For Isabell and Margaret, and all the other well-behaved

women who didn’t make history

CONTENTS

Introduction

Junko Tabei

10 Weird and Wonderful Mythical Female Creatures

The Match Women

Mary Bryant

Josephine Baker

10 Random Everyday Things You Didn’t Know Were Invented by Women

Bobbi Gibb

Artemisia Gentileschi

10 Queer Women from History We Should All Know More About

Pocahontas

Bernadette Devlin

10 Quotes from Historical Women For Any Situation

Mary Seacole

10 Women I Would Not Want to Pick a Fight With

Ada Lovelace

10 Roman Women I Wouldn’t Want to Bump Into in a Dark Alley

Stormé DeLarverie

10 Famous Muses Who Were Also Artists

Emily Davison

10 Goddesses We All Wish We Were

Noor Inayat Khan

Mary, Queen of Scots

Williamina Fleming

10 Terrible Beauty Tips from History You Definitely Shouldn’t Try

The Dahomey Warriors

10 Ways Women Dealt with Periods Throughout History

Angela Morley

Judith Kerr

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

There is a story my mum told me about my grandmother, who died before I was born.

In the 1970s, at the height of the Troubles, my grandmother went to visit a distant cousin in America. My grandmother was from the West Coast of Scotland, but her parents had emigrated from Ireland only a few years before she was born, and she was raised in a typically West Coast Irish Catholic community. Her cousin decided, therefore, to take her to an ‘Irish’ bar (well, where else do you go with Irish people?!) for a drink. From everything my mum has told me, my grandmother was a very modern woman, who would have been excited at the prospect of visiting the US and experiencing something brand new. I can’t picture her, having travelled across oceans to be there, jumping for joy at the thought of sitting in a fug of stale smoke, drinking an Irish cream ale and listening to some old guy singing out-of-tune rebel songs.

While they were there, a man approached them with a tin, collecting funding for the IRA. This was popular in the US at the time. Many ‘Irish’ Americans, with little real understanding of the conflict, felt it was their duty to help fund any organisation that supported Irish independence, while being largely unaware of the devastating impact those organisations were having on the Irish population. They either didn’t know what their money was funding or they didn’t care.

I imagine my grandmother, thousands of miles from home, in the company of strangers, and probably, up until then, having been friendly and polite. It would have been understandable if she, the child of immigrants forced out of their country by the conflict, had given him some change. It would have also been understandable if she’d simply quietly, politely declined to donate. It’s probably what I would have done. Hell, I don’t even speak up if Pret gets my coffee order wrong.

My grandmother, however, stood up and gave him a piece of her mind. She did not hold back. She told him that what he was doing was despicable, that he knew nothing about the situation in Ireland. She told him exactly where his money was going, to buy weapons that were killing and terrorising innocent civilians. I wonder if the bar went quiet. I wonder if he shouted back. I wonder what her cousin did. In my head, I see her standing, turning, and walking out without another word.

This story might strike some as a rather underwhelming anecdote, but for me it has always been … that dreaded word … inspirational.f I have been in many, many situations where doing the right thing or the brave thing or the outspoken thing has been a challenge. How, I’ve always wondered, did my grandmother have the courage in such a situation to stand up for what she believed? Can I confidently say that I would have done the same?

I wish desperately that I could have known this woman who, by all accounts, was always the first to stand up for the underdog and against oppression, and at a point when middle-aged women, especially religious wives and mothers, were expected to be quiet. My grandmother was a woman who chose to take the prejudice she herself had encountered and say ‘Not me’. She wasn’t alone.

These small acts go entirely undocumented in the history books. No Oxbridge historian is ever going to write a history of my grandmother, even though an ordinary life like hers could have told us so much about what it was like to live through the 20th century. Those everyday acts of courage by women throughout history – mothers, housewives and girls committing tiny protests, barely more than a whisper in the world – have gone largely unrecorded. But they happened, everywhere, all over the world, every day. And each small act was a foundation stone in a fairer future for women everywhere.

Learning about my grandma’s small act of defiance made me want to find more women from history who had shaped their own destinies. ‘Inspirational women’ might be one of the most familiar phrases in the English lexicon. We love inspirational women. We loved to be inspired. We love a girlboss. A badass. The internet is drowning in inspirational listicles about women who changed the world. The truth is that however inspirational these stories may be, we as a culture now know them so well that they have started to lose all meaning. Rosa Parks is reduced to one moment in time, Marie Curie to one discovery, Marie Antoinette to that one time she got her head chopped off.

