Y’all. I’m nearly done with my first series of Badass Bitches From History. Ten bitches, coming right up!
Ada Lovelace completes the set. I’m also working to update the graphics for some of the older ones. Once that’s done, I plan to start offering postcards, stickers, perhaps mugs or other merch. What would you like? (Also if anyone knows of a good site that will print sets of postcards and ship them for me that’d be cool thanks.)
As far as moving forward in a sustainable way, I think I’ve decided each series will be ten historical figures (give or take). I’m less certain about how to present InfoPosts. Those may not come in complete series like my Bitches because I sense they need different organizational formats. However, I do plan to gather them all together to create some sort of Intro to Feminism source. Book? Website? All of the above? Who knows at this early stage!
I’ll work on a loose schedule for the BBFH and InfoPosts moving forward and get that posted soon. In the mean time, stay tuned for Ada Lovelace and Fat Phobia, they’ll be coming up within a couple of weeks!
Born Lydia Lili’u Loloku Walania Wewehi Kamaka’eha in 1838 (1), the future Queen of Hawai’i was adopted at birth to another high-ranking family per traditional Hawai’ian practices. This badass had ties to Hawai’ian royalty on both sides of her family: her birth mother was an advisor to King Kamehameha III, and her adoptive mother was a granddaughter of King Kamehameha the Great (3), the man who united the Hawai’ian Islands and all the chiefdoms within so as to be a stronger force against the forces of the colonizers (6). The practice of hanai, or this type of adoption, was frowned upon by colonizers at the time who “[compared] the practice to doling out puppies” and because of that, fewer Hawai’ians today keep the practice up (4). But there is a faction working to bring hanai back, noting that it was not, and should not be seen as “’giving away,’ but rather as ‘sharing. ‘The family didn’t get smaller, it expanded (4).”
Lili’uokalani was baptized Christian at birth. Twenty years before she was born, a group of congregationalist missionaries settled in Hawai’i and set to work converting the Indigenous population to Christianity. By the time the future Queen was born, a third of Hawai’ians had converted (5).
Lili’uokalani wrote of the formal end of Hawai’ian religion in her memoir:
“…my great-grandaunt was the celebrated Queen Kapiolani, one of the first converts to Christianity. She plucked the sacred berries from the borders of the volcano, descended to the boiling lava, and there, while singing Christian hymns, threw them into the lake of fire. This was the act which broke forever the power of Pele, the fire-goddess, over the hearts of her people (3).”
Growing up, the future Queen was educated at a school built specifically for the children who held claims to the throne. She considered herself a good student, noting in her memoirs, “I was a studious girl; and the acquisition of knowledge has been a passion with me during my whole life, one which has not lost its charm to the present day (3).” The school was modeled after European or American schools; in fact the missionaries ran the school, with philosophies and beliefs of those other cultures being taught to the children who would one day run the Kingdom of Hawai’i. This may seem like a problem to our modern, “woke” minds – and I do not in any way intend to minimize the effects of this kind of colonization – but it was done with a purpose. Per PBS, “Hawai’ian chiefs could now see that their future lay with the world beyond the islands (5).” They believed the future monarchs would need a native understanding of other cultural beliefs and this would help to accomplish that.
Lydia, around age 15
As a young adult, Lili’uokalani married John Owen Dominis, an American man born in New York, but raised, for the most part, in Hawai’i. Europeans and, especially, Americans were becoming increasingly important in the government of Hawai’i. Since the Kingdom had become a constitutional monarchy, in the style of European monarchies, the Chiefs, who had been trained and raised in traditional governments were considered unable to serve as part of the Monarch’s cabinet. Missionaries were installed in their place (5).
In reading her memoirs, it is clear that she was a classy lady who believed in remaining calm and polite, even as she was strong and powerful as a person and a leader. But she was very careful to always appear socially ladylike. (TBH I’m having a hard time calling her a Badass Bitch b/c I can feel her discomfort with the abject and I don’t know whether she would have understood embracing and reclaiming oppressions to strengthen ourselves haha) So while she spoke carefully and politely of her husband in her own memoirs, Lili’uokalani suffered loneliness in her marriage and struggled to be accepted by her mother-in-law who was not a fan of having indigenous folx in her family (5).
