Historical Heroines
Page 9
Kalpana Chawla was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, NASA Space Flight Medal and NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Several academic scholarships have been established in her name, including ones at the International Space University, University of Texas and University of Colorado. There are also asteroids, mountains on Mars, streets, hostels and supercomputers named in her honour.
La Malinche, aka Mallinali, aka Dona Marina (1502–29)
Déjà vu. Mallinali’s story is yet another tale of a woman from history that has been retold several times by many different people with many different agendas.
There is only one credible source who actually knew her properly; Bernal Díaz Del Castillo was part of Conquistador Hernan Cortes’s party and from his glowing references he may well have had a crush on her. Sadly for Bernal, as Cortes’s slave, she was his woman: she literally belonged to him.
Mallinali’s mother had sold her into slavery at the age of just 5 years old. The child had inconveniently inherited her aristocratic Aztec father’s wealth when he died and Mummy Dearest wanted her son from her new husband to get the loot. So she pretended Mallinali had died. The girl was passed around between various owners and details from this part of her life are hard to find. One can surmise she didn’t have too many options, which makes judgmental historical interpretations of her all the more galling.
Mallinali’s name was first vilified after Mexico won independence from Spain and the country was riding a wave of hatred against the name Hernan Cortes and all associated with him. In their versions, Cortes had arrived on indigenous lands with only a small number of men to defeat the mighty Aztecs. By this time he clearly wasn’t the god he had first been mistaken for so how did he do it? Obviously his temptress lover Mallinali was a traitor and helped him massacre thousands of innocent Indians. Cortes didn’t help matters by citing her as the reason for winning New Spain.
The truth of course was a great deal more complicated. In recent years feminists have come to Mallinali’s rescue and pointed out that the girl had little choice but to do as she was told after being sold to the Spanish Conquistador, whether that be sleeping with Cortes or interpreting tribal leaders (it was her great skill in indigenous languages that originally rocked his boat) and negotiating alliances with the Spanish. For that is what they were, alliances and not always conquered victims.
At that time Mexico was not composed of one uniformed Aztec community but of several rival tribes who all hated each other. Many of these tribes especially hated Montezuma, King of the Aztecs, whose repeated calls for human sacrifice and cruelty weren’t a crowd pleaser. So it didn’t take a huge amount of persuasion to get them singing ‘Kumbaya’ with the Spanish.
Modern interpretations claim that Mallinali probably saved many more lives by negotiating treaties with Cortes rather than constant warfare. It also seems rather unfair to blame her for the decimation of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which was actually ravaged by smallpox and not a teenage girl. Mallinali became the scapegoat for a country constantly worried about its own identity. Was it Spanish, indigenous or too much a mix of the two? Was the Spanish invasion a blessing that rid them of the fierce Montezuma or a scourge of indigenous life?
Mallinali had a son by Cortes, the first recorded mestizo (child of mixed descent) in Mexican history. There would have been many more babies of mixed Spanish and indigenous blood but none of their stories were recorded. On the other side of the spectrum, many people have romanticised her life, waxing lyrical on the great love she and Cortes had, although ultimately he went back to his more suitable wife.
There is endless debate as to whether la Malinche was the mother to or traitor of the Mexican people. Each different political and cultural group interpreted her story to suit their particular bias and her name has become deeply entwined with the country’s identity crisis.
Lili Elbe (1882–1931) and Gerda Gottlieb (1885–1940)
Transsexual, LGBT and intersexual are today’s big buzzwords and a culture is emerging that finally welcomes this community. But what of those men and women born in the wrong body who lived in eras when gender definitions were utterly rigid and uncompromising?
Artist Lili Elbe was born Einar Magnus Andreas Wegene. Einar met Gerda Gottlieb at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and they married, living as a heterosexual couple. Both were talented but Elbe’s landscapes were more successful in Denmark than Gerda’s Art Deco work. Her risqué depictions of nudity, eroticism and women actually enjoying themselves sexually were too much for the delicate sensibilities of Copenhagen. When they discovered that her delicate and pretty artist’s model was actually her husband, smelling salts must have sold out.
