by Historical Heroines- 100 Women You Should Know About (retail) (epub)
Susan was enraged by the issue, furious that black or white, it was still men who were being given voting rights before women. Interestingly the issue put her directly at odds with another activist, Sojourner Truth, who felt that as long as progress was being made in the right direction, no matter how slow, they shouldn’t stop the momentum of change.
Nonetheless, her efforts proved pivotal in pushing the women’s movement forward in the nation’s consciousness. Susan introduced an amendment to the Constitution in 1878, for people to be allowed to vote, regardless of their gender. It would only be ratified as the 19th Amendment, on 18 August 1920.
She never married, probably because she knew only too well what that legal state would mean for her rights as a woman. Women were finally given the vote fourteen years after she died.
Truganini (1812–76)
The history of colonisation has never been pretty but when you add penal colonies and convicts to settlers’s greed for land and an atmosphere of fear, the experience takes on a chill that makes Antarctica look cosy. Strip down the Tasmanian devil and you find white colonialism at its heart.
Truganini, an indigenous woman from Tasmania, reveals the terrible history of the infamous Black War between 1803 and 1830 and beyond. Added to the abysmal acts committed against her people, her memory was then used by colonists to perpetuate the convenient illusion that Tasmania’s aboriginals were extinct. Many people only knew her from a photograph racially described as ‘Truganini the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine’. If she was the last, then what does that make Palawan descendants today?
Truganini was born in 1812 in Bruny Island near Hobart. Europeans had been there since the seventeenth century but the decision to make Tasmania a British penal island in 1803 led to a catastrophic situation as the inept system allowed the escape of prisoners (some barely criminal) , many victims of trauma themselves, into the Tasmanian hinterland. Furthermore the Europeans brought disease and a cataclysmic death toll followed.
In a series of atrocities committed against the Tasmanians and the ensuing battles between 1803 and 1830, known as the Black War, indigenous people were cut down in their thousands. Horrifying stories recount unimaginable brutality. When the indigenous people retaliated the violence escalated and so Lieutenant Governor George Arthur declared martial law in 1928 and a bounty offering £5 for an adult and £2 for a child.
Truganini had witnessed her mother Thelgelly stabbed to death in front of her, her sisters abducted to Kangaroo Island and probably sold as slaves, her uncle shot and Praweena her fiancé thrown in the river, his hands cut off so he drowned to death, before she was raped.
When the missionary George Robinson arrived in 1829 he proved to be a complex personality. He was determined to end the violence and make peace but he also believed fundamentally in the superiority of white Christians. The first aboriginal he met was called Wooraddy, and he had lost his wife. Robinson played matchmaker and hooked him up with Truganini who he had befriended when she was 18. The couple joined Robinson in what was known as the Friendly Missions where they attempted to build trust with tribes.
Little was achieved because it was decided to remove the remaining aboriginals from the island, ostensibly for their own protection but also to just get rid. Robinson was paid handsomely to persuade Truganini’s people to go to Flinders Island in 1830, which they agreed to as a temporary measure.
The camp there was little better than a prison with dreadful conditions and rife with disease. Their numbers plummeted even further. Truganini was appalled at Robinson, who tried to make matters right by taking a small number including Truganini and Wooraddy to Port Philip. However five of them splintered away and turned vigilante. They headed for the whalers camp in the Western Port area possibly because Truganini believed that is where her sisters had been taken. In October 1842, they attacked a miner’s cottage and killed two sailors, although Truganini helped the women to safety first.
They managed to evade capture for five weeks before they were apprehended and taken to trial. Aborigines were forbidden from testifying in court so Robinson perjured himself to say the women were unwitting accomplices, saving them from the death penalty. Truganini watched her husband and friend Umarrah hang, the first people executed in Victoria. She was sent back to Flinders Island and then to Oyster Cove near her birthplace where she resumed a traditional lifestyle. She refused to acknowledge Robinson again.