Unable to have children, Lili’uokalani threw herself into music, stating that “To compose was as natural to me as to breathe (3).” She estimated that her compositions must number in the hundreds and, in fact, she is known today as one of the most prolific composers of Hawai’ian music, beautifully intertwining traditional Hawai’ian chants with modern European style music. You probably know Aloha Oe. The song, about saying farewell, was inspired when she saw two lovers kissing goodbye, but later it would hold a deeper meaning for the people of Hawai’i. After their sovereignty was stolen from them, it felt to many like a song that represented the farewell to their beloved Queen and previous way of life.
I need to take a quick moment here to relay a message I’ve been seeing from Native Hawai’ians recently. Colonization has taken so much from the indigenous peoples of the world, including Hawai’ians. Currently tourism is devastating the islands and Natives ask that you choose not to vacation there. My family has history there (not indigenous, the US military led my family there) and I had always hoped someday to show my children and perhaps to lay my mom’s ashes to rest there. But there are things more important than my personal desires so I will choose to listen to Hawai’ians and support them. I urge you to do the same. You can read more about this issue here. (And, yes, currently much of their income is based in tourism, but humans are creative and intelligent creatures and I am certain that they can find solutions to any problem that arises as they seek their sovereignty.)
Before I get to the tragic ending of a nation, I want to share a part of Lili’uokalani’s story that feels pertinent right now, during a global pandemic. Before she was Queen, but after she was named heir apparent to the throne, she served as Queen Regent while the King, her brother David Kalakaua, was overseas traveling and doing King Stuff. During this time, there was an outbreak of smallpox in Honolulu. Hawai’i had lost as much as 84% of it’s native population to smallpox, measles, and other diseases (6). So Lili’uokalani was not fucking around with this. She imposed a quarantine and effectively saved an untold many lives.
“A strict quarantine of all persons infected or under suspicion was maintained; and so scrupulously and energetically were these regulations enforced, that when they were relaxed and quarantine raised, it was found that no case had been reported outside the place of its first appearance. But it was a serious thing to confine its ravages to the city of Honolulu, in which there were some eight hundred cases and about three hundred deaths (3).”
Heroine. Absolutely.
And heroine to her people, she always was and always will be. Because in the late 1800s, after the death of her brother King Kalakaua, she ascended to the throne only to have it stolen from her by a bunch of white dudes. She did what she could, but white men wield their power and take whatever they want in the world. And in this case, they wanted Hawai’i.
But let me back up a bit.
We’ve already seen how the Native Hawai’ians’ influence over government was weakened by Colonization: installing white Christian missionaries in place of the chiefs, for instance. There are many other facets to this, of course, including disease. In 1887, a group of American men who owned plantations on Hawai’i, led by Sanford Dole (yes, the pineapple Dole) among others, “took advantage of a spending scandal involving King Kalakaua” and forced him to sign a new constitution at literal gunpoint (6). This, for obvious reasons, became known as The Bayonet Constitution and it effectively stripped the Hawai’ian monarchy of nearly all its power, allowing foreign residents to vote and restricting voting to those who had significant income and/or owned land. Nearly 75% of native Hawai’ians no longer had any say in their own nation (6).
Shortly after, in 1890, the United States lifted tariffs on sugar, meaning that other places suddenly had the same access to American markets as Hawai’i. This lowered the price of sugar dramatically and created a hardship for Hawai’i which, due to colonization, had become economically dependent upon sugar (6).
Then, in 1891, King Kalakaua died and Lili’uokalani stepped into her role as Queen of Hawai’i. Two years after that, she attempted to right the wrong of the Bayonet Constitution by creating a new document that would guarantee voting rights to Native Hawai’ians and restrict foreigners’ right to vote (6). The American businessmen were not into it. Fucking white people, amirite? So they did what powerful white men do to this day: whatever they can to get whatever they want and fuck everyone else.
A group of armed men, backed up by the United States Marines waiting in the harbor, marched upon Iolani Palace and demanded the Queen abdicate. Knowing she was outgunned, and wanting to protect her people, she ordered her guard to stand down, “and the coup leaders declared the monarchy abolished, established martial law, and hoisted the American flag over the palace (6).” Sanford Dole was named leader of this provisional government. United States President Harrison supported this and signed an annexation treaty in 1893. However, when Grover Cleveland was reelected president directly after Harrison, he attempted, sorta, to fix this. He called the coup a “serious embarrassment” and insisted that the monarchy be reinstated. However, when Dole refused to step down, the United States took no more action (6).
(I mean, if this isn’t giving echoes of Trump, idk what to tell you. History tells us we must NOT allow capitalist bullies to get away with their bullshit.)