By deeming these women ‘inspirational’, we put pressure on their memories to deliver a perfect, and fictional, package of womanhood. Women in history are rarely allowed to be complicated. We don’t like to hear about their bad sides because it will undermine their struggles. But that’s exactly what we need. We need to hear more stories with more endings to fully grasp the humanity of history’s women. We can’t rely on Amelia Earhart to carry the achievements of all women on her back. They wouldn’t even fit in the plane! I know this pressure on a much, much smaller scale. I know what it’s like to be the only woman on a stand-up bill; that dreadful, looming pressure to be funny, to be liked by everyone, or else you will have, once again, proved that women are not good comedians. It feels weird coming out of a ten-minute spot at the Camden Chuckle Club knowing you’ve just made it worse for women everywhere.

I want to tell the stories of 18 women who I feel can teach us something about womanhood today, through their choices, their experiences and their opinions. Who were these women, in real life? Some of the women in these pages were indeed extraordinary. Some were born to privilege, some were very talented in their field, some simply exuded that ‘star power’ that has guaranteed them immortality. But as much as I want to look at the incredible acts of Mary Seacole, who set up an entire hospital unfunded in a war zone, or Artemisia Gentileschi, who refused, under torture, to take back her rape accusation, or Bobbi Gibb, who gatecrashed a marathon she was not allowed to run, I also want to look at the more ordinary sides of their lives. I want to remind people, through comparison to today’s events, that these women were real. They worked, they loved, they had period cramps and crushes and money worries and body issues just like any woman you meet today. I want to look at women who took action because they had no choice.

A word of warning: not all of these women are good. Not all of these women are moral. Not all of them are even likeable. Some of them are criminals. Some of them are bad mothers. They are not perfect. But who is? Dolly Parton? Oh, OK, yeah, Dolly Parton. Dolly Parton is. But who else is? No woman in history will ever live up to the standards we set for them and its time we started telling their real stories.

There are so many stories about the women of history still to be learned. Until I researched this book, I had no idea that women were excluded from running marathons as late as 1966, well within living memory. I didn’t know that Junko Tabei, the first woman to summit Everest, had to make some of her climbing equipment from household objects. I didn’t know that Angela Morley, one of the first openly trans composers, was one of the masterminds behind the music in Schindler’s List, Home Alone and Star Wars. I felt my own life becoming so much more enriched simply by knowing how many extraordinary women have come before me. I want to inspire women in a different way. I hope to inspire the women who read this book with the knowledge that everything they do, big or small, has an impact on the world around them. So yes, fair warning, this book does contain some inspirational listicles, and I hope you are inspired to find out more about their subjects and their real, complex lives

AN IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER

I AM NOT A HISTORIAN. NOT EVEN CLOSE. I am just another history nerd who wanted to write the sort of book I wanted to read. Please do NOT quote me in any school or university essay. I found out the hard way that Neil Oliver’s History of Scotland isn’t academic enough for the St Andrews undergrad programme. Don’t be like me. If any of the women in this book make you want to learn more, I highly recommend all the sources I used as further reading. Some of these women have libraries of books written about them. Some of these women don’t yet have ANY biographies about them – I’m hoping that will change one day soon. For these women, I relied on the brilliant research done by fellow history nerds like myself.

ANOTHER SLIGHTLY LESS IMPORTANT BUT NO LESS VALID DISCLAIMER

This is not an exhaustive list. While that may be obvious to you, I have spent hours agonising over who to include. I have tried to make it as diverse as I can, but in truth it can always be more diverse. I’m a white British straight-passing cis woman, and the stories I have the most insight into reflect this. What I hope I have done is write about women who genuinely mean something to me personally; women whose stories I just had to know more about. I hope it might even encourage readers to think about women they would like to include in their own version of this book. Who knows, maybe they’ll let me write another one, and then slowly, over time, I’ll be able to cover every one of the 58.5 billion women who have ever been alive.

I hope that if you take anything away from this book, it’s that the women in its pages fought for the right to be themselves. Some of the paths they forged are currently under attack. We have let ourselves get too comfortable with the idea that we live, somehow, in a post-feminism world, and our doing so allows all the hatred to sneak back in. Some of the battles we won decades ago are up for debate again – the right to our bodies, our identities, our jobs and our freedoms. By looking back to these women and remembering what they did, we prepare ourselves for future wars.

Also, there’ll be loads of jokes in this. I promise.

