by Historical Heroines- 100 Women You Should Know About (retail) (epub)
To begin with reports suggested Eliza was getting better but she became more depressed and spent the rest of her life in the incurables ward. Who knows what treatments Eliza was given and if that had anything to do with her admittance to the incurables ward. The vast majority of us will suffer from poor mental health at some point in our lifetime and we can be thankful we won’t be placed in the Bethlem of old, although there’s still a long way to go.
Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore (14 October 1856–3 November 1928)
Eliza was the first female board member of the National Geographic Society, a journalist, author, photographer, Japanese expert, plant-lover and social activist.
She was the daughter of parents who separated, her mother (also Eliza) running a boarding house in Washington DC during the Civil War. Her lawyer/diplomat brother George served across the Far East. With this family background, Eliza was never going to be your typical Victorian gentlewoman.
Born in Clinton, Iowa, she went to Oberlin College between 1873 and 1874 before moving to Washington DC to work as a society reporter at the age of 19, with her pieces appearing in papers including the New York Times. Even though that in itself was a huge and rare accomplishment for a young woman, it was never going to be enough for her. So she used her earnings to broaden her horizons.
Her first excursion in 1883 was to Alaska via a mail steamship with Captain James Carroll, and from here she wrote hugely popular articles for the American newspapers, later published in 1885 as the first travel guide to Alaska. Her adventures sound incredible – meeting Native Alaskan people the Tlingit and white settler Dick Willoughby. The Scidmore Glacier in Alaska is named in her honour for promoting Alaska to future travellers.
She must have been seen as scandalous; a highly intelligent, college-educated and unmarried woman travelling independently across the globe, clocking up miles to India, China, the Philippines, Java and Sri Lanka, not to mention actually writing for a living. Perish the thought!
The year 1885 proved to be game changer. Eliza went to Japan to visit her brother. And it was there that she completely and utterly fell in love. It was to be a life-long passion, particularly for its cherry trees (‘sakura’) and blossom, which she would describe as the ‘most beautiful thing in the world’. She would return there frequently for work, pleasure and also as an informal ambassador for the US.
She introduced the word ‘tsunami’ to the rest of the world following her report of a devastating earthquake in 1896. She would write several travel books, cultural articles for magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan, and books, most notably a non-fiction account of the Russo-Japanese War.
The contacts she’d made in Washington DC would prove useful. She’d use them to bend the ear of First Lady Helen ‘Nellie’ Taft, who, together with Washington Park managers, supported her 24-year long ambition to bring 3,000 beautiful cherry trees, as a diplomatic gift from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo, to be planted alongside the Potomac Basin in Washington in 1912. Eliza was a special guest of the First Lady, one of only three, at the private ceremony on 27 March in Potomac Park. That gift is now celebrated every year during the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington.
Eliza joined the National Geographic Society in 1890, two years after it was founded and pretty much had a finger in every pie – associate editor, foreign secretary, writer, photographer (she was a strong and early advocate of the first colour pictures in the magazine, many of which were hers) and lecturer.
Following complications from appendicitis, she died in Geneva, Switzerland in 1928 at the age of 72. Her ashes are kept in Yokohama, Japan with those of her mother and brother George. Hugely private, none of her personal letters remain – they were burnt by her family upon her death – and we are all the poorer for their loss.
Dame Emma Hamilton (26 April 1765–15 January 1815)
The great and scandalous paramour of Admiral Lord Nelson, Emma Hamilton spent much of her life being passed around as a beautiful plaything between rich, aristocratic men.
She had no choice; she wouldn’t have survived otherwise. That was the fate of women, including Amy or Emy Lyon, born 26 April 1765 in the poor pit village of Ness in Cheshire. Her father, blacksmith Henry Lyon, died soon after she was born, resulting in Amy and her mother Mary moving to a small cottage in Wales in extreme financial dire straits.