Native Hawai’ians attempted to get control of the monarchy back, but their forces were too few and too disorganized and they were arrested and threatened with death. Lili’uokalani claimed she was not involved with that attempted revolution, but to spare the lives of her supporters, she officially abdicated and the monarchy was thus ended.
Aloha Oe, indeed.
Queen Lili’uokalani was imprisoned in one room in Iolani Palace for eight months as her punishment. President Cleveland pardoned her in 1896.
“It was the intention of the officers of the government to humiliate me by imprisoning me, but my spirit rose above that. I was a martyr to the cause of my people, and was proud of it (3).”
“Today only about 10 percent of the islanders are of Native Hawaiian descent. Native Hawaiians face a number of health and social disparities, such as lower educational attainment, higher unemployment, and poverty, and higher rates of tuberculosis, smoking, and obesity compared to their white counterparts (6).”
Suddenly Dole Whip doesn’t taste so good.
Lili’uokalani spent the rest of her life working towards the good of her people. She worked towards many causes that would protect her people and the land of Hawai’i, creating a natural preserve and programs for Hawai’ian children. Never once did she not put her people first during her life and today she is deeply beloved by her people, even more than 100 years after her death.
There is a lot to learn from this Badass Bitch: grace and power, love and righteous fury, knowledge and compassion. Her life was a strange mixture of colonial and traditional beliefs, social structure, art, and attitude. There may be much for Native Hawai’ians to discuss in terms of how much colonization shaped her, but that is not for me, a white person and therefore a member of the oppressive class, to consider. What I see in Queen Lili’uokalani is pride in who she was, in her people, and in her history. And I admire her wholeheartedly.
Y’all. I heard “female pirate” and basically I was sold on this badass bitch, but after doing research I honestly feel like she may be the badassest bitch I’ve covered here and I can’t wait for you to meet her. Let’s go!
Wikipedia claims she was born as Shi Yang, but other, scholarly sources claim we do not know her birth name (2). Today she is known primarily by Ching Shih or Zheng Yi Sao, or sometimes Ching I Sao, which translates to Cheng I’s Wife or Cheng I’s Widow.
Full disclosure, I have tried to figure out which is the most correct translation of her name into English and I cannot find a source which discusses the variations so I do not know if one is more accurate/respectful than the other or if all are equally acceptable. If you happen to know, do please drop me a comment (and hopefully a source!) and I will edit this essay and all social media posts because accurate and culturally respectful histories are of utmost importance to me.
In any case she seems to have been born around 1775 and worked as a sex worker in a floating brothel in Canton. She was known for her shrewd business sense (2). It was apparently this talent that made Cheng I seek her out (1). Cheng already had considerable forces under his command when he married Ching Shih, but together they were able to unify several smaller gangs into a fleet that ultimately was made up of 1,800 ships and as many as 80,000 men (2). For comparison, the famous pirate Blackbeard commanded only four ships and 300 men (1). For yet even more impressive comparison, this badass and her husband had more than twice as many men in their service as the Spanish Armada (2). Fucking wild.
Meanwhile her husband was apparently bi and wanted his lover/protégé to inherit his legacy so he adopted him which is less uncomfortable than it sounds to our modern, Western ears as it was the primary means of “establishing kinship” for inheritances (1). Women were limited in the rights they were granted (2) and I presume this was also true of inheritances.
In any case, Cheng I died unexpectedly, leaving his “son” Chang Pao to inherit the fleets. Almost immediately, Ching Shih took Chang Pao as her lover as well, soon marrying him (2). And thus she retained her power in the fleet with even her new husband subordinate to her.
To continue to maintain her position, she instituted a severe code of laws which included the following:
Disobey a superior? Immediate beheading.
Stealing from treasury? Also gets you dead.
Desertion or AWOL? Lose your ears and everyone makes fun of you.
Have sex with a captive? Again with the beheadings. Even if the sex was consensual. (2)
But it wasn’t all threats. She also provided for her crews by guaranteeing 20% of all captured goods for those doing the capturing (2). It’s almost like a union. Or something.
Y’all. This whole operation was so massive and so well-run that nobody could stop them. They were able to move their operations onto land and into cities, getting involved in the salt trade and eventually all but ceasing the opium trade (2). People do not like not getting their opium, it turns out.
Eventually the Chinese government realized that even with the help of the Portuguese navy and England’s East India Trading Company, they could not make a dent in Ching Shih’s forces. They offered a generalized amnesty to all the pirates if they’d just stop pirating (3).