JUNKO TABEI

How to Get Outdoors

It is 11am on a windy day in July, and I am standing at the bottom of a mountain googling ‘Time it takes to climb Schiehallion’. Google says five hours. Five hours?! Woah! Must be a big mountain! It’s actually not. Not by the standards of any real mountain climbers. It’s dead easy. Well. It definitely doesn’t FEEL easy. Once you’ve climbed the steep mountainside, you’re greeted by a huge boulder field that you have to scramble across like Frodo and Sam in Lord of the Rings. By the time I stumble to the top, I am gasping for breath and have discovered first-hand that, fun fact, you can get windburn and sunburn simultaneously. I feel like I’m wearing a wetsuit made of sweat, which has cooled and is now making me shiver. Standing at the top of the mountain, you feel out of time. Above and away from human life and error, the lochs and hills are rendered tiny and hazy, like something from a dream. Everything seems so simple all of a sudden. The wind, free to forge its own path up here, pushes at you, forcing you this way and that. You have no choice but to follow. You are in the mountain’s domain now. I am so proud of myself. I really feel like I’ve achieved something big. I feel, almost literally, on top of the world. But I’m far from it. I’m not even on top of Scotland. And to someone like Junko Tabei, my big achievement would have been a piece of cake.

Junko Tabei was the first woman ever to ‘summit’ Everest, and although she cemented her reputation, her name is still less well known in the wider world than it deserves to be. Not only did Junko break incredible records with her climbing, she broke gender barriers while she did it, by defying every expectation society had of her.

Now, let me get one thing out of the way first. I think climbing Everest is mental. It is simply too damn high. It’s basically a guaranteed horrible time, as the first people to summit it, Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay discovered in 1953. Tenzing is of course now memorialised in history as … an energy drink. I can only assume a drink called Hillary didn’t sound as appetising. Anyway, why bother climbing Everest? What if you get to the top and it’s foggy and you can’t see anything? Or your phone dies and you can’t take any pictures? Is there even anything worth reaching at the top? A lovely artisan coffee house or an exhibition on Picasso’s ceramics? No? Then I’ll pass.

Climbing Everest is really, really hard. No, I mean it. It’s REALLY hard. That might seem obvious to you, but let me explain to you just HOW hard it actually is. At over 29,000 feet above sea level at its peak, Everest is deadly to humankind. Like the Moon, the Mariana Trench or Aberdeen, there is nothing about it that is receptive to human life. You could almost consider scaling Everest a very expensive, fancy suicide mission. Even Mount-Everest.net, a climbing website that I assume exists for the purpose of encouraging people to scale Everest, states: ‘Everest is our tallest mountain. It is difficult enough to have killed many climbers in horrible falls and deep crevasses.’

Altitude sickness sets in about a third of the way up, which can cause fatal heart attacks and blood clots among other things. If that doesn’t get you, you might be crushed in an ice avalanche, or fall to your death. Or you might just get stranded in a snow storm, unable to move forwards or backwards. Or you might run out of spare oxygen, and your friends will have to abandon you. Or, on very rare occasions, you might be kidnapped by the Yeti, taken back to his cave, and forced to do his cooking and cleaning until, Beauty and the Beast style, you realise that under all that fur and anger, he just wants to be loved.

Over 300 people have died on Everest, and most of their corpses still litter the paths up, preserved in the permafrost, a morbid warning to everyone who passes. The path is called ‘Rainbow Valley’ by climbers because it’s littered with the colourful jackets of the bodies. Cute. I don’t know about you, but personally, I’m not interested in any hobby that involves a backdrop of corpses. That doesn’t scream ‘fun’ to me. If you turned up at the local bowling alley, and it was strewn with the bodies of former bowlers who hadn’t quite made a strike, you wouldn’t stick around for a Wimpy.

Still not dissuaded? Since 2008 alone, more than 80 people have died climbing the mountain. About half those who climb Everest don’t actually summit, and even if you do make it to the top, there’s still a good chance you won’t make it back down. It’s also very expensive, clocking in at about £40,000 on average, although it can be way more. (You can do a ‘budget climb’ for about £15,000, but I think we can all agree that the words ‘budget’ and ‘Everest’ belong together about as much as ‘budget’ and ‘parachute’.) And, if you’re like me, you’ll spoil this magnificent once in a lifetime moment by overthinking it; ‘Oh God, this is obviously an incredibly special moment, am I appreciating it enough?? I think so. But could I be doing more? Am I REALLY feeling it? Oh God, I’m wasting this. I’m just going to go to the shop and buy a postcard of it and look at it later.’