Beautiful, socially ambitious and determined to escape her poor background Amy headed to London in 1777 and found work as a maid, before working as a dancer at a Piccadilly brothel. In 1781, the now 16-year-old Amy was taken in by her lover Sir Harry Fetherstonehaugh, only to be abandoned by him when she became pregnant with their child. Utterly distraught, she pleaded for herself and her mother to be taken under the wing of another aristocrat, Charles Greville. He agreed, on the premise she change her name to Emma Hart and that once born the child be sent away. Her first-born daughter Emma Carew subsequently spent most of her life with her maternal great-grandmother Sarah Kidd in Wales.
Emma Hart would be mainly kept in social isolation by Greville, all the while unsuccessfully pleading for her daughter to live with them. He refused. During this time, she became a hugely popular artists’ model, featuring in over sixty portraits by George Romney alone. Jealous of her celebrity, on 26 April 1786, Emma’s 21st birthday, Greville handed her over to his uncle Sir William Hamilton, the British Ambassador to Naples, during a trip there that he pretended was a holiday. Upon their arrival, Greville abandoned her and informed her by letter that he wanted her to become Hamilton’s mistress.
Fortunately for Emma, Hamilton treated her well. They grew to love each other and married in 1791. Emma, Lady Hamilton learned Italian, French and became a singer and accomplished musician. Their sumptuous social and diplomatic circles in Naples meant she became a great and close friend of Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples and Sicily, who was the sister of Marie Antoinette.
She and her husband would first meet and make friends with Horatio Nelson in September 1793 during the French Wars of Revolution. A few years later, in 1798, Emma played a vital role in helping secure a major victory for him; his naval forces were desperate for fresh supplies at St Peter, a major Sicilian port. Emma, using her close friendship with Maria Carolina, managed to get the supplies released in time for Nelson to win the Battle of the Nile.
Emma was also made a Dame of Malta by the Czar of Russia and given the Maltese Cross, the first English woman to be so honoured, for generously using her own funds to provide huge amounts of grain for the starving populace being blockaded by the French. By the following year, Emma and Nelson were besotted with each other, so much so that he joined her and her husband, in what must have been a jolly family trio, at the Hamiltons’ rented home in Palermo, Sicily. On their eventual recall to England in 1800, the passionate affair continued. Emma became pregnant with twins.
Nelson’s wife Fanny was banned from visiting him. Humiliated beyond endurance by Emma and Nelson’s subsequent and very public affair, she gave Nelson an ultimatum. Furious at being challenged by his wife, our naval hero walked out on her. They would never see each other again. And that wasn’t even what most scandalised society. Again proving that men could have their cake and eat it too, it was perfectly acceptable for high-flying society men like Nelson to take courtesans as lovers. What was a complete ‘no-no’ was actually leaving your wife for your mistress. Go-figure.
In 1801, Nelson and Emma’s child Horatia was born. The other twin did not survive. They bought land in Surrey and planned to live there together, along with the ageing Sir William, who died in London in 1803.
On 21 October 1805, the British forces, led by Nelson on board his ship the Victory, would decimate the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar, near Cadiz. Wounded during the battle, Nelson died late in the afternoon of the 21st. Emma would only find out the news on 6 November. She was inconsolable and banned from the funeral.
It was downhill from there. Nelson’s dying wishes for Emma and Horatia to be provided for
were brutally ignored. She was shunned and, due to her luxurious lifestyle, left hugely in debt. She died in 1815, with Horatia by her side and was buried in an unmarked grave in the Church of St Pierre’s in Calais.
Nelson, in comparison, was and is remembered as one of the great British heroes of all time, with a national monument, Nelson’s Column, erected to commemorate his endeavours. Despite the fact that it was Nelson’s ‘column’ that got Emma into trouble in the first place, she died impoverished, her spirit and heart broken, betrayed by the society which she had spent her life fighting to be accepted by. Ironically, their daughter Horatia Nelson would marry a clergyman and have a quiet, unremarkable life.
