Right to the very end of her 98-year-long life, Whina wanted to be in charge. When Whina was 87, a reporter wrote that, ‘The sound of Whina Cooper’s determined voice on the phone can still make a civil servant’s heart shrink.’ She was relentless, and when she wanted something done it would be done – whether or not others agreed with her. Whina believed that New Zealand should be one nation, Maori and Pakeha together, while other Maori wanted (and want) a separate Maori national identity within New Zealand. Her legacy remains a controversial one, but her leadership shaped the conversation for a nation dealing with its colonial legacy.
Perhaps Whina has given us the best way to remember her complicated and divisive history. As she explained to her biographer Michael King, she was ‘he wahini riri, he wahine awhina, he wahine aroha – an angry woman, a supportive woman, a loving woman’.
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Susan La Flesche Picotte
1865–1915
When Susan La Flesche Picotte was a child, she watched a woman die at the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska when a white doctor refused to treat her because he cared more about being an evil racist than saving a person’s life. She decided to become a doctor herself, so that members of her community would not have to depend on the whims of evil racists for medical care.
When she was 14, her dad, the Chief Joseph La Flesche, or Iron Eyes, encouraged her to continue her education as far as possible, which meant leaving the reservation for a while. She went to study at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, a historically black college attended by many Native Americans who were not welcome at white universities, due to the inscrutable fears and superstitions of white people. Susan went on to the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, one of the few places women could study medicine at the time, and casually graduated at the top of her class. She’s thought to be the first Native American to receive a medical degree.
Susan returned to Nebraska, where she was the only doctor for nearly 1,300 Omaha people across 1,350 square miles. She ran public health campaigns against drinking and in the prevention of tuberculosis. She worked day and night helping her community in more ways than medicine, intervening in financial and family troubles. She married in 1894 and moved to Bancroft, Nebraska, where she ended up opening a private practice that treated both white people and people of colour, because she wasn’t an evil racist. In 1913, she opened a hospital on a reservation in Nebraska.
When her husband died, Susan had to go head to head with the federal government in order to inherit his land. It had gone to a male relation rather than her, because it couldn’t possibly be the case that a woman would be competent enough to handle the land of a man. She became an advocate for other Omaha people locked in struggles with the Office of Indian Affairs over land and money owed to them. She wasn’t just a doctor, but a leader of the community, and one of those people with a seemingly infinite, glowing orb of energy inside of them – even as she dealt with chronic illness herself. In Susan’s lifetime, it was almost unheard of for a woman to carry on working after marriage, and especially after having children, but thankfully, Susan didn’t give a fuck about that, and saved a lot of lives because of it.
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Sojourner Truth
c. 1797–1883
You can find recordings on YouTube of the actress Kerry Washington performing Sojourner Truth’s famous ‘Ain’t I a Woman’ speech, made to the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851. It is a sublime rendition of this 19th-century abolitionist’s witty and cutting speech about the intersections of the anti-slavery and women’s rights struggles, punctuated every few lines with the question, ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’
It’s an amazing, theatrical, emotional monologue, which asks over and over whether she, a formerly enslaved black woman, would ‘count’ as the kind of woman that a supposedly hostile crowd at the women’s conference sought to liberate.
So it is frustrating to find out that this speech passed down to us in all its glory is not, in fact, anything like the real speech Sojourner Truth made. In a baffling but not surprising example of dramatic irony, the transcript performed by Washington and others was actually written 12 years later by the white suffragist Frances Dana Gage, who had been the conference’s organiser.
And what she did – like a posh white person today enthusiastically singing along to rap – was publish Sojourner’s transcript in an invented Southern dialect, (including two invented uses of the n-word). This is the version most people know, and what Kerry Washington bases her performance on. Here’s an extract:
Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have de best place eberywhar.
Nobody eber helps me into carriages or ober mud-puddles, or gives me any best place.
And ar’n’t I a woman?
In fact, Sojourner was a Northerner from New York. She was born into slavery in 1797, and only spoke Dutch until she was nine. Her accent, if she had one, was Dutch, and in any case she prided herself on her clear English diction. After all, she toured the entire country delivering lectures and debating.
Sojourner gained her freedom in 1826, or rather took it for herself. New York State was set to abolish slavery in 1827, and her owner said he would let her go the year before, but reneged on his promise. So one morning, she took her infant and left at dawn. In the dictated memoirs she published in 1850, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave, she recalled that when her former master came to find her and accused her of running away, she told him, ‘No, I did not run away; I walked away by daylight, and all because you had promised me a year of my time.’ He demanded she return with him, and she refused.
Once free, she went to court to try and get back one of her children who had been sold to the South – which was illegal at the time. She told her former mistress, ‘I have no money, but God has enough, or what’s better! And I’ll have my child again.’ In 1828, she successfully secured the return of her son, and was the first black woman to win a case like this against a white man.