Everest is cold, it’s dangerous, and even the air doesn’t want you there – everything about it screams ‘Not for humans, go away!’, which is largely, I believe, why it’s mostly been men who have climbed it. It seems to me that men like dangerous hobbies because they don’t have to think about danger in their everyday lives. Women simply have too much other shit to do. Can you imagine your mum saying ‘I’m off to Everest, dear, there’s a chance I may freeze to death halfway up, but there’s a casserole in the fridge that just needs 15 minutes heating in the oven’. No. Your mum has stuff to do. Society does not let women pursue anything so frivolous as climbing a mountain. Not in this economy. Mountains are for rich men, mostly. Men with money and time to burn. Men with kids in boarding school. Men with beards and polo necks. And Canada Goose jackets. Men.

*

Junko Ishibashi was born on 22 September 1939 in Miharu, Japan. She climbed her first mountain, Mount Nasu, aged ten, with her school class and it sparked a lifelong passion, although her family couldn’t really afford for her to pursue it as a regular hobby. Junko was fairly small and not particularly athletic, but she knew she wanted to climb. Every day she would ascend the small hill in her town, to a playground at the top, surrounded by trees and flowers. In her book, Honouring High Places, Junko remembers the thrill of looking out over the landscape:

From the high point of Fudo-yama, we could see a palace-like building in the distance, an image I had only seen in picture books, and I used to believe it was the home of the Emperor of Japan. In reality, it was one of the many temples that dotted the countryside. Nonetheless, standing on that small summit was enough to show me what lay beyond my hometown, a moment when the flicker of inspiration ignited.

Junko was the youngest of seven children, and when she was in middle school, her sister Chikako was diagnosed with cancer, rocking Junko’s world. The family had to sell their farm to pay Chikako’s medical bills and devote all their time to caring for her. When she died a year or so later, Junko began to act out, misbehaving and withdrawing from her lessons.

Despite having little encouragement from her school to continue her education, Junko applied for the Showa Women’s University in Tokyo. Still grieving, she struggled with her studies, and it was only when she started climbing alone and with the student mountaineering club in the peaks around the city that she began to heal. Japanese culture has long revered the restorative properties of nature in the form of forest bathing and onsens. Junko simply viewed mountaineering as (literally) the next level in this tradition. Junko stayed in Tokyo after graduating to continue her mountaineering trips with friends, funding her hobby through her day job. But she also wanted to be part of bigger expeditions. In her 20s, after searching for an organisation that would accept women, she joined the climbing club Hakurei-kai, and started to learn about the more complex aspects of climbing, such as using ropes and scaling cliffs.

In mid-20th-century Japan, women were expected to be quiet homemakers. Despite general progress for women’s rights globally, Japan was (and still is) pretty conservative. Climbing mountains was not very ladylike. A woman’s place was in the home, not the hills. It went against all notions of the ideal Japanese woman; demure, graceful, shy and largely silent. There is nothing graceful or demure about weeing in a bush 3,000m above sea level. But, for whatever reason, weeing in a bush at 3,000m above sea level really appealed to Junko Tabei.

The men in her new climbing club were initially suspicious of Junko’s motives. Why would a woman want to climb a mountain? It didn’t seem natural. Didn’t she know that there’s no artisan coffee house at the top? No gift shop? What’s worse, many of them assumed she was only there to find a husband, as if it was the start of a wacky sitcom: ‘Junko’s life is a mess! She’s got no boyfriend, no career, and no crampons! Thursday, 8pm, BBC1: Junko Tabei is Going Downhill!’ Gossip spread quickly around the club: she found that climbing and sharing tents with men was leading to rumours that she must be dating them. This hostile environment only pushed Junko further in her desire to summit Everest on her own terms.

Climbing was an expensive hobby, and Junko had to put every penny from her salary aside to buy endless supplies and equipment. Occasionally she would get lucky and a friend would give her a second-hand pair of boots, but mostly Junko had to save carefully and put away as much money as possible for trips, club fees and kit.

It was at this time that she also met her climbing partner, Sasou Rumie. Sasou was a fellow female climber and Junko’s equal in stature, and Junko immediately felt at ease with her. They began climbing together frequently, and even after Junko met and married mountaineer Masanobu Tabei, Sasou remained her favourite climbing partner and closest friend. Then, in 1967, twenty-eight-year-old Junko received a telegram informing her that Sasou had gone missing during a climb. She had lost her footing while scaling a rocky cliff, and fallen out of sight. Soon the news came from the rescue team: they had found Sasou’s body. She was 31 when she died. Junko was overwhelmed by grief yet again. But she was also able to find meaning in this dark moment:

Sasou’s death made me face the reality that everyone, including me, would eventually die and return to the soil of the earth. I became contemplative, questioning if I was fully living the life I wanted. Simultaneously, I felt such confusion and disappointment that the world around me could continue in its day-to-day manner, business as usual. There was only one solution for me: I had to embrace the sadness and emptiness in my heart and begin to climb again.