However in a final insult the Victorian community began to show an interest in aboriginal people in much the same way as they enjoyed investigating an extinct species and desecrated their bodies for the purposes of research. Despite Truganini’s pleas to respect her body, her skeleton was put on display in Hobart Museum until 1947. She was not cremated until 1976 when her ashes were finally taken home.
As Jewish women we were brought up with the words ‘never forget’ – as in never forget the atrocities of the Holocaust. Without doubt Truganini’s story should also never be forgotten.
The Trung Sisters (d. AD 43)
Sisters had been doing it for themselves a long time before Aretha Franklin sang her famous anthem.
National heroines in Vietnam with temples and homages dedicated to their rebellious spirit, the Trung sisters were the Mockingjays of Vietnam’s own rebellions and encouraged women born centuries later to take up arms in its most famous war against the US.
The daughters of a nobleman and born in the first century AD near Hanoi, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi would become two of Vietnam’s most famous war generals as they pushed back the Chinese trying to subjugate their country. They then ruled as queens for a few years, before being ruthlessly put down.
Both the Vietnamese and Chinese history books have misrepresented the Trung sisters. The first initially elevated them to near mythical status but as their society became more patriarchal what swiftly followed was a far less flattering rewrite; the Chinese depicted their battle as a meaningless mockery. Neither are useful for a proper understanding of women’s lives in Vietnam at the time, a period that puts the Western world to shame as women enjoyed a level of autonomy not granted to their European sisters until centuries later.
A popular version of the sisters’ story tells us that the Vietnamese were suffering under the barbaric rules of the greedy Chinese Emperor To Dinh. Trung Trac’s own husband was executed by the Chinese governor for protesting at a raise in taxes. His death has been touted as the casus belli for the ensuing rebellion headed by the Trung sisters in AD 39 or 40 which spread across Vietnam. However the suggestion that Trung Trac fought to avenge her husband as a romantic gesture rather than to free her people from tyranny does seem to smack of condescension.
Regardless the sisters raised an army of 80,000, many of whom were women, and drove the Chinese away. China’s emperor was compelled to send in the army under his best general, Ma Yuan, to deal with the uprising. Famously the sisters met him astride elephants but the Chinese forces finally defeated them at the Battle of Lang Bac in AD 41.
Embedded in the story of the Trung sisters is the tale, possibly apocryphal, of another fierce woman. According to legend Phung Thi Chinh, who was heavily pregnant, gave birth on the battlefield and then fastened the baby to her back as she carried on fighting. Knowing what most women experience straight after birth, leaking from every orifice, struggling to breastfeed, it’s difficult to believe.
The emperor’s need to send in a top general ridicules the more biased legends that claim the Chinese warriors turned up naked to the fight causing the blushing Vietnamese women to run away in embarrassment. It’s hard to imagine the women being more scared of a horde of hostile penises than a ferocious army, unless all the laughter rendered them incapable.
Vietnamese academics declared that their rebellion failed because the sisters’s followers deserted them, knowing an army of women would lose. These particular scholars wrote their versions a few hundred years later, after being educated by the Chinese patriarchal Confucius ideology. The heady days of female
equality were long gone by then and men were fiercely embarrassed by this episode, undermining it with ridicule to soothe their battered pride.
Unfortunately after the plucky Trung girls were defeated the Chinese ruthlessly retained tight control over the Vietnamese and the fate of the sisters was lost in myth and misogyny. Some claim they were beheaded, others believe they took their own lives as a traditional honourable death. Either way they live on in the national imagination influencing the spirit of Vietnam’s history.
Veronica Franco (1546–91)
Sixteenth-century Venetian writer and poet Veronica was one of the cortigiana onesta, the intellectual courtesans, not to be confused with the lower class cortigiana di lume, prostitutes who worked the Rialto Bridge and offered only sex.