So Ching Shih recognized the power she held here and, in theory, could have continued on as they were, but she also knew that tensions were rising among the leaders of the various fleets she commanded. She realized the power she held and the chance for this total amnesty would ultimately not last. She decided to negotiate the best terms she could for herself and her crews (2).
Y’all. This may be the most badass part of all of this. She did not budge during negotiations which went on over a couple of months and multiple attempts. Eventually she showed up at the home of the highest official in the land with only women and children to accompany her. She would not agree to any terms until it was guaranteed that her second husband Chang Pao would be allowed 80 ships to continue working in the salt trade, legitimately (2). Not only did none of her pirates receive punishment, but many went on to do the same work they were already doing, and many others went on to join the actual military (2). But really. Can you imagine?
As noted earlier, women were limited in various ways in how they could hold power. Ching Shih had achieved her status through illegitimate means thus far. Now that she and her crews were going straight, she wanted to maintain status. Normally remarried widows could not hold the title of Wife of an Official, but this badass bitch petitioned and won that right despite the social barriers (2). Absolute fucking queen, y’all.
She spent the remainder of her years in peace, running a gambling house, until her death in 1844.
So many women who achieve power in situations where it is typically withheld from them come from some sort of privilege, either an established family, or financial means, or a privileged community, or educational background. But Ching Shih seems to have had none of these. She rose from a brothel to become more powerful than China, Portugal, and England combined using only her wits and her shrewd business sense. I am in utter awe of this badass bitch.
Y’all, this badass bitch, tho. Rosalind Franklin was a gifted and driven English scientist in the middle of the 20th Century. And because she was a woman, she faced a fucking lot of misogyny. Yay, Women’s History Month.
Watson and Crick are the men generally credited with the discovery of DNA, but there is huge debate even to this day as to whether they did, whether Rosalind Franklin did, or whether they stole her work and succeeded unethically. After doing my research, I feel like the answer is this: they absolutely profited off of her work without her knowledge or credit and anyone who says otherwise is, usually, a man.
Here’s how it went down.
Rosalind was an English chemist and X-Ray crystallographer and, after doing work on coal that was vitally important to WWII and to the world we live in today, she took a fellowship at King’s College in London where she wound up working on DNA structures. There was some miscommunication, or perhaps some chaotic reassignments within their department when she joined and this, in addition to apparent personality differences, caused some friction between herself and fellow researcher Maurice Wilkins (1). “Her friend Norma Sutherland recalled: ‘Her manner was brusque and at times confrontational – she aroused quite a lot of hostility among the people she talked to, and she seemed quite insensitive to this (1).'” Girl, SAME.
Meanwhile, at Cambridge, Francis Crick and James Watson were doing the same work, but struggling to find the correct answers. “Watson and Crick’s first foray into trying to crack the structure of DNA took place in 1952. It was a disaster. Their three-stranded, inside-out model was hopelessly wrong and was dismissed at a glance by Franklin (1).” Badass.
Meanwhile over at King’s College, Wilkins had been working with graduate student Raymond Gosling on attempting to get pictures of DNA with some success. But once Franklin arrived, she, working with Gosling, who had been transferred to her leadership, used her expertise in Chemistry to make some adjustments to the camera and tools Wilkins had been using. In this way she was able to capture the first clear picture of DNA.
Photo 51 by Franklin and Gosling
Now there’s a lot of politics and bureaucratic nonsense going on here and it’s not unreasonable for Wilkins to have felt slighted with his tools and grad student being used to achieve superior work without his input or involvement. Based on everything else I’ve read on this case and also my experience as a woman in our society, I think it’s reasonable to say that the fact that the superior work was being done by a woman must have stung even more.
But what’s not reasonable – and what’s strangely up for debate to this day – is what he did next.
He fucking showed the photo to Watson. Without Rosalind’s permission.
This is particularly important because this photo changed the game. Immediately, Watson understood that he was looking at a double helix. He later said, “my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race (qtd in 1).”
Here’s where the “debate” comes in. Did he “steal” the photo? Technically, no, nothing illegal occurred. But was it unethical? FUCK YES, JESUS CHRIST, YES IT WAS UNETHICAL FOR FUCK’S SAKE. Matthew Cobb, at the Guardian, wrote that, “Their behaviour was cavalier, to say the least, but there is no evidence that it was driven by sexist disdain: [they] would have undoubtedly behaved the same way had the data been produced by Maurice Wilkins (1).” To which I, a woman, say, “mhrm, okay bro” but even if he’s right about that, I daresay we would not still be debating whether it was stolen work had it been stolen from a man.