In 1969, aged 30, Junko established her own climbing club for women, the Joshi-Tohan Club. The club’s slogan was; ‘Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves’, which is the most literal slogan for a club ever, apart from that of the British Vegan Society: ‘Let’s not eat any animal products at all, yes that includes cheese’. But it also highlights an important cultural barrier that Junko was breaking; the idea that women should travel alone, climb alone, and choose their own destinations. Even today, women travelling alone, or without the company of men, is considered dangerous. Just popping to the corner shop is a potential hazard. Junko was pushing boundaries simply by attempting the climb at all. Although of course Junko and her fellow female climbers were unlikely to actually encounter, on the mountain, the biggest danger for women, the one that prevents them from travelling alone in the first place: men. The sad truth is that for many women, snow, ice, blizzards and altitude sickness are really not as scary as walking in your local park after 7pm.

Junko’s club decided that their first expedition would be to Annapurna III in Nepal, one of the world’s tallest mountains (42nd tallest, to be precise). Clearly, they weren’t messing around. Junko would be assistant leader, and the team would consist of nine women. On 19 May 1970 they became the first women to summit the mountain, and the second group overall ever to reach the top. But Junko still wasn’t satisfied.

In 1971, Junko and 15 other female climbers created the Japanese Women’s Everest Expedition (JWEE), led by Eiko Hisano, with the aim of summiting Everest. However, it took another FOUR YEARS to actually obtain a climbing permit, and the club found it nearly impossible to get anyone to sponsor them. The negative reaction was driven by a feeling that these women should be raising children, not climbing mountains. I recall the similar uproar when Scott set out for the South Pole – ‘This is an outrage! This man should be at home, ignoring his children, not in the South Pole, ignoring his children!’

In an interview with Outside magazine’s Brad Frenette, published in October 2017, a year after her death, Junko describes the difficulties of persuading anyone to sponsor their trip to Everest:

It was very hard. There was a serious economic crisis, called the oil shock, in 1972 and ‘73. The economy had cooled down, and wherever we visited with our expedition plan, we were told that no money was available, and it would be impossible to go to Everest with a women’s-only group.

You could pick any random activity out of a hat and chances are that at some point in history, people were insisting that women couldn’t do it. Snooker. Scuba diving. Skateboarding. Wait, that’s just things starting with ‘S’. But my point stands. As recently as the 1970s, mountaineering was viewed as essentially out of bounds for women.

With funding scarce, Junko and her team gave music lessons for extra money and tightened their belts as much as possible by making equipment, including clothes and sleeping bags, from everyday things around the house. It’s also worth noting that by this point, Junko was already a mother. Like all mothers, she was able to bend time and reality and somehow fit a series of impossible tasks into 24 hours. Now those tasks included conquering Everest. She was beginning to prove that Japanese housewives didn’t just belong in the kitchen.

The expedition to the summit of Everest began in May 1975, with 15 women and 6 Sherpa guides. If you want to climb Everest (and as I’ve emphasised repeatedly, you really don’t) you first have to make it to one of the two base camps, both of which are at an altitude of over 5,000m. Junko and her team did this, but disaster struck on 4 May when they were hit by an avalanche at 6,300m. The group were camping at the time, and Junko and several other climbers were left buried under huge drifts of snow. In her book, she describes the terrifying moment the avalanche hit:

I was forced upright, yanking at Watanabe by way of our proximity as the immense blow shook me to my core. Within seconds I could hardly breathe as an enormous pressure bore down on me. Confusion set in as I was tossed and turned upside down, the tent whipping around in somersaults among the churning ice. I thought for a moment I was dead.

Amazingly, everyone survived, although Junko found it hard to walk afterwards. She was forced to spend two days recuperating and, frustratingly, wasting precious time. There was only enough oxygen for one of the group to climb to the top of Everest, and the group chose Junko. Despite being injured in the avalanche, Junko was the most experienced climber at high altitudes and the one most likely to reach the top. Accompanied by Sherpa Ang Tshering (who had helped rescue her from the avalanche), and after a gruelling crawl along a deadly ice ridge, Junko reached the summit on 16 May 1975. She was the first woman ever to do so.

