by Jason Porath
Dedication
Contents
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
HOLD UP A SECOND!
Khutulun (1260–1306, MONGOLIA)
Tatterhood (NORWEGIAN FAIRY TALE)
Agnodice (4TH CENTURY BCE, GREECE)
Te Puea Herangi (1883–1952, NEW ZEALAND)
Moremi Ajasoro (12TH CENTURY, NIGERIA)
Sybil Ludington (1761–1839, UNITED STATES)
Kurmanjan Datka (1811–1907, KYRGYZSTAN)
Andamana (C. 14TH CENTURY, CANARY ISLANDS)
Mary Seacole (1805–1881, JAMAICA/CRIMEA) and Florence Nightingale (1820–1910, ENGLAND/CRIMEA)
Gráinne “Grace O’Malley” Ní Mháille (1530–1603, IRELAND)
“Stagecoach” Mary Fields (1832–1914, UNITED STATES)
Yennenga (EARLY 12TH CENTURY, BURKINA FASO/GHANA)
Annie Jump Cannon (1863–1941, UNITED STATES)
Wilma Rudolph (1940–1994, UNITED STATES)
Alfhild (5TH CENTURY, DENMARK)
Calafia (16TH-CENTURY SPANISH MYTH)
Keumalahayati (16TH–17TH CENTURY, INDONESIA)
Marie Marvingt (1875–1963, FRANCE)
Iara (BRAZILIAN LEGEND)
Jane Dieulafoy (1851–1916, FRANCE/PERSIA)
Tin Hinan (C. 4TH–5TH CENTURY, ALGERIA)
Hatshepsut (1508–1458 BCE, EGYPT)
Emmy Noether (1882–1935, GERMANY)
Ka’ahumanu (C. 1768–1832, HAWAII)
Katie Sandwina (1884–1952, AUSTRIA/UNITED STATES)
Gracia Mendes Nasi (1510–1569, PORTUGAL/ITALY/TURKEY)
Sayyida al-Hurra (C. 1482–1562, MOROCCO)
Matilda of Tuscany (1046–1115, ITALY)
Moll Cutpurse (1584–1659, ENGLAND)
Nellie Bly (1864–1922, UNITED STATES) and Elizabeth Bisland (1861–1929, UNITED STATES)
Trung Trac and Trung Nhi (1ST CENTURY CE, VIETNAM)
Yaa Asantewaa (C. 1830–1921, GHANA [ASANTE CONFEDERACY])
Gertrude Bell (1868–1926, IRAQ [MESOPOTAMIA]/ENGLAND)
Eustaquia de Souza and Ana Lezama de Urinza (1639–C. 1661, BOLIVIA)
Mary Bowser (19TH CENTURY, UNITED STATES)
Pope Joan (9TH CENTURY, VATICAN CITY)
Nwanyeruwa (EARLY 20TH CENTURY, NIGERIA)
Mary Lacy (1740–1801, ENGLAND)
Josefina “Joey” Guerrero (1918–1996, PHILIPPINES)
Chiyome Mochizuki (16TH CENTURY, JAPAN)
Nana Asma’u (1793–1864, NIGERIA [SOKOTO CALIPHATE])
Julie “La Maupin” d’Aubigny (1670–1707, FRANCE)
Nanny of the Maroons (C. 1680–C. 1750, JAMAICA)
Xtabay (MESOAMERICAN MYTH)
Tomoe Gozen (1157–1247, JAPAN)
Empress Theodora (C. 497–548, TURKEY)
Rani Lakshmibai (1828–1858, INDIA)
Mariya Oktyabrskaya (1905–1944, RUSSIA)
Yael (C. 13TH CENTURY BCE, KINGDOM OF ISRAEL)
Wallada bint al-Mustakfi (C. 1000–1091, SPAIN [ANDALUSIA])
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852, ENGLAND)
Laskarina Bouboulina (1771–1825, GREECE)
Ching Shih (1775–1844, CHINA)
Christine de Pizan (1364–C. 1430, FRANCE)
Harriet Tubman (1822–1913, UNITED STATES)
Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643, UNITED STATES)
Petra “Pedro” Herrera (LATE 19TH CENTURY–EARLY 20TH CENTURY, MEXICO)
A’isha bint abi Bakr (614–678, SAUDI ARABIA [ARABIA])
Olga of Kiev (890–969, UKRAINE)
Agontime and the Dahomey Amazons (19TH CENTURY, BENIN)
Mata Hari (1876–1917, FRANCE)
Josephine Baker (1906–1975, UNITED STATES/FRANCE)
Dhat al-Himma (8TH-CENTURY ARABIAN MYTH)
Alice Clement (1878–1926, UNITED STATES)
Shajar al-Durr (C. 1220–1257, EGYPT)
Amba/Sikhandi (INDIAN MYTH)
Khawlah bint al-Azwar (7TH CENTURY, SYRIA/JORDAN/PALESTINE [ARABIA])
Princess Caraboo (1791–1864, ENGLAND)
Anita Garibaldi (1821–1849, BRAZIL/URUGUAY/ITALY)