Einar was eager to help his wife’s career and the couple moved to Paris in 1912, a city far more bohemian and receptive to her scandalous exhibitions, but less enamoured by his landscapes. Gerda was hugely successful as an illustrator for some of France’s greatest magazines. More importantly she was a pioneering beacon for women in the art world, depicting women as the subject of a painting rather than as the object of our gaze. Plus she loved to imbue her work with a sense of cheek and sass.
France’s avant-garde capital was also a haven for Einar. After he reluctantly stepped quite literally into the stockings of his wife’s model who had to cancel, Einar awoke his alter ego Lili. He discovered how comfortable he felt in women’s clothes and modelled more and more for Gerta. By all accounts she loved Lili and when a little bored would ask Einar to let Lili come out and play. By moving to Paris there was more anonymity and freedom for him to visit parties, carnivals and artist soirées as a woman. Gerta would introduce him as Elbe, Einar’s sister. Only their closest friends knew the truth.
Was Gerda a lesbian as many people seem to suggest? Maybe she was, maybe she was bi and maybe she was just spicing up their sex life as well as showing support for his transformation. Her paintings gave Lili a space to launch her identity. However, as Einar felt more and more comfortable as Lili, she became more despondent at her situation. She felt very deeply that internally she must be female and when she started to experience nose bleeds every month Lili believed they were a manifestation of the periods she should be having. Doctors dismissed her as either unbalanced or a homosexual. Some even diagnosed schizophrenia. It was a terrible time, and a desolate Lili describes feeling being torn between two people. Driven to despair she marked the start of spring, 1 May 1930 as the date she would commit suicide.
A friend introduced her to German specialists Magnus Hirschfield and Kurt Warnekros in Dresden, who apparently confirmed the presence of undeveloped ovaries in her abdomen.
In Lili’s autobiography, her relief at finally being taken seriously is heartbreakingly tangible. With the sale of her artwork and financial and emotional support from Gerda and her brother-in-law she was able to pay for surgeries to remove her penis and scrotum as well as experimental procedures to add a uterus and vagina.
Whilst she felt her truest self during this time, it was a painful period. She was rejected by many of her male friends and felt she had murdered Einar. She was no longer able to paint. Art had been Einar’s occupation. They returned to Denmark where she intended to live as Lili but someone leaked her story to the press leading to public derision and disgust. So she took the matter in her own hands and told her story herself.
The Danish authorities issued a new passport in the name of Lili Elbe and the King of Denmark effectively annulled their marriage. Two women were not allowed to be married. By now she had fallen in love with an art dealer called Claude Lejaune and was hoping that surgery would complete her as a woman able to have full sex and become a mother.
Tragically it was not to be and she died from heart complications following the surgery, probably from a rejection of the transplanted organ.
Gerda was devastated by her death and life was not kind to her in the years that followed. She married an Italian officer Fernando Porta but divorced a short time later and after he had g
one through all her money. She was broke, her artistic style fell from fashion and she had to make postcards to earn a living. She ended up drinking and living in poverty and obscurity.
Lili’s story has helped blur the rigid definitions of sexuality and gender identification but she could never have done this without the unquestioning love and support of Gerda. Lili and Gerda were both remarkable women whose unselfish sisterly love for each other was heroic in itself.
Lilith (A Long Time Ago In a Garden Far, Far Away)
If you want some drama in your life then there’s nothing like the Creation story to stir up emotions between religious creationists and Dawkins evolutionary enthusiasts.
Just mention Adam and Eve, sit back and watch the sparks fly. Yet some of the earlier interpretations of the Garden of Eden also mention another woman, one who seems to have been forgotten, perhaps deliberately. For she represents a dangerous symbol to a patriarchal society so fiercely protected by our medieval authors.