Characteristically for the modest Junko, when she reached the top she ‘didn’t shout anything’, but thought, ‘Oh, I don’t have to climb anymore.’ I wonder if a man, on achieving the impossible, has ever had such modest thoughts? Does Djokovic, after winning Wimbledon, say to himself, ‘Oh good, I don’t have to serve any more’?

Back in Japan, Junko and her fellow climbers were met with cheering crowds, TV cameras and celebrations, which is SO BLOODY TYPICAL, ISN’T IT? First they laugh at you, then they try to stop you, then you do it, then they pretend they were with you all along and throw you a party. Generally, Junko was a bit embarrassed by this outpouring. Her intention had never been fame and fortune. She just wanted to climb a mountain. It was society who was making a big deal out of it.

Junko didn’t stop at Everest. In fact, it was only the beginning of a lifelong quest to climb as many mountains as possible. She also conquered the Seven Summits, the highest mountains on every continent, as well as scaling the highest mountain in 70 different countries. Her passion for the natural world saw her complete a postgraduate course focusing on the environmental impact of climbers on Everest in 2000. As a director of the Himalayan Adventure Trust of Japan, she helped to maintain and clean up climbing environments (I imagine she was sick of tripping over all those corpses). Junko recognised that these landscapes deserved respect and reverence, and she treated them with veneration. And she probably recycled everything too, even those batteries you have to go into a shop to get rid of.

Throughout her life, Junko put her passion and energy into environmental causes and climbing advancements, leading groups on expeditions, writing seven books, and continuing to climb even after she was diagnosed with stomach cancer. She died in 2016, aged 77.

Despite her achievements, Junko did not seem to see her feats as particularly impressive. She remained modest throughout her career. I love Junko’s attitude. She refused to bow to the idea that women making history should surprise or shock anyone. Junko had a higher calling than the opinions of other people. She had the mountains.

Her point was that nobody should really have been surprised that women were capable of summiting mountains. In fact, she once stated that she would rather be remembered, not as the first woman, but as ‘the 36th person to summit Everest’. But the truth was, people were surprised that a woman had done it. We live in a world where men sometimes put their hand on your lower back in case you fall over getting on the bus. Despite all that we face, women are still seen as delicate, as breakable, as incapable. Female climbers did not just have to break the physical barriers of the hardest climb in the world, but the social barriers of doing so as women. Since Junko’s ascent, almost 800 women have reached the summit of Mount Everest. When asked about her incredible achievement, she simply said: ‘I can’t understand why men make all this fuss about Everest – it’s only a mountain.’

10 Weird and Wonderful Mythical Female Creatures

1. Medusa Serpent-headed monster of Greek mythology, capable of turning onlookers to stone with a single glance. According to Ovid, Medusa was originally a woman ‘seduced’ by Poseidon, king of the sea, and then turned into a gorgon by a jealous Athena.

2. Succubus A female demon said to seduce sleeping men. They would then drain their victim’s energy, and sometimes even devour their souls.

3. Shishiga The original ‘goblin mode’, the Shishiga is a Slavic female swamp-dwelling monster who annoys male travellers, usually on their way home from the pub.

4. Deer Lady A Native American spirit, the Deer Woman, or Deer Lady, is said to enact murderous revenge on men who have harmed women and children.

5. Jorōgumo Aka Woman Spider – a Japanese supernatural creature that can shapeshift into a woman. She will seduce men in her human form and then turn back into a spider to eat them.

6. Selkie A Scottish supernatural creature, who in the sea is a seal, and on land takes on the shape of a woman. If a man wants to marry her, he can steal her seal skin and hide it, forcing her to stay on land. Once she finds it, though, she will immediately return to the water.

7. Joan the Wad The Cornish queen of the Pixies, Joan the Wad is a mischievous trickster. She uses light to dazzle or confuse travellers, but can bring good luck if asked.

8. Soucouyant A shape-shifting hag from Caribbean folklore, the Soucouyant enters homes through cracks and keyholes and drinks the blood of her victims, leaving marks and bruises.

9. Erathipa A boulder shaped like a pregnant woman who, in Aboriginal mythology, contains the souls of dead children. If a young woman passes the boulder, Erathipa can deposit a soul from the stone into her, to be reborn anew.

10. Pania A Maori sea spirit who protects the waters around the North Island of New Zealand. She’s a beautiful maiden who men instantly fall for, including a prince who tried to get her to stay on land by eating human food.

