by Jason Porath
In November 1929, Nwanyeruwa was just trying to hold things together in her family. The Great Depression’s effects had just spread to Nigeria, driving down the price of their exports. Compounding her difficulties was the recent death of her daughter-in-law. So when a local government official levied taxes on Nwanyeruwa (although women had never had to pay in the past) and then tried strangling her when she objected, she went to complain to his superior, Warrant Chief Okugo.
Unfortunately, Okugo was no help. He blamed Nwanyeruwa for starting the conflict and for dirtying his messenger with palm oil. (She’d had some on her hands when fighting him off.)
Nwanyeruwa replied by mobilizing the town’s women, who then started “sitting” on Okugo: loitering outside his house 24 hours a day, playing music, and dissing him in song. Okugo reacted in utterly insane fashion—first chucking a spear into a woman’s foot, then shooting a pregnant woman with an arrow (she miscarried), and finally setting his own house on fire and blaming it on the women, attacking anyone who tried to put it out.
Shockingly, these acts did not settle down matters in the slightest.
Soon thereafter, the protests spread. In many nearby towns, the combination of hatred toward the British-appointed warrant chiefs and fear over women’s taxes boiled over, and women began protesting. Nwanyeruwa’s group, lacking official channels through which to lodge their many complaints, took to the streets. They marched on the offices of the administration that had ignored them, continuing to sing their nonviolent yet inflammatory songs (“If it were not for the white man we would have killed Chief Okugo and eaten him up”).
When, weeks into the protests, their actions were still being dismissed as feminine hysterics, the women went beyond the pacifist tactics espoused by Nwanyeruwa. They attacked European stores, banks, and courts and knocked down telegraph poles and cut wires (much like Emmeline Pankhurst’s suffragettes); they even freed prisoners from the jails, but they never harmed anyone.
The British government was not nearly so measured in its response. On December 13, a frightened British medical officer ran over and killed two women, then fled. When over 15,000 women, outraged over the killings, began again attacking European property, British soldiers opened fire into the protesters, killing more than 50 and wounding over 50 more. The British burned entire villages as punishment.
Thereafter, the colonial authorities relented in their plans to tax women and curtailed the power of the warrant chiefs. Thus ended the Igbo Women’s War, one of the first major challenges to British authority in West Africa. From there, Nwanyeruwa disappeared into the mists of history.
• ART NOTES •
Nwanyeruwa is seen here robbing Okugo of his red cap, an Igbo symbol of leadership.
The scars on the people in the scene are traditional for many tribes in West Africa. Be forewarned if you decide to research this custom further: while very striking, some of these scars can be quite extreme.
In reality, Nwanyeruwa and Okugo would probably be at least 10 years older than this. While their birth dates are uncertain, they are both described as old.
Mary Lacy
(1740–1801, ENGLAND)
The Runaway Who Built Ships
At 19, Mary Lacy’s life took a strange turn. Literally. At six in the morning, dressed in men’s clothing, Mary sped off from her family home in an unplanned direction, intent on living a life of adventure instead of that of a house servant. As it turned out, the direction she’d chosen brought her to Chatham, where she soon began serving in the navy on her majesty’s spectacularly named ship Sandwich—as a man named William Chandler.
Mary had been a lively sort from her childhood. In her youth, she’d ride horses without saddle or bridle, pushing them as fast as they could go. When warned she would break her neck, she’d reply, “Neck or nothing!” The beatings and admonishments of her parents did nothing to dampen her spirit. In her teens, she took to sneaking out at night to attend secret dances. Her decision to run off at 19 was less a rash decision than it was the culmination of years of mischief.
Ships in those days had a reputation for being some of the most rough-and-tumble places around, and the good ship Sandwich did not disappoint. Mary became apprenticed to the ship carpenter, who, as a semifunctional alcoholic, beat her regularly and paid her a pittance. Additionally, being small for a sailor, she made enemies of the admiral boys-in-training. It was only after she challenged one of their best scrappers to a fistfight—and won—that she gained respect.
Mary spent many years at sea, across several ships, posing as a man. This was not as difficult as one might think. Her main adaptations were feigning ignorance of basic housekeeping (“How do you make a bed?”) and using heaps of profanity. As for her monthly cycle? She was among sailors, one of the populations most prone to venereal disease. As a rule, they did not ask many questions. The last step, though, was the hardest: she needed a girlfriend.
Mary’s sexuality is a bit of a question mark. Although early in her autobiography she remarks upon being smitten by a man, later on she mentions seducing (and being seduced by) a number of women. Her chief biographer, historian Suzanne Stark, theorizes from her analysis of the language used in the text that the passages that portray Mary as more heterosexual were added by someone else and that she was closer to the homosexual end of the Kinsey scale than 1700s England would have been comfortable with. In any event, she became quite the ladies’ woman, bedding numerous women, including her superior’s mistress (!).
It was only after she’d been gone for many years that she finally sent word to her family that she was alive. In a letter that comes across as more sheepish than genuinely remorseful, she instructed them, with no explanation, to address any replies to “William Chandler” and signed off as “your undutiful daughter.” Eventually, after being gone almost eight years, she visited her family in Kent. While it was a joyous reunion, it led to a crisis.