Sojourner gained fame travelling around the country, moved by her religious convictions to preach about abolition, women’s rights, prison reform, and against capital punishment. She helped recruit black soldiers to join the Union army in the Civil War, and afterwards worked to resettle formerly enslaved people attempting to start new lives. She lobbied the federal government for seven years to grant land to emancipated people, and even met with President Ulysses S. Grant, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
There is another transcript of Sojourner’s barnstorming ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ speech, from only a few weeks after she gave it, published in collaboration with Sojourner in an anti-slavery newspaper. There are some overlaps between the two versions, but notably the 1851 version is likely much closer to Sojourner’s own words, and in any case was published with her approval. A website called The Sojourner Truth Project has compiled readings of this original version of the speech by women with contemporary Afro-Dutch accents, to get a bit closer to Truth’s truth. Here is an excerpt:
I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it.
I am as strong as any man that is now.
As for intellect, all I can say is, if women have a pint and man a quart – why can’t she have her little pint full?
You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, for we can’t take more than our pint’ll hold.
The poor men seem to be all in confusion, and don’t know what to do.
The poor men! It’s always a treasure to read sarcasm which works just as well more than 160 years after it was first uttered.
We should refrain from making the misconception about Sojourner’s most famous speech another ‘actually Frankenstein is the name of the scientist’ stick with which to beat each other. It’s just a shame, and an ironic one, that her own words were lost. Everything that was uttered by brilliant people before the technology existed t
o record sound depends on the foggy memories of witnesses, journalists, and ethically dubious activists. Even the ‘Gettysburg Address’ speech by Abraham Lincoln, whom Sojourner also met, exists in multiple versions, but I suppose what really matters is the version carved in marble in Washington DC beside a 19-foot-tall statue of the president. (President Lincoln, that is. We haven’t yet got a statue of the current president, though it’s only a matter of time.)
So listen to both versions of ‘Ain’t I A Woman’, and be inspired by them to get up, go outside, scream at the sky in a righteous fury, and then join an anti-racist activist group or two.
Women who knew how to have a good-ass time
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Empress Theodora
c. AD 500–548
Let us now marvel at a lady who achieved one of the most impressive glow ups in the thousand-plus-years of history of the Byzantine Empire: Empress Theodora. If you don’t know what a glow up is, you’re about to find out.
Theodora was born in 500 AD to modest circumstances: her mother was an actress and a dancer, and her father was a bear-keeper for Constantinople’s centre of debauchery, the Hippodrome – a job which, though awesome, didn’t exactly make them rich. But the Hippodrome was a place for more than bear-related debauchery, and it was there that Theodora and her sisters were put to work as ‘entertainers’ after the death of their bear-wrangling father. In those times, being an actress was basically the same thing as being a prostitute, though being a prostitute was perhaps less of a big deal than it is nowadays.
By the age of 15, Theodora was an acting ~star~ of the Hippodrome. As well as her, er, private performances, she would dance for audiences with only a ribbon to cover her lady bits, and was also known for, well … Look. I don’t know what your average Byzantine gentleman was into, and who are we to judge what got people’s rocks off 1,500 years ago? It was a different time. In any case, Theodora *may* have had a fun circus ‘act’ in which geese pecked food out of her fanny.
It is true? Well, what we know of her is mostly recorded in the various histories of one contemporary historian, Procopius, who may have kind of hated her and her future husband. He said that she had many lovers, all at once, and that she wished she had more sexy bits in order to sex more dudes at the same time. Procopius, who frankly sounds jealous, may have meant to posthumously slander her name, but the joke’s on you mate, all of this fun slander just makes us like her more.
After her early teenage years spent in a series of orgies and goose-related sexual performances (you can’t libel the dead!), Theodora shacked up with a Syrian official and settled in Alexandria. She’d eventually get dumped, have a religious turn, and then move back to Constantinople in 522.
She came back a reformed, pious woman, and replaced her former line of entertainment work with the more low-key occupation of spinning wool, assuring people that, ‘NOW I SPIN WOOL, GUYS. MY BAD ABOUT ALL THE STUFF WITH THE GEESE.’
But Theodora’s life was only about to get more exciting. See, the place where she spun wool ever so innocently happened to be quite close to the royal palace, where she managed to catch the eye of the emperor-to-be, Justinian, by being like, ‘Heyy, I’m just a pious wool spinner … with a sexy past.’ And Justinian was all, ‘I’m into it.’
Theodora was, as the Byzantines used to say, well fit. Procopius, in a more generous mood, said that ‘painting and poetry’ were insufficient to capture her ravishing beauty. Anyone who’s cute but looks awkward in photos will relate.
Theodora became Justinian’s concubine, as you do. But Justinian was so smitten that he wanted to marry her. Justinian’s auntie, the current empress, knew of Theodora’s less-than-salubrious past, and needless to say, didn’t see her as marriage material. But unfortunately for her, she died, so they married anyway. RIP.