Tomyris (6TH CENTURY BCE, KAZAKHSTAN)
Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1929, ENGLAND)
Marjana (ARABIAN MYTH)
Mai Bhago (LATE 17TH CENTURY–MID-18TH CENTURY, INDIA)
Hortense Mancini (1646–1699, FRANCE/ITALY/ENGLAND) and Marie Mancini (1639–1715, FRANCE/ITALY/SPAIN)
Nzinga Mbande (1583–1663, ANGOLA [NDONGO])
Hypatia (350 [370]–415, EGYPT)
Jezebel (9TH CENTURY BCE, KINGDOM OF ISRAEL)
Qiu Jin (1875–1907, CHINA)
Yoshiko Kawashima (1907–1948, CHINA/JAPAN)
Joan of Arc (1412–1431, FRANCE)
Osh-Tisch (LATE 19TH CENTURY–EARLY 20TH CENTURY, CROW NATION/UNITED STATES)
The Night Witches (C. 1940, RUSSIA)
Sita (INDIAN MYTH)
Kharboucha (19TH-CENTURY MOROCCAN LEGEND)
Marguerite de la Rocque (MID-16TH CENTURY, CANADA/FRANCE)
Noor Inayat Khan (1914–1944, FRANCE)
Empress Myeongseong (1851–1895, KOREA)
Micaela Bastidas (1744–1781, PERU/BOLIVIA)
Neerja Bhanot (1963–1986, INDIA)
Boudica (C. 20–60 CE, ENGLAND)
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1653, ITALY)
Wu Zetian (624–705, CHINA)
Arawelo (C. 15 CE, SOMALIA)
Caterina Sforza (1463–1509, ITALY)
Elisabeth Báthory (1560–1614, HUNGARY)
Malinche (1496 [1501]–1529, MEXICO)
Ida B. Wells (1862–1931, UNITED STATES)
Phoolan Devi (1963–2001, INDIA)
IT DOESN’T HAVE TO STOP HERE!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Introduction
There’s a list of stories in your head. You know the one. It’s the list schools give to girls: Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie, Rosa Parks, and so on. It’s safe. It’s censored. It’s short. It’s the list of amazing women in history.
But what of the untold stories? The uncompromised ones? The uncomfortable ones? The rejected ones?
That’s where this book comes in.
Who Rejects the Rejected?
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: if you’re expecting a collection of pitched-and-rejected ideas for animated movies here, you’re out of luck. I didn’t pitch any of these as movies. To my knowledge, nobody has. Heck, most of the women covered here aren’t even princesses. “Rejected Princesses” is less a description and more a question: Why don’t we know about these women? Where are their movies?
I mean, think back to history class. You learned about male figures running the gamut from Abe Lincoln to Genghis Khan. And on the female side? The aforementioned short list. And that list was not a foregone conclusion: it’s not like history lacks for strong-minded women. But at some point, our society collectively decided that people like Elizabeth I and Cleopatra VII are fine, but rebels, hellions, and warlords? Not so much. And when someone like Harriet Tubman does sneak onto the list? The unpalatable parts of her story, the bits “not suitable for children,” get left off.
Now, as you read this book, some of you will bristle a bit and say, “Well, that’s obviously not suitable for kids.” Okay, sure—but where is that line? Ancient Greek children had Zeus impregnating women while in the shape of various animals. Norse children hear
d about Odin plucking out his own eye for wisdom. Inuit children got a lot of talk about genitalia in their folktales. (Seriously, look them up. Inuit stories can get pretty weird.) Kids are flexible. Kids can handle more than we think.