Enter Lilith, the first woman created by God at the same time as Adam and from the same earth. Lilith is the first feminist to walk this earth, if you don’t count Ms Neanderthal (see Lucy). From the start she demands equality with Adam. And Adam doesn’t like it – never mind original sin, he is the original cliché. Lilith is first mentioned in ancient Mesopotamian texts where she is represented as a demon.
These Creation stories were copied into two versions at some point, one mentions Lilith and the other does not. In a satirical interpretation penned anonymously in the text Alphabet of Sirach, the story of Lilith is written as a bawdy and hilarious text alongside many anecdotes about farts and other forms of puerile humour. In this version, she is a woman with insatiable sexual demands. If she wants sex she isn’t about to sit making pretty moon eyes and rearranging her lotus leaves until Adam takes the hint. She asks for it and she wants satisfaction god damn it. Lilith prefers sex on top, which according to this interpretation means that she wants to take power; it’s nothing to do with the position of the G-spot, it’s all about controlling men. By now Adam, due to some design flaw perhaps, is feeling emasculated and determined to exert power over her by claiming that as a subordinate she should lay beneath him. Cue the world’s first relationship row.
In the end Lilith leaves the Garden of Eden, whether by force or her own free will depends on which version you read. Adam then asks God for an ‘easier’ woman, perhaps one that will give his poor old battered balls a rest. And so Eve is born from his rib, eager to please and obey, until she is seduced by the wily serpent, who some people believe is Lilith in another form.
Our medieval brothers would have it that when Lilith leaves the garden she becomes a demon threatening death, destruction and general evil misdoings, including persuading the pious Eve to eat the apple and so set off a chain of catastrophic events for the rest of eternity. This idea was lent credence by Michaelangelo who painted her as a half-serpent, half-woman coiled around the Tree of Knowledge.
Many of the Lilith myths (of which there are many and none of them complimentary) depict her as a baby-eating demon preying upon pregnant women and new born babes. Holding a demon goddess responsible during eras of high infant mortality gave people a target for their fear and blame. Unfortunately it also set up horrific stereotypes of women.
Luckily some women have reinterpreted this story and added their own twist, casting Lilith as a biblical suffragette. To them she represents freedom and equality, and is, one might say, one of the first to demand education for woman in the form of the apple from the Tree of Life. And she shares this knowledge in a sisterly relationship with Eve when they meet beyond the walls of the garden.
Whether you believe in creationism or evolution is incidental; Lilith’s story has severe repercussions for thousands of years that still reverberate today. Hers is one of the first tales to set up the dangerous dynamic of angel versus whore, mother versus monster. It’s a dynamic repeated throughout history to polarise women into two impossible states of being, and deny them that which really makes us human – a complex personality possessing good, bad and everything in between.
Lucrezia Borgia (18 April 1480–24 June 1519)
The background: Italy isn’t unified but is instead a collection of warring papal states, duchies, kingdoms and republics.
The scene: Renaissance Italy. Corruption. Incest. Extravagance. Excess. Poison. Sex. Seduction. Privilege. Ruthless political intrigue. Illegitimate children. Depravity. Blackmail. Bribery. Nepotism. (And that was just on a quiet day.)
This is the tale of a fifteenth-century Italian woman born into the real-deal of a crime family, a woman whose name continues to spark controversy and interest long after her death. Was she an innocent pawn, used ruthlessly by her social climbing, politically ambitious family? A family whose escapades would make life at the ‘Sopranos’ house look like afternoon tea at a convent? Or was she a willing participant in their scurrilous schemes and plotting, a cold-hearted poisoner of rivals, a heartless harlot? The truth may be somewhere in between.
The beautiful Lucrezia was the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia and his long-term mistress Vannozza dei Cattanei, who also provided siblings in the form of Cesare Borgia, Giovanni Borgia and Gioffre Borgia. Lucrezia wasn’t brought up by her mother, instead living in the household of Adriana daMila, a cousin of her father.