THE MATCH WOMEN

How to Start a Fire

London. 1888. The East End. Smog and smoke swirl around a guttering gas lamp as twilight descends. The plaintive cry of a street urchin ‘Spare us a bob, guv’nor?’ is silenced by the looming shadow of a cloaked figure. It raises its top hat as it steps into the gaslight, knife flashing as it plunges downwards. What’s that!? Could it be?! Yes! It’s the terrifying figure of CLICHÉ!!!!

The East End of London in the 1880s is such an overused backdrop in cinema, literature and art that it may be hard for me to convince you that it was a real place, full of real people. It’s most famous son, Jack the Ripper, was actually a short-lived, if terrorising, spectre, whose tabloid exploits made for deliciously outlandish reading. Today, if you mention Victorian London, it’s the Ripper, along with Sherlock Holmes, smog and Queen Victoria, that pop into people’s heads first. And today the East End still has a thriving tourist trade built around one unknown man and his actions. You can, as historian Hallie Rubenhold discovered while researching her book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, even get a fish supper from ‘Jack the Chipper’, or a haircut at ‘Jack the Clipper’. After that they appear to have run out of puns. I wish I were more surprised, but my home town Edinburgh has a strip club, ‘Burke and Hare’, named after two men who murdered people and sold their bodies to medical science. Sexy.

I went on a Ripper tour a few years ago with my sister, who is currently studying for a PhD in dark tourism and the way the female corpse is objectified after death (no, I’m not the weirdest one in my family), and it was fascinating to see just how much of a thrall Jack still has over London tourism. But despite the Ripper’s fame, his story was not typical of the horrors of Whitechapel. What really haunted the streets of the East End, what people truly feared, day in, day out, was poverty.

The working classes in late 19th-century Britain had few rights. Most of them couldn’t vote, there were few laws prohibiting child labour, health and safety was a dim and distant dream, and there were few, if any, rights for workers. There was definitely no welfare system to provide a safety net. If you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. If you didn’t eat, you starved to death. It was very much considered your own problem and your own fault and, sadly, there are plenty of people today who still consider poverty to be an individual error caused by frivolous spending or owning a smartphone. What held the people of the East End together, despite it all, was their community spirit, still famous today in documentaries like EastEnders. The people of Whitechapel and Bow knew to look out for one another, and they knew that there was power in numbers.

Industrialisation had led to the creation of thousands of factory jobs in the East End, usually in the mass production of household goods. These jobs were often deadly – with no safety precautions, it was less a case of if you would get harmed and more one of when and how. You might get your hair caught in the machinery and be dragged under. You might inhale toxic chemicals or fumes. A piece of heavy equipment might fall on you. Your clothes might catch fire in this highly flammable environment. Your body might be crippled or otherwise injured through the repetitive and strenuous working of machinery. A pesky roadrunner might trick you into running head first into a cliffside because he’s painted a tunnel on it.

Progress was hard, and change was slow. Direct action seemed to be the only way to make an impact, and one group of women decided that they’d had enough of their poor treatment at the hands of big business employers. The Bryant & May workers were not the first matchmakers to strike – in fact strikes had been held pretty regularly from the 1870s onwards, but it was theirs that undoubtedly lit the flame, so to speak, under a series of other strikes that would follow, including the dockworkers strikes soon afterwards. This is the story of the Match Women.

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The Bryant & May match factory in Bow, East London, employed large numbers of teenage girls and young women, as well as a few children. These workers were often called, collectively, match ‘girls’, instead of match ‘women’ or ‘workers’, suggesting that they were not taken very seriously by their employers (as any woman over the age of 18 who has been called a ‘girl’ in their work environment can attest). As unskilled workers, they were seen as most likely to be corrupted by drink, debauchery and one another. But their ‘spunky’ demeanour was also a strength. They were known throughout the East End for being headstrong, riotous and fashion-conscious, and for going about in groups and gangs. They loved to dress in feathered hats and wear brightly coloured neckerchiefs. Writing in 1894, the barrister and writer Montagu Williams described them thus:

They have fashions of their own; they delight in a quantity of colour; and they can no more live without their large hats and huge feathers than ’Arry can live without his bell-bottom trousers.