According to records, there were over 11,654 prostitutes in Venice, which had a population of 100,000. You can do the maths. It was fairly simple to be considered a prostitute in Venice. If you were single and were dating a couple of men, then you were considered one. Or if you were married but separated and still dating a couple of men you were also a prostitute. They’d have a whale of a time attempting to make a clear distinction today.
It was also considered vulgar for a woman to be intelligent, express or even have her own opinion. No change there then. Venetian courtesans were world famous. Beautiful, sensual, sexy, enrobed in colourful and bright clothing, often with ribbons and bare breasts, and high-clogged shoes, it’s fair to say they were a tourist attraction as they beckoned to customers from the windows and Venetian bridges.
Thanks to the wealth and generosity of their patrons, their lives would be one of extremely comfortable luxury and financial security. Although it wasn’t all plain sailing, as the risk of contracting syphilis from one of their lovers was a very real threat, both to their health and that financial security.
Courtesans and aristocratic women actually wore very similar clothing and shoes, but there the resemblance ended. The cortigiana onesta were well informed, intellectual, articulate and educated — many times more so than the high-bred, more respectable aristocratic women and wives only viewed by society as vehicles of procreation and objects of prestige.
Women like Veronica, who was classically educated alongside her three brothers, could read and write. Politicians and those in power would seek the counsel of these courtesans, ironic considering that women were not allowed to hold any power in the government of the day. The most famous and high-born of Veronica’s lovers was King Henry III of France, to whom she dedicated two of her sonnets in Lettere familiari a diversi (Familiar Letters to Various People). Their relationship is a great example of how a courtesan could, through her affairs with powerful men, effect change and influence in global politics. Veronica embarked on her affair with the king at a pivotal time for her beloved Venice. Its borders threatened by the Turkish, she persuaded him to provide the republic with ships with which to defend itself.
Her writing was supported by the hugely influential Domenico Venier, a Venetian poet, former senator and the head of Venice’s largest literary academy. What set Veronica further apart was that she published two volumes of poetry, the Terze Rime, in 1575, followed by Familiar Letters in 1580. She played music and was part of an artistic ‘salon’ of thinkers, philosophers and poets.
Veronica was forced to flee her beloved Venice in 1575 because of the plague and lost most of her money and possessions to looting. She came home in 1577 only to face the Inquisition on charges of witchcraft in 1580 for allegedly bewitching her many happy and loyal noble customers. Her first marriage was likely an arranged one, to a doctor, Paolo Panizza. She had six children from different men, only three of whom survived.
Veronica founded a charity for fellow courtesans whilst also writing letters of caution to friends considering entering their daughters into a life like hers. She died penniless in Venice at the age of 47.
Vivian Bullwinkel (18 December 1915–3 July 2000)
Born in Kapunda, South Australia, Vivian ‘Bully’ Bullwinkel was rejected from the Royal Australian Air Force because she had flat feet. Instead she enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service in 1941 at the age of 25.
Posted to Singapore on the hospital ship Wanganella, she joined the 13th Australian General Hospital with forty-three other nurses. As the Japanese invaded Malaya on 8 December 1941 the hospital was repeatedly bombed and forced to work under blackout conditions at night. As the city fell to the Japanese, she was one of the last 300 civilians, British soldiers and nurses to flee the island for Australia on the boat Vyner Brooke on 12 February.
But the escape was not to be – after two days at sea, the freighter was spotted by the Japanese and bombed out of the water. Around 150 survivors clung to pieces of wreckage until they were washed ashore on Banka Island, where they were encouraged to surrender. Most of the British soldiers accompanying them were murdered.
Twenty-one of the army nurses, together with an elderly civilian woman, were forced into the sea by their captors. As they waded in Matron Irene Drummond said to them: ‘Chin up girls. I’m proud of you and I love you all.’ The final words of another nurse were: ‘There are two things I hate in life, the Japs and the sea, and today I’ve got both.’