But even this groundbreaking photo was not quite enough. More of Rosalind’s work was taken – again, not illegally, but not with permission or acknowledgement. Watson and Crick needed, not just the photo, but the detailed observations from it to make their calculations. This was made available to them by another man, Max Perutz, who showed them an informal report Rosalind had made (1).
Even Cobb admits that “The report was not confidential, and there is no question that the Cambridge duo acquired the data dishonestly. However, they did not tell anyone at King’s what they were doing, and they did not ask Franklin for permission to interpret her data (something she was particularly prickly about) (1).”
How the fuck can they claim that the work wasn’t stolen? A scientist and scholar of Franklin’s notes that “you do not hand unpublished data to a competitor. Period. I don’t care if the MRC report was not marked confidential (2).” And I mean, I’m just a lowly literature and Women’s Studies scholar, but it was made patently clear in every single class from middle school through university that plagiarism is unconscionable and this smacks of plagiarism. *shrug*
Furthermore, the arguments against wrongdoing by Watson and Crick (which tend to be made my men) generally go like this:
She was mean and didn’t want to work with anyone else.
But she wasn’t discriminated against for her sex (ummm okay reread the line before this one and just try to tell me anyone would have used this excuse about a man).
The information was publicly available previously (I will get into this in a mo). (2)
and my personal favorite:
She never found out the extent to which they’d used her work to beat her to the finish line so she therefore wasn’t harmed by it (2).
What. Like. Really though. What? How is this an argument made by an adult professional? It feels like kids fighting on an elementary school playground.
As for the information that was publicly available previously? Watson had attended a seminar in 1951 where Rosalind presented “virtually identical” data as was in the later-acquired report. “Had Watson bothered to take notes during her talk, instead of idly musing about her dress sense and her looks, he would have provided Crick with the vital numerical evidence 15 months before the breakthrough finally came (1).”
Yeah. Still not seeing how his refusal to take her seriously enough at the time makes it acceptable for him to use her work, retrieved illicitly, to earn a Nobel prize. I feel like any one of my professors would shrug and say “too bad, so sad” to me if I tried to use that as an argument. I certainly feel like, again, had she been a man presenting this information, Watson may have taken her seriously enough in the first place so that he would never have had to twist and bend ethics in an attempt to wash his conscience clean.
*feminist grumbles*
In an interview from PBS Newshour, Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian was asked if Watson and Crick would have arrived at their world-changing discovery without Rosalind’s work. “They absolutely would not. It would have been very hard for them,” before conceding that “They might have, eventually (3).”
He goes on to acknowledge that “I think they never thought of Rosalind as a serious competitor of their level. I think it was chauvinism to the nth degree and was very common in academic science on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean at that time (3).”
That, friends, is how you ally.
Would they have, eventually, gotten there? Yes, maybe, but still not before our girl Rosalind. “The progress she made on her own, increasingly isolated and without the benefit of anyone to exchange ideas with, was simply remarkable (1).” She was speedrunning what had taken them years and stolen data to achieve. Markel notes, “Francis Crick said: Of course, Rosalind would have figured it out in a few weeks. It’s just that we figured it out faster (3).” (With stolen work.)
Rosalind lived only five more years, dying in 1958 of ovarian cancer, possibly due to her work with X-Ray technology, and four years before Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel prize for “their” discovery. It is often argued that Rosalind would not have been eligible for the Nobel prize, anyway, because they did not award them posthumously. But to me that sounds like more bullshit because a) why they fuck not? and b) we will never truly know if she would have been considered for it.
Rosalind was an absolute powerhouse and her work changed the world not only through the vital understanding of DNA, or even her earlier work with the structures of coal, but because she worked with viruses as well and her work laid the foundations that shaped scientific response to the pandemic we are currently living through. Fucking hero. Badass bitch. Rosalind Franklin.
Damn, I knew this lady was a badass bitch, but when I dove into this research I was thrilled to learn exactly how few fucks she had to give. T Thomas Fortune, a Black civil rights leader, journalist, and publisher, once said of Ida that she “has plenty of nerve; she is as smart as a steel trap, and she has no sympathy with humbug.” And like damn if that’s not accurate. Let’s dive in and see just how little sympathy with humbug this badass bitch had.
Born into slavery about six months before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation*, Ida’s childhood was informed by the Reconstruction era and the work that Black folx of the South were doing at the time. Something that may be important to note here, that I certainly never learned in high school history, is that in the years directly following the end of the Civil War, there were as many as 1500 Black officeholders elected to office before white southerners began enacting voter restriction laws. Ida’s father was not in government, but he did help to found Rust College, an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), which Ida attended. So she comes from a family of Badasses.
