Historical Heroines

by Historical Heroines- 100 Women You Should Know About (retail) (epub)

  Hugely useful with her knowledge of the terrain, its edible plants and native languages, it was her visible presence on the expedition, as a mother with a young child, that ensured they were welcomed by other Native American tribes they encountered as peaceful explorers rather than as a possible war party. As a group of men they would have been met with aggression and suspicion.

  During one of these encounters, with a group from the Shoshone tribe, Sacajawea was actually joyfully reunited with her brother, now Chief Cameahwait, who provided the Corps with horses to cross the Rockies. Despite the reunion (emotional because once kidnapped, a member of the Shoshone tribe was mourned as ‘dead’), she left him behind and continued with the explorers.

  When a boat they were travelling in, steered by her husband, hit a squall and nearly capsized she kept calm and ensured valuable supplies, equipment, documents and journals were not lost. At the end of the expedition, declared a success in terms of exploration and mapping, though it did not find the fabled Northwest Passage to the Pacific, Charbonneau was given hundreds of acres of land and $500. Sacajawea received nothing.

  Together with her husband and son, Sacajawea travelled to St Louis to visit Clark in 1809, when he took custody of ‘Pomp’ and assumed responsibility for his education. Three years later Sacajawea had a daughter, Lisette and Clark became custodian of both children. Whilst Jean-Baptiste went on to become an explorer himself, little is known of Lisette or whether she even survived infancy.

  Sacajawea died, likely of typhoid, on 22 December 1812 at Fort Manuel in what is now South Dakota. She was just 25 years old. An interpretation of what her face might have looked like was minted on a dollar coin in 2000 and there are monuments dedicated to her in Wyoming and Missouri.

  Sappho (620–550 BC)

  Little is actually known of this seventh-century BC poet from Lesbos, the island off Greece where she lived. Her work inspired the terms ‘sapphic’ and lesbian. Despite no hard evidence of her actual sexual preferences, she is often referred to as the first lesbian poet. Much of the rumour stems from her close friendships with three women, Atthis, Telesippa and Megara.

  The fact that her name (a woman’s name to boot) survives says much about her accomplishments and influence. What we do have of her work has been painstakingly and meticulously put together from tiny fragments. She is also recorded in the Suda, the tenth-century Byzantine version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and we know she married a rich man called Cercylas and had a daughter called Cleis.

  The daughter of wealthy aristocrats, with three brothers, Larches, Charaxos and Eurygios, Sappho has a reputation as one of the greatest poets of Antiquity, although maddeningly very few examples of her lyric poetry (so called as it was written to be accompanied by a lyre) survive, perhaps because it proved too scandalous at the advent of early Christianity, which either censored it or burnt it.

  Plato called her ‘the Tenth Muse’, and she was held in such high regard that she would be known only as The Poetess just as Homer was known as The Poet. The Sapphic type of verse would be named after her and more modern poets from Byron to Tennyson would attempt translations of her work, a sign of her lasting significance and influence.

  Her poetry focused on love, passion and eroticism but she would also write religious and more personal poems. The only complete poem of hers which survives is ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’, recorded by Greek literary critic and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

  Shirin Ebadi (21 June 1947–)

  Born in Hamadan, Shirin is the first Muslim woman and first person from Iran to win the Nobel Peace Prize. It was awarded to her in 2003 ‘for her efforts for democracy and human rights’ in Iran and her ‘struggle for the rights of women and children’.

  She was also, at the age of 22, one of the first female judges in Iran. She gained her doctorate in law from Tehran University in 1971, served for four years (1975–9) as president of Tehran’s City Court and is the first Iranian woman to be appointed Chief Justice.

  Following the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Islamic clerics took control of the government, led by the Ayatollah. They were quick to do away with rights for women – including their ability to work as a judge. Shirin was forced to step down. Instead she tried to open her own private lawyer’s practice – but wasn’t allowed to until 1992, three years after the Ayatollah’s death.

  During a career particularly focused on defending political prisoners, she’s been imprisoned, kept in solitary confinement, spied on, banned from practising law, received death threats, had her bank accounts frozen and her Nobel medal confiscated. She’s also penned two memoirs and a book, staunchly defended pro-democracy Iranian-American academic Haleh Esfandiari and fought to expose the identities of attackers who murdered students at Tehran University.

  Forbes Magazine included her in their 2004 list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. She founded the Association for Support of Children’s Rights in 1995 and the Human Rights Defence Centre in 2001. She has two daughters.

  Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86)

  When she grew up Simone Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de Beauvoir wanted to be a nun. However she is celebrated as a French feminist icon and remembered for being a writer, activist, existential philosopher and journalist.

  Born in Paris to a devout Catholic family, she had an epiphany at the precocious age of 14, when she declared herself an atheist. Thereon she would focus on maths, literature philosophy and the study of existence. Educated at the prestigious Sorbonne from 1926, three years later she met fellow student and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Their friendship and relationship would endure until his death. He did propose marriage – she refused. She wanted to be free. In fact, being remembered or defined solely as one half of a partnership with a man would probably have infuriated her.