Theodora became empress in 527, and adorned herself with magnificent dresses, furs, and jewellery. She bedecked herself in purple, visited hot springs and treated herself to luxurious beauty treatments, enjoying the rare gifts that Justinian brought her from across the empire. If officials forgot to kiss her feet, or otherwise failed to treat her with all due respect, they risked exile. It was a long way from spinning wool and, er, performing.
Justinian sought Theodora’s advice in all stately affairs, and viewed her as an equal. (Shout-out to Justinian, original woke bae <3.) Under their reign, they won loads of wars which reconquered far-flung lands from Vandals and Ostrogoths and health goths and sport goths and skateboarding hooligan types. They rewrote Roman legal codes, some aspects of which survive in civil codes today.
Things were going well across the empire, but there was trouble brewing at home. In order to fund their imperial exploits, Justadora, as we will refer to Justinian and Theodora jointly, raised taxes on the wealthy. And if there’s anything the wealthy don’t like, it’s sharing.
At this point in history, Constantinople was divided into two rival gangs: the ‘Blues’ (poshos who thought that Christ had a human AND a divine nature) and the ‘Greens’ (a worker’s party who thought Christ had only one nature). The groups had originated from rival Roman chariot racer teams, but by the 500s they were mostly just shouting about Jesus. (Someone really should have asked Jesus about his nature, it would have saved a lot of trouble.)
Theodora was firmly team Blue, as they had helped out her family in the past. But the Blues weren’t happy about the raised taxes, and the Greens weren’t happy about the general Blue-ness of Justadora, and so everyone decided to riot. Aside from setting things on fire, the angry mob also took it upon itself to say that some dude called Hypatius should be the emperor, and that Justinian, instead of being emperor, should be dead.
Things were looking pretty grim, and Justinian was about ready to get the fuck out of town. But ho! The empress literally stood in his way, and gave him a speech about how not to be a tiny, scaredy baby.
‘If you my lord, wish to save your skin,’ she proclaimed, ‘you will have no difficulty in doing so. We are rich, there is the sea, and there too are our ships. But consider first whether, when you reach safety, you will regret that you did not choose death in preference. As for me, I stand by the ancient saying: the purple is the noblest winding sheet.’
I have no idea what a purple winding sheet is, or why it is noble, however, the speech clearly worked, because Justinian decided to stay and fight it out. He ordered his troops to see off Hypatius, and took out another 30,000 demonstrators for good measure. This indirectly gives Theodora the highest kill count of any woman in this book. (Look, it’s called Nasty Women of History, not Nice Fluffy Bunnies of History Who Wouldn’t Hurt A Soul.)
In any case, if it weren’t for Theodora’s intervention, Justinian would have been surely overthrown – and then we’d all be sorry.
In the rest of the time they ruled together, Justadora completed the Hagia Sophia, a truly top-notch church, which was the largest in the world for nearly a millennium. Theodora also founded a monastery to house 500 women who had ended up in prostitution, and lobbied to reform the law to make it easier for women to bring suits against men, divorce, and own property.
Theodora died at 48 years old. Her life, friends, was a glow up for the ages. Should you ever find yourself fallen on hard times, perhaps sitting beside a lake, looking upon a goose and considering your options – remember Theodora, who rose from the lowliest station to become one of the two most powerful people in an empire at the height of its glory.
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Wallada bint al-Mustakfi
c. 994–1091
Wallada bint al-Mustakfi had the good fortune to be born to the Caliph Muhammad III of Cordoba in about 994, and the even better fortune for her father to be murdered, thereby inheriting his wealth and gaining total independence.
What would you do with wealth and independence, had you lived in Cordoba at the height of the Muslim conquest of Spain? This was a time and place celebrated for its running water, its gardens, its public baths, its university, its booksellers, its high
literacy, and its all-around pleasantness – all during a period when the rest of Europe was thigh-deep in raw sewage, clubbing each other over the heads with sticks.
Well, Wallada did the classy thing: she opened a literary salon. It served as a school for women from all walks of life, from slave to royal, and she invited Jews, Christians, Muslims – and her lovers, naturally – to compete in fierce poetry competitions. She herself was a brilliant poet, and master of ~sensual wordplay~. Which everyone knows is the best type of wordplay. She never married, because who needs a husband when you have a literary salon well stocked with lovers and entertainment?
Speaking of lovers, one man had the good fortune to experience a long and particularly tortuous affair with Wallada. His name was Ibn Zaydun, and he has come to be known as one of the most famous masters of Arabic poetry of all time, because blah blah blah men get to be remembered by history, good for them, isn’t that nice.
When times were good between Wallada and Ibn Zaydun, they’d wander the gardens at night, as Wallada wrote:
Wait for darkness, then visit me,
for I believe that night is the best keeper of secrets.
I feel a love for you that if the light of heaven felt, the sun would not shine,
nor the moon rise, nor the stars begin their nightly journey.
Why the secrecy, other than the fact that secrets are hot? Well, Ibn Zaydun was a political rival of her family, and he and her dad absolutely hated each other. They probably shared some crushing handshakes.
100 Nasty Women of History Page 21