Unfortunately when she was a teenager, she lost both of her parents and one of her siblings during a yellow fever epidemic. Out of this tragedy, she arose, pulled up her badass britches, and stepped into the path of no humbug that she followed her whole life.
Although she was only sixteen at the time, she convinced a local school administrator that she was eighteen and qualified to be a teacher (1). In this manner she was able to continue to support her five younger surviving siblings.
A few years later, a rather inciting incident took place. She bought a first class train ticket and hopped on board with all the other first class passengers. Once the train was underway, she was asked to move to a car designated for Black riders. Like Rosa Parks would nearly a century later, Ida refused. She’d paid for first class, for fucks sake. Having no respect for human beings, the crew tried to physically remove her at which point she, in her own words, “fastened [her] teeth in the back of his hand (2).” Fuck yeah you did, Ms. Wells! While that particular dudebro would not go near her again, other crew members dragged her out anyway. Ida wrote, “They were encouraged to do this by the attitude of the white ladies and gentlemen in the car; some of them even stood on the seats so that they could get a good view and continued applauding the conductor for his brave stand (2).” She sued the railroad and won. For a time, anyway. The decision was eventually reversed by the Tennessee Supreme Court (1).
So, like so many badass bitches, she began writing. She had articles published in various newspapers and even went on to own two papers herself (1). However, because she preferred to remain not murdered, she used the pseudonym “Iola” (3). She continued teaching even while she was writing and often wrote about the inferior conditions of Black schools, demanding equality.
When three of her friends were lynched, she responded in the only way she knew how: she spent two months travelling through the south, collecting information on lynchings and writing about them, and eventually publishing a pamphlet and taking her anti-lynching campaign across the Atlantic to Europe and Great Britain (3). She was not fucking around. No sympathy with humbug.
It feels like such a silly detail to follow that epic part of her story with, but in reality I think it’s remarkable to remember that when Ida got married in 1895, she was one of the first American women to keep her maiden name (1). Fuck yeah. No sympathy with humbug patriarchy, y’all. Never forget where we come from, fellow women. It may be commonplace today to keep our names, but it was revolutionary at one time and Ida got in on the ground floor.
But she wasn’t just an investigative journalist, writer, publisher, orator, educator, wife, and mother. She was also a suffragist.
(Fun fact because I like fun facts: “suffragette” is a term that actually only applied to one small group of suffragists in Great Britain who were kinda known for their mild violence. Throwing bricks through windows and whatnot. Everyone else was a “suffragist.”)
When I am educating people on feminism and feminist ideals, I often remind them that feminism has historically been exclusionary. The suffragists excluded Black women, the women’s libbers excluded lesbians, and today some so-called feminists attempt to exclude transwomen. I use this fact as proof that it’s time to learn from our history and do better. Ironically, it’s always been an attempt to appeal to the perceived majority that prompts the exclusion. An attempt to “find the middle ground” (lol sorry but it’s not the middle ground if all of the people aren’t welcomed into the space).
Ida faced this directly. Having no sympathy for humbug, she did what Ida always did: what she fucking set her mind to.
In March of 1913, Alice Paul and other suffragists had planned a march on Washington. Ida traveled to Washington DC with the Alpha Suffrage Club, an organization she helped to found in Chicago, with the intent to March. Although Alice was sympathetic to Ida, in the end it was decided that Black suffragists would have to march at the end of the parade instead of with their respective organizations. Ida was like fuck no everyone knows I’ve got no sympathy for humbug and she waited in the crowds along the street until her group marched by, at which point she just fucking joined them (4).
The Chicago Daily Tribune published a photo of Ida B. Wells marching in the suffrage parade on March 5, 1913. Credit: Chicago Daily Tribune, found at wttw.com (4)
God I love this woman.
There is so much more she was involved with that this mini-bio doesn’t have time to go into. She’s considered a founding member of the NAACP, for instance (1). I highly recommend you go forth and google some shit. If each of us can find just a fraction of the amount of No Sympathy For Humbug that Ida did, we could change the world for the better real fucking fast. Keep that in mind, friends.
*Remember, slavery did not end until… well, technically ever if you read the thirteenth amendment, which specifically allows for slavery as “punishment for crime,” but the amendment’s act of ending chattel slavery was not proclaimed until December 18, 1865.