  Working as a philosophy teacher following the German occupation of France, she was thrown out of her job by the Vichy government. Their loss was literature’s gain, as devoid of a job she turned to writing. She’s most famous for her 1949 two-volume The Second Sex. Widely regarded as the founding stone of the modern feminist movement, it debated female oppression, challenged the accepted patriarchy and questioned what it meant to be a woman. On publication it was an immediate scandalous sensation – selling over 20,000 copies in its first 2 weeks. She received hate mail, much of it graphic, and leading male intellectuals of the day spoke disparagingly to her.

  In the Second World War she fought in the French resistance against the Nazis and in later years protested against the Vietnam War.

  The relationship between de Beauvoir and Sartre, which endured for over half a century, was not without its own scandals; de Beauvoir would secure young female philosophy students for Sartre to bed and would often join in to make these couplings a threesome. She also had a passionate love affair with Jewish writer Nelson Algren and in her letters to him refers to herself as his ‘wife’. She called him the ‘the only truly passionate love in my life’.

  De Beauvoir fervently believed that in order to fully be a ‘woman’ those of the ‘second sex’ should have a job, be intellectually stimulated and fight for social justice. She died in Paris, where she was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery together with Sartre; 5,000 mourners attended her funeral. The Simone de Beauvoir Society was established in 1981, and holds an annual international conference. In 2017 the group celebrated its twenty-fourth conference in Haifa, Israel.

  Queen Sondok or Seondeouk (606–47)

  King Jinpyeong of Silla, the southern kingdom of Korea (then separated into three different kingdoms), had three daughters and no sons – cue the inevitable moaning about no male heir. However Jinpyeong was fairly enlightened about women thanks to Silla’s culture that respected women and even allowed for equal matrilineal lines of inheritance, baffling their Confucian Chinese neighbours. So when Jinpyeong favoured Seondeouk as his successor it only upset a few diehard chauvinists, though they would be a constant thorn in her sid
e.

  It is generally agreed that her father chose her to inherit his throne because of her vast intelligence. In a popular anecdote her father received a box of peony seeds and a picture of what the flowers would look like in full bloom from the emperor of the Tang Dynsty in China. When Seondeouk, aged just 7, looked at the picture she said the flowers are pretty but would have no scent. Her astonished father asked how she knew and, perhaps rolling her eyes and translated into modern speech, she answered, ‘Duh, there’s no bees and no butterflies in the picture – it’s so obvious.’ When the flowers bloomed as predicted King Jinpyeong was confident, with no daddy bias, that his was the smartest little girl.

  Unsurprisingly Seondeouk would still face opposition from the diehards that felt the throne needed a male on it as well as enemies outside her borders who did not take her seriously. In a strategic move worthy of the adage ‘keep your enemies close’ she formed an uneasy alliance with the Tang Dynasty to ward off attacks from her neighbours. At the same time she had the foresight to arrange political marriages between the highbrow of the three Korean kingdoms that would later be crucial in their unification.

  Despite the endless fighting, she seems to have been considered a successful monarch bringing culture, literature and the arts, a stronger connection to Buddhism and astronomy to ancient Korea. She built Asia’s first astronomical observatory called Cheomseongdae (the Star Gazing Tower). Seondeouk’s childhood tutor from Japan was against teaching a female a discipline he considered totally masculine. Astronomy was very important and was considered a divine skill by which the kings were divinely connected to the heavens and could make premonitions by reading the alignment of celestial bodies, the appearance of comets and so on. She was undeterred. Above all she was a common people’s queen. By building this tower for others to use Seondeouk took astronomy to the people. She was also known for implementing policies to help the impoverished and provide welfare. She was also celebrated as a powerful shaman and three incredible prophecies are attributed to her: the peonies already mentioned; the story of the white frogs and a vagina; and foretelling her own death. A colony of white frogs was making a racket at a place known as Jade’s Gate. Seondeouk interpreted this to mean that her enemies were converging at the Women’s Root Valley as Jade’s Gate meant vagina and the frogs were fierce soldiers. She sent her loyal general who did indeed find 2,000 Baekje soldiers about to invade. They were soon sent packing.

  She may not have won over all the chauvinists but her reign was sufficiently successful that Silla accepted another female monarch following her death, her cousin Queen Jindeok.

  Sophie Morigeau (c. 1836/7–1916)

  A frontier-woman and pioneer in the wilds of British Columbia, there are no existing or surviving pictures of Sophie. She was born into a family of fur trappers and traders, and was part of the Metis people, Canada’s aborigines. She spent her life trading with both white Europeans and her own Indian people.

  At 16 she was married to a white man, fellow trader Jean Baptiste Chabotte, but the union didn’t last long and there’s very little remaining evidence as to why. She left that relationship but had many more, on her terms and when it suited her – but woe betide any man who tried to take advantage of her.

  She didn’t take any nonsense. Following an accident with a buggy and runaway horse, she amputated her own rib, which had been left sticking out. Enough said. Apart from the fact that she displayed it in her cabin, tied up with a pink bow. Then of course there’s the eyepatch, following a brutal run-in with a homicidal tree branch.