Engaged twice before the age of 12, Lucrezia’s first political marriage of alliance was to Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro in 1493. Fifteen years older than Lucrezia, poor Giovanni was urged to bed his wife in front of the Borgias and his own family in order to prove his manhood. In 1497, when the relationship was no longer politically expedient for the Borgia family, the marriage was annulled on the basis of non-consummation.
However someone definitely consummated something because Lucrezia, sent to a convent during the annulment, had an illegitimate son called Giovanni, hidden from public view until he was 3.
Italian society went into overdrive, taking wild guesses at the paternity of the child. Rumours of incest raged, not helped by the Papal Bulls issued on the matter, the first stating Giovanni’s father as Cesare, Lucrezia’s brother, the second Bull then awarding paternity to her own father, Rodrigo. The likely actual father, Pedro Perotto Calderon, a servant in Pope Alexander’s household, was found drowned in the River Tiber.
Lucrezia’s second marriage in 1498, also for her family’s political gain, was to Alfonso V of Aragon, Prince of Naples and Duke of Bisceglie. That liaison didn’t end so well either; brother Cesare strangled him.
There were also the feverish whispers of Lucrezia’s adroitness at poisoning enemies (she allegedly had her own bespoke ring to store the stuff), and her scandalous involvement in events of legendary sexual excess, such as the Banquet of the Chestnuts on 30 October 1501, an orgy at the Palace of Rome for nobles and senior members of the Catholic Church, complete with courtesans and prostitutes, all organised (naturally) by the Borgia family.
Marriage number three occurred in 1502, this time to Afonse d’Este, Prince of Ferrarra. This was a case of third-time lucky; although they both had affairs, it was a happy marriage producing four children.
Pope Alexander would die in 1503, providing some respite for Lucrezia from her family’s all-consuming political machinations. When Afonse’s father died, he and Lucrezia would become the Duke and Duchess of Ferrara. She would turn to patronage of the arts and religion in the latter years of her life.
Lucrezia died at the age of 39 from pureperal fever following the birth of a daughter, who also died. She is buried in the convent of Corpus Domini.
Lucy, or AL 288-1
In 1974, in the extreme heat of the Ethiopian desert, weary palaeontologists Donald Johanson and his colleague Tom Gray took a detour back to camp after a long, hot day sifting through sand.
It was then, in the dust of an ancient lake bed in the area of Hadar, that Donald discovered a fragment of elbow bone, swiftly followed by other bones including a bi
t of skull. Clutching bits of fossilised bone in sweaty hands may not be everyone’s idea of a fabulous afternoon but to Donald and his team it was like winning the lottery. For the first time they had found the most complete set of remains of a single hominid. In total 40 per cent of a skeleton, the team were confident that their find, named AL 288-1, came from one female.
They took the party back to camp where they celebrated all night long to an endless repeat of the Beatles classic homage to drugs ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. Possibly slightly the worse for wear, a canny member of the team suggested naming AL 288-1 ‘Lucy’.
A mere 3 million and a bit years old, Lucy was the first almost complete skeleton ever found, a crucial piece of the evolutionary jigsaw that scientists today are still trying to put together. She is yet another possible contender for the title ‘the first woman on earth’. From the creationists to the Darwinists there is a first lady for everyone. And she adds to the evidence that humans originated from Africa. However in this case we can’t blame sexism for our knowing so little about Lucy’s life, thoughts or motives. Forty bits of skeleton help paint a picture but they cannot conjure up a fully illustrated autobiographical diary from a hominid species with a brain that was closer to Bubbles the Chimpanzee’s than Jane Austen.
According to science bods it wasn’t her brain, but the fact that she walked on two legs that make her a likely candidate for our great, great (to the power of some really big number) grandmother. Her knees and pelvis point to her walking on two legs whilst other skeletal parts such as long, muscular arms tell us she spent a great deal of her time in trees.