The women were then gunned down from the behind in cold blood. Bullwinkel, standing towards the end of the line, was the sole survivor, describing the impact of the bullet that went straight through her waist as like the kick of a mule. She survived only by playing dead, lying on the beach for 10 minutes and waiting until the Japanese soldiers had disappeared. She found a surviving British soldier, known only to her as ‘Private Kingsley’ who was badly wounded and nursed him for twelve days. At risk of starvation they surrendered again to the Japanese. Private Kingsley died soon afterwards.
Bullwinkel didn’t tell the Japanese what she had survived on the beach of Banka Island. They would have shot her if they had known. Instead she spent the following three-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war at Palemberg in Sumatra, doing her job as a nurse for prisoners of war.
There had been 65 Australian nurses on the Vyner Brooke: 12 died during the Japanese air raid, 21 were massacred on Radji Beach and 32 became prisoners of war.
Vivian presented evidence of war crimes to the Tokyo Tribunal, following which the Japanese officer thought to have ordered the murders committed suicide. Awarded the Order of Australia, the MBE for bravery and the Florence Nightingale Medal, she died at the age of 84 on 3 July 2000, having returned to Banka Island in 1992 to unveil a memorial to her fellow nurses.
Yaa Asantewaa (c. 1840–1921)
Asantewaa, known as Nana Yaa, was the guardian of the Golden Stool (Sika ‘dwa), an artefact of such profound importance to the Ashanti nation (modern-day Ghana) it inspired a rebellion against the British known as the War of the Golden Stool. It was led by Nana Yaa in 1900.
Nana Yaa had been appointed by her brother the ruler (Eijushne) of the Ejisu as their Queen Mother, a powerful position that enabled her to have her grandson appointed Eijushne when her brother died in 1894. When the British colonial powers exiled her grandson alongside King Prempeh II of the Ashanti Empire in 1896 she ruled in his stead over the Ejisu-Juaben District.
Although the British helped Prempeh win a bitter civil war he was damned if he would let them trample over his people, land and traditions, although he was happy to remain friends. However the British were firmly ensconced on the Gold Coast swiping the Ashanti gold mines and trying to convert all and sundry to Christianity. Prempeh’s success as a leader made the colonists nervous and after he refused to give up his independence, they exiled him and several supporters to the Seychelles.
Governor Frederick Hodgson didn’t think it was enough to take away the Ashanti’s beloved leader, he demanded that they recognise him, and per se Britain, as the rightful ruler. He knew whoever owned the stool owned the land.
Each Asantahene (king) assumed his power after taking part in a sacred ritual of the Golden Stool. Tradition told th
at in the seventeenth century the stool had fallen from the sky onto the lap of the first king of the Ashanti Empire, Osei Tutu. Priest Okomfo Anokye revered for his divine powers declared that the soul of the Ashanti kingdom resided in the stool and its loss would signal the destruction of the Ashanti kingdom.
At first only Yaa stood up to Hodgson. In a famous secret meeting held by the Ashanti to discuss Hodgson’s demands, the men wanted to give in. Yaa stood up and made a famous speech in which she chastised them for their lily-livered cowardice, and like many women before her and since she said if the men won’t do the job the women will even if it means fighting to their deaths.
And she was true to her word leading the Ashanti in rebellion with 20,000 supporters. She reportedly threatened the women to withhold sex until the men joined the fight. The British thought they would quell the rebellion quickly but Yaa’s clever strategies meant it took several months. She besieged the fort of Kumasi. After the British had to call in extra troops they were still unable to capture Yaa. It was only after hearing of her grandchildren’s capture that she handed herself in. She was sent to join Prempeh in June 1901 and she died in exile.
It was a spiritual victory as the British never got hold of the Golden Stool and the people never stopped believing that Prempeh was their rightful king. He was returned from exile after years of petitioning inside and outside Ghana.
Yaa’s bravery and resolution inspired the Ashanti people who would never give up seeking independence. Their dream was finally realised in 1957.