Empress Theodora (c. 500–48)
Empress Theodora of Constantinople really was a regular Byzantine fairytale Cinderella. Daddy was a poor bear keeper at Constantinople’s Hippodrome which, startlingly, was not the lusted-after job it might sound like. After he died the family’s situation became desperate. So Theodora and her sisters took to the stage.
Theodora worked as an actress, dancer, mime artist and comedian; and back in those heady days of ‘Constantinople’s Got Talent’, actresses were expected to give audience members a bit of ‘knickers down’ after the curtain fell. (Today’s luvvies don’t appreciate the association ‘actress’ then had with ‘hooker’, so now insist on being called an ‘actor’.) It’s likely Theodora was no exception. However, it’s doubtful she was the depraved sexual monster painted by her biographer Procopius in his book The Secret History, written after her death. Indeed much of his lurid details about her early years probably owe more to his own lewd imagination than to actual fact. 50 Shades of Grey has nothing on the images he paints of Theodora, one example being of one night spent with thirty men and some geese. (Sounds exhausting.)
But like a good Cinderella, Theodora shut her legs for business and discovered God during a brief sojourn in Libya. From that point the fair Prince Justininan was fated to fall in love with her and persuade the powers to be to change the law prohibiting actresses to marry. (Something modern-day actresses have taken to with gusto.)
Through a series of courtly machinations, twists, turns and political conspiracies, she and her husband became emperor and empress, a true power couple in the mould of Hilary and Bill Clinton. Her radical reforms included laws to protect women at risk such as her former friends engaged in prostitution and making rape punishable by death, making Theodora one of our firm early feminist favourites.
Empress Wu Zetian (624–705)
The only woman in Chinese history to rule as an empress, doing so during the Tang Dynasty (ad 618–906), which was a relatively ‘good’ time for women in China – there was no binding of feet and a lot more freedom. The period of the Tang Dynasty’s power is widely regarded as the golden age of Chinese history, which says much for the empress’s achievements, despite attempts by historians to paint her as a villain, tyrant and all-round dragon lady.
Whu Zhao, daughter to a wealthy dad and well-connected mum, became concubine number 5 to the 40-year-old Emperor Taizong when she was just 13. Being number 5 out of 9 didn’t sit well with this particular girl’s ambitions, but it was nothing a little murder and Machiavellian mischief wouldn’t solve.
She raced up that ladder very quickly, and following Taizong’s death was recalled from a convent to marry his son and successor Emperor Li Zhi Gaozong. Interestingly they’d already been having an affair. Our girl clearly believed in planning ahead. They had a baby girl who was allegedly strangled, allowing Wu to neatly and rather conveniently remove the former Empress Wang from the political equation and have her killed.
She became huanghou, or empress. Gaozong’s frequent ill health and subsequent stroke in 690, five years into their marriage, and her poisoning her eldest son Li Hong, led her to assume the full powers of the emperor in 690 at the age of 65.
What followed was a three-year reign of ‘Soprano’-inspired terror, complete with a secret police force, where she ruthlessly murdered or framed innocent victims, forced suicides and generally raised hell with anyone who opposed her. She did whatever was politically expedient. Perhaps if she’d been a man her actions would have been viewed differently. She was also an alleged nymphomaniac who liked observing herself with lovers in mirrors, but that’s conjecture and possibly propaganda.
Why did a woman, much less a former concubine, get away with this? Because the people loved her: she brought peace and prosperity during her dynasty by rooting out corruption and helping the common people. She stepped down from the throne in 705 in favour of her third son and died later that year. Her tomb remains unopened, her tombstone mysteriously left blank.
Flora Sandes (22 January 1876–24 November 1956)
Flora Sandes defies stereotypes. The only woman permitted to enlist in the First World War as a soldier, she is frequently described in masculine terms. However, whilst Flora enjoyed so-called male pursuits, she also loved shopping and a good party.
She didn’t give a fig for what society thought, perhaps thanks to a happy, liberal childhood that let Flora enjoy her favourite activities – hunting, shooting and reading adventure stories.