I am ridiculously excited to introduce you to our next Badass Bitch From History! Toypurina was a Native American from the Tongva people near today’s Los Angeles. This lady was having *N O N E* of Junipero Serra’s colonizer bullshit.
(TW/CW for marital rape, psychosis, suicidal ideation)
You are going to think, “wtf, Bonnie? why this bitch?” And my answer is this: for the past few months, I have been in the darkest place in my life. I have spent weeks crying, unable to stop at all. Driving to and from my kids’ schools and appointments, shopping for groceries, anything, tears running down my face 24/7. I keep Margery Kempe in my heart for times like that. She walked across the country, wailing loudly and obnoxiously, but never hiding herself. She kept showing up to the work she felt called to do, despite the constant tears. She is my archetype, my goddess, patron saint of depression, mental illness. I invoke her in my darkest times for strength and spiritual fuel to keep going, despite the tears. I want to share her with anyone else who needs her.
So. This bitch.
Margery was ordinary. This is one of her most remarkable features, according to scholars. For many centuries since her life and death, we knew almost nothing about her. It was only in the 1930’s that her book was discovered in an ancient family collection somewhere in England. She’s remarkable because she’s middle class and her book gives a rare account on the life of middle class medieval women. Her father was notable in their small town, even serving in leadership roles. She married when she was about 20 to a man who seems by all accounts to have been as kind as any medieval man could be (specifics on that later).
After the birth of her first child, Margery had what was probably postpartum psychosis*, having visual and auditory hallucinations of demons commanding her to harm herself. This lasted for nearly a year until she had a vision of Jesus which saved her from a suicide attempt and began a lifelong series of visions and voices.
This changed her life and she wanted to become as holy as possible but faced some obstacles. For one thing, she was married, so her ideal celibate life was out of the question. In the middle ages – particularly for a woman so devoted to the Church – husbands had the right to sex regardless of whether their wives wanted it. Margery was wholly sold into this concept; constructs can be powerful af. She speaks of her husband with love and without blame. He treated her (mostly) tenderly and compassionately, and followed her throughout many of her travels. He stood with her through adversity whenever he could (he struggled with debilitating social anxiety). At least fourteen children and many years down the line, he finally consented to a celibate marriage. Obviously this is super complex to our modern minds and I want to make it clear that I am in no way excusing rape for any reason; rather, I am simply relating her story as she has written it herself.
So anyway, this bitch struggled in other ways, too. She owned and ran two businesses for a time (a brewery and a mill), but they both failed (beer went flat and horses refused to pull) – she attributed the failures to not following God’s will for her life; her employees just thought she was cursed. Eventually, she began to take pilgrimages instead.
This chick was one highly sensitive person (actually, as I was reading her autobiography, I repeatedly recognized neurodivergence in her). Her understanding of Jesus’ life and death was too much for her and she’d cry when she thought about it, which was almost always. And she cried L O U D L Y okay? People, as a rule, did not like this bitch (that’s often the hallmark of one of the best bitches). In fact, when she traveled to the Holy Land, her companions repeatedly tried to ditch her and leave her to travel utterly alone. In England, she was arrested and put on trial more than once for heresy, but she was never convicted.
Why? Because this bitch was SMART. She was not literate – most weren’t at that time – but she knew her scripture and could hold her own against the most scholarly priest. She had knowledge of other religious texts as well. I mean *I* have auditory processing issues, but even so I cannot imagine just hearing something and knowing it well enough to debate it. Impressive!
And that is how she came to be the first author of an English language** autobiography. Not a man, not a scholar, not a poet: just an ordinary, illiterate, middle class woman. Talk about a badass bitch, am I right?
Truth be told, reading her autobiography became tedious at times. She gave a *lot* of dialogue between herself and Jesus (or Mary or God himself… an occasional angel, you know) and I skimmed all that. And even back in the middle ages, she was too “Jesusy” for many of her peers – including the ones who were literally on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land – so if that isn’t your thing, hers might not be the book for you. But as a historical figure – as an archetype – she is vital to me, a badass bitch who cries, um, kind of a lot.
Margery Kempe inspires me to be unabashedly myself, no matter what that looks like. Sometimes it’s easy to be myself. I am funny and smart and empathetic. But I am also angry and emotional and wild, and I’m ashamed of those things sometimes (maybe more often than sometimes). Margery Kempe is the goddess I invoke when I need to find love for my uglier bits. I hope some of you find comfort in her, too.
