins is no excuse for not getting your work done.
Ali sets her free on the spot. For unknown reasons, she chooses to stick around.
The Thief Chief, despondent from the macabre deaths of his friends, decides that he will get revenge on Ali Baba if it is the last thing he ever does. Disguising himself as a merchant again, he sets up shop in the town marketplace. Within a few weeks, he befriends Ali’s son (remember him?) and starts plying him with gifts. In thanks, Ali’s son invites the Thief Chief over for dinner at Ali’s house.
Ali Baba, being a towering paragon of wisdom, once again does not recognize the Thief Chief. Marjana, however, does, largely due to blunders on the Thief Chief’s part. When offered beef stew, he demurs, claiming that he does not eat salt or meat. Infuriated at having to now cook another meal for a surprise vegetarian, Marjana storms out of the kitchen, only to instantly recognize the merchant as the Thief Chief in a lousy disguise.
Thinking quickly, she puts on a dancer’s outfit, tosses a tambourine to another slave, and starts dancing. She dances with a small dagger, which is not uncommon for belly dancers. At the end of the dance, she plunges the dagger into the Thief Chief’s heart and keeps it there until he stops moving. Which is less common for belly dancers.
Ali and son are shocked, but when Marjana produces a dagger from the Thief Chief’s belt and points out that he was the guy who’d tried to kill Ali a mere month ago, all is forgiven. Ali marries her to his son, retrieves the rest of the gold from the now-uninhabited cave, and all live happily ever after. Presumably with Marjana managing everything.
Mai Bhago
(LATE 17TH CENTURY–MID-18TH CENTURY, INDIA)
Savior of the Sikhs
When the dust cleared at the battle of Khidrana, one thing was clear: the Sikh religion had escaped extinction. This was due to the heroics of a ragtag group that came to the Sikhs’ defense at the last minute—all of whom, save one, were now dead. That one? A woman named Mai Bhago.
But let’s take a step back and look at the history of the Sikhs. You probably know that their men wear turbans, don’t shave, and consistently get mistaken for Muslims by ignorant morons. Frustrating as that is, jerks attacking them for virtually no reason is something that Sikhs have had to live with for the majority of their religion’s existence. Exhibit A: the Mughal Empire.
The Mughals were tough customers. Their founder, Babar, had quite the lineage himself: descendant of Tamerlane (an Uzbeki warlord known for constructing pyramids out of his enemies’ skulls) on his father’s side and grandson of Genghis Khan on his mother’s. The Mughals carried on and refined this legacy. On the one hand, they did so militaristically, riding elephants into battle, redefining warfare, and expanding the empire until it encompassed all of present-day India and beyond. On the other hand, they also advanced literature, culture, and the arts tremendously. They built the Taj Mahal and giant libraries and had a tremendously multicultural empire. For more info on that, check out Akbar the Great, who—having brought together a huge number of disparate peoples, including the Sikhs, in a surprisingly peaceful, literary, and secular empire, especially for the time—definitely earned the moniker.
Unfortunately, by the time our story begins, the Mughals were being ruled by Aurangzeb, who was neither peaceful nor understanding. He was particularly aggressive toward the Sikhs, partly for religious reasons, and partly because the Sikhs weren’t down with the caste system. In fact, the Sikhs were egalitarian in general and considered women equal to men.
Which brings us to Mai Bhago.
Mai Bhago lived in a peaceful rural town with her parents. She spent a lot of time with her dad, who, during their daddy-daughter hangouts, taught her what any good father should: how to be a devoted Sikh, how to ride a horse, and how to kill anyone who starts a fight with you. All of these skills came in handy just a few years later when the leader of the Sikh, Guru Gobind Singh Ji, founded the Khalsa—the warrior-saints.
You see, the guru before Gobind Singh Ji—and there were only ever 10 of these guys total—was executed by Aurangzeb when Guru Gobind Singh Ji was only nine years old. Rather than capitulating to Aurangzeb and living a quiet life, the guru ordered his followers to eschew the caste system, forsake their family names, be baptized as warrior-saints, and kick butt for the lord.
Mai Bhago was one of the first to get down on that.
The following years were very difficult on the Sikhs as the Mughals waged nonstop warfare on the guru. As tough as it was on him, it was arguably tougher on his warriors, holed up in fortress after fortress, eventually subsisting on nothing but nuts and leaves. After months of this, 40 of them, with heavy hearts, forsook the religion and left the Khalsa in order to return to their normal lives.
Mai Bhago was not on board with that decision. Upon hearing about the 40 deserters, she rode to every nearby city and convinced all the local women to refuse them hospitality. She even rounded up a group of women to take up arms in the deserters’ place—telling the 40 to either stay behind and look after the children or sack up and fight. Suitably ashamed by this, the 40 deserters had a change of heart.
This happened just in time, because as the 40 (plus Mai Bhago) were riding back to the guru, the Mughals were making another assault on the guru’s stronghold. The size of the army is difficult to determine from historical records, with the only source claiming the Mughals had 10,000 men, which seems a bit ridiculous. In any event, it is agreed that the Sikhs were massively outnumbered.
On December 29, 1705, the 41 Sikhs rushed in to cut off the Mughals anyway. They did several clever things leading up to and during the battle:
• They positioned themselves in front of the Khidrana reservoir, the only source of water for miles around, and defended it viciously.
• They laid sheets across bushes everywhere, giving the appearance of tents—and then hid nearby, ambushing the Mughals when they started attacking the empty “tents.”
• They kicked up a colossal amount of dust, attracting the attention of the retreating guru—who proceeded to unleash an incessant barrage of arrows from a nearby hill upon the Mughals.
Eventually the Mughals, battered and thirsty, withdrew. All 40 of the deserters died in that battle, as did a large number of Mughal soldiers. Mai Bhago was the only Sikh surviv
or. From there, she became bodyguard to the guru. She outlived him and later died of old age. The Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb’s leadership began a slow decline and petered out over a century later. The Sikh religion continues strong to this day. Mai Bhago’s spear and gun can still be found in Sikh museums, and her house has been converted into a gurudwara (Sikh place of worship).
And lastly: although best known by the name Mai Bhago, technically her name, after she converted to the Khalsa, was Mai Bhag Kaur—Kaur being a surname all female Khalsa take, which roughly translates to “princess.”
• ART NOTES •
Mai Bhago is depicted here wearing not just the traditional Khalsa clothing but that of the Nihang, an elite warrior Khalsa sect. This outfit includes a variety of bladed weapons (the guru was known to have five weapons on him at all times), electric blue robes, steel-wrapped turbans, and iron bangles about the wrist.
And yes, she is decapitating that guy.
Lastly: the Mughal being beheaded has period-accurate clothing, although his helmet is one of an infantryman and his outfit is that of a cavalryman.
Hortense Mancini
(1646–1699, FRANCE/ITALY/ENGLAND)
and Marie Mancini
(1639–1715, FRANCE/ITALY/SPAIN)
Divorce Pioneers of the Renaissance
In the 1600s, few women were more famous than Hortense and Marie Mancini. For years, the gazettes of the time breathlessly reported on the Mancinis’ defiant escapes from their abusive marriages and their subsequent court battles. As the sisters fled across Europe, escaping convent after convent, hiding in forests to evade their husbands’ henchmen, the pair became feminist icons and pioneers of one of Europe’s most revolutionary concepts: divorce.