What’s “suitable for kids” defines what sort of kids we as a society want. And right now, the girls society wants are the ones who can fit on a short list—while the list for boys is without borders or end.
If girls can be anything, let them be anything.
This is a book for any girl who ever felt she didn’t fit in. You are not alone. You come from a long line of bold, strong, fearless women. Glory in that.
This is a book for anyone who ever underestimated a girl.
Where’d This All Come From?
I hadn’t planned to start this project.
It all began with a lunchtime question posed to my DreamWorks Animation coworkers: Who is the least likely candidate for an animated princess movie? Over an hour, we tried one-upping each other with increasingly inappropriate suggestions (most inappropriate: Nabokov’s Lolita). Throughout, I kept suggesting obscure warrior women I’d learned about from Wikipedia binges, like Angolan freedom fighter Nzinga Mbande or tank-driving Soviet Mariya Oktyabrskaya. None of my coworkers had ever heard of them. I thought that should change.
By the end of the conversation, I knew this needed to exist. I had almost no artistic training to speak of (I was a very technical sort of animator), and no background as a historian, but I did the best I could. After I left DreamWorks, I put a handful of entries online, to see if there would be any reaction.
There was. In short order, www.rejectedprincesses.com made Reddit, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, NPR, and newspapers around the globe. I got a book deal. And here we are.
Throughout this project, I’ve been asked one question more than any other: “Why? Why are you, a random white guy from Kentucky, so interested in women’s issues? Where’d this come from?” To which I have a simple reply. And it’s one that I want you to keep in mind as you read this book, as you gaze upon hilariously mismatched art styles and subject matter. Keep it in mind as you chuckle and automatically dismiss these stories as unsuitable for kids. The reply is: Why not?
What We Know and How We Know It
At some point, the following scene is going to happen.
In a bookstore, someone will pick up this book. Not recognizing a lot of the names in the table of contents, they’ll flip to an entry they do know—maybe Joan of Arc or Elisabeth Báthory. And they’ll spot something they think is wrong. And they’ll put down the book and say, “How can I trust anything in this book if this one thing is wrong?”
Which is a shame, for a couple reasons. First of which is that they’ll be missing out on a lot of great stories. But second is that it shows a common misunderstanding of how history works—because history is not an unchanging record of facts and figures. History changes. It shifts and evolves, as does our understanding of it.
One example of many: Textbooks for decades held that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA. Wasn’t until years later that it came to light that they’d based much of their work off that of a largely uncredited woman named Rosalind Franklin. Does that make everything else in the textbook incorrect? Of course not! The textbook is a product of its time and the knowledge available when it was written. And this book is the same.
Know that a lot of love and effort has gone into creating Rejected Princesses and making it a valuable (and entertaining) resource. I may not be a trained historian, but I’ve done my damnedest to treat these stories right. And really, what else can you ask?
Here’s hoping you enjoy. I certainly have.
Hold Up a Second!
YOU SHOULD KNOW WHAT YOU’RE ABOUT TO READ
Unlike what you may be used to reading, this book doesn’t pull punches. It’s not censored. Sometimes there’s rough content.
Not every entry is suitable for every reader (despite the cartoony demeanor).
To help you know what’s a good fit for you, this book provides helpful guide markers.
As the book goes on, the icons change from green to yellow, then to red. The way to think about these divisions is, how much evil are you comfortable with in the world?
• Green is simple. Good beats evil, the world is moral. Think PG.
• Yellow is more complex. No black and white, just shades of gray. Think PG-13.
• Red requires maturity. You must be your own moral guide. Think R.
Additionally, look out for these icons that tell you what’s in an entry.
On to the stories!
Khutulun
(1260–1306, MONGOLIA)
The Wrestler Princess
Staring at you from the opposite page is none other than Khutulun, princess of 10,000 horses, the pride and glory of the Mongol Horde.
A bit of background on the Khans’ Mongol Empire—it was, for the time, as big a deal as deals got. At its height, it stretched from China to Europe and the Middle East, making it, at the time, the largest contiguous empire in human history. The whole thing was started by Genghis Khan (maybe you’ve heard of him), who unified a number of nomadic tribes under a single banner. While he did bring many advances to the regions he conquered (religious tolerance, increased trade, meritocracy), you probably know him more for his reputation as a brutal dictator. Certainly it was the defining characteristic of his reputation back in the day too.