*Since writing this post, I’ve come to understand that history scholars avoid applying modern psychiatric terms to past eras. The medieval way of thinking was so different that it may not have had the same societal effect as a diagnosis of postpartum psychosis does today. Mystics were revered so, although Margery was challenging to many of the people around her, it is possible they did not consider her “sick” at all and instead believed her to have messages from God. I am no historian so if I have explained this poorly, I am happy to be corrected by someone who knows better!
If you’d like to read her book, you can do so here.
**Technically, she spoke Middle English which is not as closely related to modern English as you might think. You can read her original version here.
Drop me a comment and let me know who you’d like to hear about next!
I’m back kinda! Long story very short (more later), I’m disabled enough right now that I cannot work full time so I’m currently planning to bring life back to SOAM both in its historic form of honoring the mama body, but also in new ways. One of my favorite things is history so here is the first in a new series of posts about underrated badass bitches from history. It seems appropriate that I should choose a badass black mama for this first one as it’s Black History Month. Let me know what you think and who you’d like to know more about in the future!
Today I’m thinking about Harriet Jacobs. Look. This lady was a fucking badass. She was born a slave and wound up as a young girl in the ownership of this real fucky fucker named Norcom. She was pretty so Norcom fancied her especially and began building a home for her so that he could keep her to himself. Fucking scary.
So she starts a relationship with this other white dude who, iirc, was like pretty decent for a white dude at the time. His name was Sawyer and he was fairly influential at the time. She gets pregnant with his baby and, as punishment, her owner’s wife banishes her and threatens to kill her, so she lives with her grandma while she has two kids with this halfway decent white dude, Sawyer.
So Norcom, her abuser/owner, won’t leave her the fuck alone even tho she’s got this other white guy. He comes to harass her at her grandmother’s after she has her babies. He likes to remind her of his position as owner of her and now of her children. So when she’s just 21, she fucking runs away. Sorta.
Ultimately she winds up- and this is the fucking superhuman bit – SHE LIVES IN A TEENY SPACE UNDER HER GRANDMOTHER’S ROOF. LIKE 9x7x3. And she lives there FOR SEVEN GODDAMN YEARS. Her uncle had some mad carpentry skills so he built a little trap door that was nearly invisible if you didn’t know it was there. She’d come down in the dark of night to stretch her legs and do her business and then she hid away again.
Her babies were so young that she couldn’t let her kids know she was nearby in case they let it slip so they had to believe she’d gone. Harriet would peek at them from her crawl space during the days and watch them play. I can’t even imagine the kind of heartbreak she must have had to live in during this time. To watch her children grow up before her eyes, but without her.
Her abuser/owner got a little pissed off and figured he’d revenge her by selling her kids and her brother. BUT NEVER FRET because this Sawyer dude was waiting there to trick Norcom into selling them. He hired a slave trader to make the offer and Norcom didn’t realize Sawyer was behind this trick. There is some bullshit slave law crap about why you can’t just like buy people and then set them free so it was the best option at the time and the kids were able to remain living with their grandmother.
Eventually Harriet was able to leave not only the attic space, but also the state. She settled in New York and worked to free as much of her family as she could. Since she had been lucky enough to have been taught to read and write, she was able to write her own memoir. Which is fucking rad just FYI and you should read it. This is all the very short version. There are many more twists and turns in her book. She writes of her struggles to balance the Christian morality ideals (ie to not have sex outside of marriage) with her reality as a slave (being that sometimes you gotta bang a dude to save your life). She struggled openly and honestly with the very simple concept of bringing children into slavery at all:
“Sometimes I wished that [my son] might die in infancy. God tried me. My darling became very ill. The bright eyes grew full, and the little feet and hands were so icy cold that I thought death had already touched them. I had prayed for his death, but never so earnestly as I now prayed for his life; and my prayer was heard. Alas, what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life! Death is better than slavery” (p 80).
Harriet Jacobs was such a skilled and honest writer that I hope you choose to read her book. In fact, you can read it FREE at Project Gutenberg. Click here!
Slavery is over in the US (well. that’s debatable) but the effects are still present today. Reading narratives directly from the minds of black women and men throughout history is important work.
Harriet is a woman I hold in my heart when things seem impossible. I hope she means as much to you as she does to me.
(One last thing- if you do decide to read her book, note that she uses fake names for all the people in her life in order to protect them as best she could from retribution. In this post I’ve used their real names.)
I’d like to do more of these posts in the future. Who are your favorite underrated badass bitches (or dudes or anyone except cis straight white men bc they have enough spotlight)? Leave me a comment and I may choose yours!
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