One of the more loudmouthed family neighbors who’d witnessed Mary’s return soon thereafter moved to the town where Mary was working—and outed her as a woman to several of her shipmates. Her fellow workers spoke to Mary about it, but she held her ground, and somehow they came away convinced she was not just a man, but a man’s man. Nobody ever doubted her again.
In 1770, she got her certificate as a shipwright, the first ever given to a woman. Sick with rheumatism by then, she powered through and worked 12- to 17-hour shifts, sleeping on the planks of disassembled ships, until she was physically incapable. At that point she retired and collected a pension—under her real name.
Applying for her pension as Mary Lacy hadn’t been her first choice. She’d tried as William Chandler but suffered endless delays. It was only after revealing the truth of her gender that she finally made headway: indeed, her annual pension of 20 pounds was granted almost without delay.
From there, her story becomes impossible to track. While her official autobiography has her marrying a Benjamin Slade, many, including Suzanne Stark, consider that information suspect. Historian Peter Guillery makes the case that she moved in with a female lover, became one of the first female architects, and built her own house. Historian Olwen Jonklaas finds that scenario less likely and puts forward substantial evidence that she did marry, have a child, and settle down to a quiet life in Deptford.
Given the uncertainty of her post-shipwright life, it might be best to do as Mary did and choose your own adventure.
• ART NOTES •
Mary Lacy is here portrayed working on the ship, in the state of poverty in which she spent most of her life—with dirty clothes and no shoes. Behind her, nursing a bottle of booze, is the carpenter to whom she was apprenticed. On board the ship are the admiral boys-in-training with whom she tussled early on. Down on the docks you can make out a number of women waving handkerchiefs at her.
Josefina “Joey” Guerrero
(1918–1996, PHILIPPINES)
The Leper Spy of the Philippines
Leprosy* is vanishingly rare to
day—so rare that you’re far more likely to come across a joke using this affliction as a punch line than to meet someone actually suffering from it. But in the 1930s it was anything but funny. Contracting leprosy meant a lifetime of ostracism and pain, and then eventually death.
Nevertheless, some managed to rise above the stigma of the disease and even use it to their advantage.
Exhibit A: Josefina “Joey” Guerrero.
Twenty-three-year-old Joey was diagnosed with leprosy during a terrible era in Philippine history. Lepers were treated as subhuman and often quarantined in filthy colonies. Those who weren’t shipped off would suffer worse degradations. In Manila, for example, lepers had to ring bells as they walked so that others could avoid them—an aural scarlet letter. But this was not the worst part of Joey’s fate: three weeks after her diagnosis, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and subsequently invaded the Philippines.
Her initial distrust of the Japanese quickly blossomed into quiet rebellion. A turning point came early when some Japanese soldiers propositioned her while she was out in public with several of her friends. Her demure, understated response was to repeatedly bludgeon the soldiers with her umbrella and run off. That night one of the friends came to her in secret and asked if she’d be willing to join the locals’ resistance. With the nearby leprosarium suffering even further neglect under Japanese rule, Joey agreed. Thus began what she came to call her “quiet war.”
Her initial missions were low-key. She would sit in her apartment and count all the incoming and outgoing Japanese forces at the military base across the way. She eventually surpassed expectations—for instance, by noting which squadrons were dirty, she was able to surmise where they’d been. She started visiting some of the American POWs, smuggling notes in and out using all manner of vessels: scooped-out fruit, hairbands, even hollowed-out shoes.
She and her husband* conducted spy work for three years and proved so skilled at it that they were eventually recruited into some of the highest levels of the resistance. They were even brought to resistance headquarters: a secret cave hidden behind movable boulders.
Throughout all this, Joey’s untreated disease progressed, until no amount of clothing could conceal it. She would routinely get horrified reactions everywhere she went, and nobody was more horrified than the Japanese soldiers.
One day she was called into the rebels’ fort again and given the most difficult mission of the entire campaign. The American forces, she was told, were soon launching a major offensive, but they faced an area covered in land mines. The resistance had mapped out a safe path for them, but they needed to get the info to the Americans quickly—the US forces were 50 miles away, coming in three days, and on the opposite side of some of the most dangerous areas of the country.
So Joey put on her shoes and started walking. Alone. In revealing clothing.
Her fashion sense worked wonders. When she came to Japanese checkpoints, the guards were so disgusted by her appearance that they just let her pass—never realizing that she had a map taped between her shoulder blades.
For two days straight she walked, day and night, through sniper fire and mortar shells. Even though she was so malnourished, sleep-deprived, and sick that she was barely able to stay upright.
When she arrived at the coordinates for the American camp, 50 miles from her starting point, she found that the Americans had moved—and set out to walk another 25 miles.
When she eventually found the US forces, she was so weak that she couldn’t even eat the pancakes and coffee they offered her—even though it was the first offer of real food she’d had in years. Then, to top it all off, she had to make her way back through territory that had become even more dangerous. At one point she hid behind an American tank, only to have it immediately explode. Somehow she managed to make it back unscathed. The Americans also made it through the mine field, and soon thereafter the war was over.