  Determined to be her own boss and not a stay-at-home wife, she set up business on her own. Alone and fearless, she led a pack train (a line of animals laden with goods, supplies and often bootleg booze) for trading with both natives and Europeans, travelling through mountains, ravines and rivers. During the heady days of the Wild Horse Gold Rush of 1863, Sophie would lead her pack train from Washington and Montana to supply gold miners further north and would spend time at Galbraith’s Ferry, later known as Fort Steele, the town that sprang up to accommodate the prospectors. The Wild Horse River would provide nearly $7 million worth of gold during the rush. When Fort Steele closed in 1870 Sophie was one of the first women from British Columbia to claim land for herself – all 320 acres of it, and set up her own trading post, all by her early 30s, hiding gold coins under her mattress. She kept cattle and horses and was known as a generous woman who would help those who needed it. She died at the age of 80.

  Soujourner Truth (c. 1797–1883)

  Early civil rights activist, social reformer and speaker Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree, was the first black woman to publicly speak against slavery.

  She was born into slavery herself in around 1797 in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York to parents James and Elizabeth Baumfree. Her exact date of birth is not known because slaves weren’t considered important enough to have a birth certificate. Her father was a slave from Ghana and her mother, also known as Mau-Mau Bet, was herself the daughter of slaves from Guinea.

  The entire family (Isabella was one of around twelve children) belonged to Colonel Hardenbergh and lived at his holdings in Esopus, just under 100 miles from New York City. Following his death, ownership passed to the colonel’s son Charles and after his own demise Isabella was sold at auction together with a flock of sheep for $100. She would be sold twice more before settling at the property of John Dumont at West Park, also in New York.

  Dumont forbade her to marry the man of her choice, with whom she’d had a young daughter, forcing her instead to marry one of his own slaves; this meant that any children born of the union would also belong to him. When Dumont broke his promise to grant her freedom, she ran away with her baby daughter in 1826 (New York would free all its slaves on 4 July the following year) to the home of a nearby abolitionist family, the Van Wageners, who paid him $20 to secure her freedom. She then proceeded to do something that no one expected from a black slave woman. Upon discovering her son Peter had been illegally sold across state lines to an owner in Alabama, she took the owner to court. That in itself was mind-blowing for the time. Even more so that she won the case and her son’s freedom. Peter would later embark on a whaling ship expedition from which he would never return.

  Undergoing a profound spiritual awakening, Isabella converted to Christianity and in 1843 changed her name to Sojourner Truth, embarking on a life dedicated to speaking out against slavery and as an advocate for women’s rights. She was a powerful orator and although she had never learned to read or write, she dictated her own story to a friend; this was later published as The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave.

  An active member of the Underground Railroad, which helped smuggle black slaves to safety, she delivered a famous speech on slavery and women’s rights at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851. Although the address was later called ‘Aint I a Woman?’, it’s highly unlikely Sojourner, from New York and Dutch speaking, gave it that distinctly Southern-style title. No transcript of the speech in its entirety has survived.

  She also helped in the Civil War, recruiting young black men to fight on the side of the Unionists; she later met and thanked Abraham Lincoln for his role in ending slavery. She died aged 86 in Michigan and is buried in Battle Creek.

  Susan B. Anthony (15 February 1820–13 March 1906)

  Social reformer, civil rights leader, abolitionist and women’s rights leader, Susan was born in Adams, Massachusetts into a devout Quaker family devoted to advocating temperance (abstinence from drinking alcohol) and abolitionism. And for the curious amongst you, the ‘B’ stands for Brownell.

  Susan had six brothers and sisters and was born into an era when women were second-class citizens. No voting rights. They couldn’t own their own property or keep their wages. But her father took her education seriously; he didn’t have faith in the abilities of the local schools, so decided to home-school Susan himself. She eventually embarked on a teaching career to help her family after they went ban
krupt during a national financial downturn, before becoming a campaigner for women’s suffrage and against slavery and racial prejudice.

  Susan managed feminist newspaper the Revolution, which was launched in 1868. It’s motto was ‘Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less!’ She met fellow activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851 – it was to be a meeting of minds and the start of a long, devoted friendship.

  After attending her first women’s rights convention in Syracuse Susan joined the women’s rights movement and would travel across New York to promote suffrage and abolitionism. She petitioned the legislature, she lobbied, she lectured and she soon became the New York spokesperson or agent for the American Anti-Slavery Association. The two causes would be irrefutably linked for many years.

  She famously voted (for Ulysses S. Grant) in the November 1872 elections in Rochester, New York. The only issue was that women weren’t allowed to vote. She was arrested, faced trial and had to fork out $100 for her illegal action – but the ensuing publicity and furore helped widen the audience reach for the women’s movement. She would continue to travel across the country to fight for suffrage and was alive to see Utah, Colorado and Wyoming allow women the vote. Although she fought for women in California to have the same right, the motion failed.

  The American Equal Rights Association, of which Susan was a member, would famously split into two factions – those who wanted to support the 15th Amendment, which would allow black men to finally have the vote, and those who didn’t, because it would be at the expense of the women’s vote. The schism was so acute that the association would rip apart into two different groups – the National Women’s Suffrage Association, established in 1869 by Susan and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the American Woman Suffrage Association.