As an adult she loved ‘galumphing’ (getting drunk), smoking (a lot) and travelling. Her nephew Dick believed she could drink more than the average man. Heaven knows what Dick would have made of the antics of the average twenty-first-century Glasgow girl.
She famously said that as a child she wished she had been born a boy, but the truth is, like so many, she was a frustrated woman born in the wrong time, an early feminist desperate for the same freedoms her brothers enjoyed. She participated eagerly in various suffrage movements as well as the FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), and these were the days before a fanny was a ‘fanny’, enabling her to gain wartime first-aid skills. She then joined the St John Ambulance Brigade.
One of the first to sign up as a volunteer (now aged 40), she was frustrated to be turned away from many voluntary corps, due her suffrage past giving her a label of troublesome coupled with a lack of formal training, denied her because she was too posh for that sort of malarkey.
She was finally accepted into Mabel Grouitch’s Corps which was bound for Serbia due to a shortage of trained surgeons and nurses. The three-week journey there was uncomfortable, exhausting and riddled with problems but she still managed to kick her heels up with Emily Simmonds, her new BFF. Her fellow nurses may have been horrified by their risqué behaviour but by the time they reached Serbia, Flora was all business. Despite being told she wouldn’t survive a month, she volunteered to help at Valjevo, a town stricken by typhus, which she nearly died from herself. As the fighting grew worse, she then enlisted in the Serbian army.
There are numerous examples of her bravery, stoicism and cheerfulness in the face of desperate hardship and danger. However the daring escapade that won Flora the highest honour in the Serbian army, the Kara George Medal, a promotion to sergeant major and a hero’s write-up in most national papers in Britain was the tale of her being wounded by a grenade whilst leading her men in Macedonia. She had to be dragged through no man’s land to safety, her right arm shattered by the grenade.
Like so many of the fiercely brave women who volunteered on the front line, Flora returned home to find the freedoms enjoyed during the war swiftly curtailed by a country eager to put women back in their place. Flora retired to her home town of Suffolk where she carried on being the racy, hell-bent rebel she had always been in her electric wheelchair.
Golda Meir (3 May 1898–8 December 1978)
Golda was the fourth Prime Minister of Israel and its first female premier.
Born in Russia as Goldie Mabovitch, her family fled Kiev (now capital of Ukraine) to escape pogroms and violent massacres of Jews – she witnessed her father boarding up the front door in anticipation of them. The family moved to Wisconsin in the US in 1906 and, against the wishes of her parents, Golda trained as a teacher in Milwaukee in 1917. A passionate and active leader of the Milwaukee Zioni
st Party, she married Morris Myers in 1917. They emigrated to Palestine in 1921 and joined the Merhavya kibbutz; she and Morris would separate but never divorce.
Golda was of only three women to sign Israel’s historic Declaration of Independence; in an ironic twist, considering her place of birth and reasons for fleeing it, she was made ambassador to the Soviet Union. Strong, tough, dependable and passionately protective of the Jewish people, in May 1948 she went to Jordan disguised as a Muslim man to try and persuade King Abdullah not to attack Israel. Elected to the Israeli Knesset, or government, in 1949 (she would remain a member until 1974), she was made Labour Minister by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. The remit of this post, which she held from 1949–56, was enormous: in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust she was charged with finding housing and jobs for the hundreds of thousands of immigrants pouring into the new State of Israel. She also convinced the American Jewish community to put $50 million towards securing the fledgling state’s security against their Arab neighbours.
Ben-Gurion referred to Golda as ‘the best man’ in his cabinet and appointed her Foreign Minister in 1956, effectively his Number Two. He also advised her to embrace her new Israeli citizenship and change her surname from Myerson to Meir. Ten years later, she stepped down at a time when she was also secretly being treated for lymphoma, a fact that would only become public after her death.
Following the death of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in 1969, she came out of retirement to take on the role of Prime Minister at the age of 71. That very rare thing, a woman in power, in the Middle East no less, she took to the international political stage to push hard for peace via diplomacy.