After the occupation ended, Joey immediately volunteered as a nurse for the wounded, but quickly proved too ill to work. She was sent to the nearest leprosarium, only to walk into a vision of hell. The facilities had been completely ignored for three years, and the rotting shacks were awash in people sleeping in their own waste. Within weeks, 600 more people were transferred to the facility, tipping the situation past the breaking point. Joey again took matters into her own hands.
Writing to journalists, the daughter of the president of the Philippines, and friends in the US military, Joey directed a spotlight on the leprosarium. Within months, everything changed. The entire facility was transformed with an infusion of modern drugs and newly implemented sanitation standards.
But all of this came too late for Joey. Her condition had progressed to the point where she needed treatment at a top-notch medical facility, which could only be found in the United States. However, the United States had a strict policy of not admitting foreigners with communicable diseases.
Until, that is, the attorney general himself stepped in and used his special wartime powers to allow Joey into the country for treatment. Thus, in 1948, she became the first foreign leper allowed into the United States. She was greeted by a crowd of 400 in San Francisco, including many of the soldiers she’d helped in the Philippines. After giving her the US Medal of Freedom, they sent her to Carville, Louisiana, for treatment—and there she was eventually cured.
Joey stayed in the United States from that point onward, becoming a major figurehead in the fight against the stigma of leprosy. After a pitched battle over her right to stay in the country that involved the intercession of three senators, she gained citizenship. She moved to San Francisco, became a journalist, got a master’s degree in Spanish literature, and worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, Colombia, and El Salvador. She eventually remarried* and died at the age of 68 in Washington.
Chiyome Mochizuki
(16TH CENTURY, JAPAN)
The Matriarch Who Ran a Ninja Academy
There are eight ninjas in this picture.
Not that you’d know it to look at them—which was kind of the whole point of Chiyome Mochizuki’s schemes.
Chiyome was a noblewoman who lived in one of the most violent periods in Japanese history (it wasn’t called the Era of Warring States for no reason). Towns were destroyed, and soldiers killed with such terrifying regularity that virtually everyone was one degree of separation from a murder.
Chiyome was no exception: she lost her husband in one of the bloodiest conflicts of the time, the Battle of Kawanakajima. After that, she came into the care of her husband’s uncle, one of the most famous, powerful, and highly regarded feudal lords to ever live: Shingen Takeda.
And Takeda had plans for Chiyome.
In short order, with Takeda’s blessing, Chiyome set up camp in the village of Nazu to help the female victims of war. The province was awash in orphans, widows, runaways, and lost girls, and Chiyome found it in her heart to take them in. She quickly gained a reputation as a kindly woman who provided a foster home for the less fortunate. All she asked in return was that her boarders work for their room and board . . . as ninjas.
You see, Chiyome’s foster home was, in actuality, a secret training camp for female ninjas (kunoichi). She would train them to pass themselves off as shrine maidens, serving women, and geisha in order to secretly gather information on Takeda’s enemies. She ended up with between 200 and 300 agents in all, forming one of the largest and most powerful spy agencies in all of Asia.
As kunoichi, these women rarely saw combat. On their behind-the-scenes battlefields, they planted rumors to sow confusion and dissension, snuck into secret areas, and used their feminine wiles to charm men. Not that they were untrained in the martial arts—since Chiyome’s family were longtime members of the Koga Ryu school of ninjutsu, it is assumed that she taught her kunoichi many of the same martial arts techniques used by their male counterparts.
Little else is known about Chiyome herself. In fact, about all one can concretely say is that she existed—the rest is oral history.
Her involvement with Takeda was kept a secret for most of their lives, and little was ever revealed. Even the date of Chiyome’s death and how she died are unknown. The question of whether kunoichi even existed—and if so, what they actually did—was a matter of no small debate for much of Japanese history. All of the lore surrounding kunoichi and Chiyome can easily fall into the realm of mystery and rumor. But this much is true: Chiyome Mochizuki had such a fearsome reputation that we are still talking about her 500 years later.
• ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •
Chiyome (in purple) is displaying the hikimayu style of the time—noblewomen would pluck out their eyebrows and paint on large smudges in their place. Were her mouth to be open, her teeth would undoubtedly have been painted black, as that was also a style common to the era (called ohaguro).
The geisha on the right is passing a note to Chiyome. Technically geisha did not exist in this era—Chiyome would likely have employed yujo (prostitutes whose work had no platonic component, unlike that of geisha), shirabyoshi (dancers who wore male garb), and miko (shrine maidens, seen outside in the back).
The pronunciation of Chiyome’s name is indeterminable from how it’s written. Some think it’s pronounced Chi-yo-jo.
Japan’s Greatest Warlord: A Woman?
The man whom Chiyome’s kunoichi would have spent the most time spying on was Takeda’s enemy, the warlord Kenshin Uesugi—who, if you believe one contemporary Japanese historian, was actually a woman.