And it was not undeserved. Here’s an example: Genghis once conquered the neighboring Khwarezmian Empire. Right after taking control, he decided to erase it from existence, burning towns to the ground and killing everyone in its government. He went so far as to divert a river through the deposed emperor’s birthplace, wiping it off the map. These were the sorts of things he was known for, and it was these warlike traits that he passed down to his descendants.
Well, Khutulun was his great-great-granddaughter.
By 1260, the year Khutulun was born, the Mongol Empire was starting to fray at the seams and civil war was imminent. Some of the Khans, Khutulun’s father Kaidu among them, favored the old ways of riding and shooting and other trappings of the nomadic lifestyle, while Kublai Khan—Kaidu’s uncle—was more into politics, governing well, and other things that bored the average Mongol to tears. Eventually Kaidu and Kublai began outright warring against each other, in a conflict that would last 30 years. Throughout this, Kaidu relied on one person above all others, and, spoiler alert, it was not one of his 14 sons—it was Khutulun.
Growing up with 14 brothers, Khutulun had no shortage of testosterone around her at any given time. She grew up to be incredibly skilled in horsemanship and archery. Marco Polo, history’s greatest tourist, described her thusly: “Sometimes she would quit her father’s side, and make a dash at the host of the enemy, and seize some man thereout, as deftly as a hawk pounces on a bird, and carry him to her father; and this she did many a time.”
Picture that. You’re up against a horde of Mongolian warriors riding into battle. You’re tracking the movements of this huge chunk of stolid soldiers, trying to read which way they’re going. Suddenly, one of them—a woman, no less—darts out from the group, picks off a random person in your group, and runs back, before you even know what’s happened. That’s intimidating as heck.
But all of this paled in comparison to her skill with wrestling.
The Mongols of Kaidu Khan’s clan valued physical ability above all things. They bet on wrestling matches constantly, and if you won, people thought you were literally gifted by the gods. Now, these weren’t your modern-day matches, separated out by things like weight class and gender—anyone could and did wrestle anyone else, and they’d keep going until one of them hit the floor. This was the environment in which Khutulun competed. Against men. Of all shapes and sizes.
She was undefeated.
Now, okay, back up. How can we be sure of that? Well, according to Marco Polo (and this is corroborated by other historians of the time)
, Papa Kaidu desperately wanted to see his daughter Khutulun married, but she refused to do so unless her potential suitor was able to beat her in wrestling. So she set up a standing offer, available to all comers: Beat her and she’d marry you. Lose and you’d give her 100 horses. She ended up with 10,000 horses and no husband.
Now, in these sorts of texts, 10,000 is like saying “a million.” It’s shorthand for “so many I can’t count them all”—you may also note that elsewhere in this book Mai Bhago fought 10,000 Mughals at Khidrana. While 10,000 may have been hyperbolic, it was, suffice to say, a truly ludicrous number of horses, supposedly rivaling the size of the emperor’s herds.
Khutulun remained stubborn about marriage even as she got older and pressure mounted on her to find a mate. Marco Polo tells of a time when a cockier-than-average suitor challenged her. This guy was so confident that he bet 1,000 horses instead of the usual 100. Apparently he was a decent fella too, because Kaidu and his wife liked him. Khutulun’s parents approached her privately and begged her to just throw the match. Just lose intentionally, they said, so you can marry this totally decent guy.
She walked away from that match 1,000 horses richer.
Unfortunately, due to her stubborn refusal to take a husband, people began to talk. Rumors began to spread around the empire that she was having an incestuous affair with her father. (These sorts of slanderous rumors, you will note, are a recurrent problem for many of the women in this book.) Realizing the problems her refusal to marry was causing her family, she finally relented and settled down with someone. Who, exactly, is subject to some debate, but whoever it was never beat her at wrestling.
Near the end of his life, Kaidu attempted to install Khutulun as the next Khan leader, only to meet stiff resistance—particularly from Khutulun’s many brothers. Instead, a rival named Duwa was appointed to be Great Khan, and Khutulun’s story here begins to slide into obscurity. Five years after Kaidu’s death, Khutulun died under unknown circumstances, at the age of 46.
Afterwards, the Mongol Empire, particularly the more nomadic factions, began to crumble. Khutulun could be considered one of the last great nomadic warrior princesses.