In short, they had the mindsets, the confidence and the style to take on the bosses who vastly underestimated them. Assembly jobs were ideal for this demographic because it was fairly simple work that didn’t require a lot of strength or training. Factory-made matches had revolutionised life in the 19th century. Now that it was cheap and easy to light fires and lamps, producing food and other activities also became cheaper and easier. The production process of these safety matches required them to be coated in phosphorus. In the 1830s, the introduction of white phosphorus to match tips meant that they could be lit anywhere, from the tip of a shoe to the side of a wall. These matches were naturally very popular, but very toxic to produce. Workers exposed to phosphorus would often feel nauseated and would vomit up glowing, fluorescent sick. Exposure over long periods was causing what was colloquially known as ‘phossy jaw’, or phosphorus necrosis. This nasty condition would cause the jaw and teeth to start to decay, rot, and finally die, leaving workers severely deformed. The chemical could also affect the brain, causing seizures and brain damage.

Obviously, the matchmakers of the time weren’t very happy about having their jaws rot away. The factory owners were aware of the issues, but they either fired workers who complained or insisted that they had teeth removed the second that symptoms started to show. This was much more convenient than finding a cure or an alternative method of making matchsticks. There were, in fact new, red-tipped ‘safety matches’ like we have today, which were much safer to produce, but these had to be struck on strips of red paper on the side of the box, and proved much less popular than the portable ‘lucifer match’. Bryant & May were therefore very reluctant to give up manufacture of the lucrative lucifer. Yup, you guessed it, as usual the whole problem boils down to … capitalism!

As if a dead jaw wasn’t enough to worry about, match factories were usually run on a ‘sweating-shop’ basis, a form of work that we still see today, particularly in clothes and goods manufacturing in Asia for the Western mass market. Matchmakers were expected to pay for their own supplies like glue and string, and to work ten-hour days to produce a specific number of matches, usually without breaks. The amount of money they received was, unsurprisingly, paltry. According to historian Louise Raw, the strike register shows that many of the workers were only earning 4 shillings a week (about £12 today) in 1888, as opposed to the lordly sum claimed by Bryant & May in 1876 of 10 to 12 shillings for ‘steady’ workers. Skilled male manual workers, as Raw notes, would have an average wage of 40 shillings a week. Today, the right likes to complain about benefits claimants getting £70 a week, already a poverty wage. But £12, even by their standards, is a pitiful amount of money for a human child to survive on. Most workers didn’t even go home with that, as fines for lateness, untidiness and other things were liberally dished out. One worker described the brutality of the fines in an interview with Annie Besant (more on her later):

If a girl is late she is shut out for ‘half the day’, that is for the morning six hours, and 5d. is deducted out of her day’s 8d. One girl was fined 1s. for letting the web twist round a machine in the endeavour to save her fingers from being cut, and was sharply told to take care of the machine, ‘never mind your fingers’. Another, who carried out the instructions and lost a finger thereby, was left unsupported while she was helpless. The wage covers the duty of submitting to an occasional blow from a foreman; one, who appears to be a gentleman of variable temper, ‘clouts’ them ‘when he is mad’.

Sweatshop wages made for a life that was stuck in a cycle of poverty – just enough to keep you going, but never enough to save, invest, or even buy anything of quality to improve your life, like a good pair of shoes or new set of clothes. Work usually left people too exhausted to do much more than climb into bed, ready for the next day, where they would do it all again, six days a week, with few holidays except perhaps Christmas and Easter Sunday. There was also no such thing as unfair dismissal – your employer could fire you for whatever reason they wanted. It’s pretty easy to see, then, why the match women of Bow were fed up. Their employers were getting rich off their cheap labour and, in exchange, their jaws were falling off.

By the summer of 1888, tensions were growing in the Bow factory. Bryant & May were already angry because of a recently published article, the provocatively titled ‘White Slavery in London’ by left-wing activist Annie Besant, which claimed that the women were unfairly treated and were sacked without reason. Reports were conflicting. Some papers and sources claimed that the strike was started by the unfair dismissal of one worker; some said it was because Bryant & May attempted to get their workers to sign a paper refuting Besant’s article, and those who refused were fired. Either way, bullying and intimidation were the likely catalyst for the strike that was soon to begin.

In early July 1888, roughly 1,400 women and teenagers downed tools and walked out of the Bryant & May factory. Their bosses were furious, although at first they tried to backtrack, offering fired workers reinstatement. But it was too late. The workers immediately began to picket, fundraise and organise rallies and meetings.

As Louise Raw explains in her book Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History, and contrary to popular belief, it was not activist and social campaigner Annie Besant who organised the strike, nor was she the first to bring it to public attention. Besant has been accorded a well-deserved place in history because of her prominent position in the socialist movement, her friendship with figures such as George Bernard Shaw, and pieces such as the ‘White Slavery’ article. But Besant, in fact, only began to publicise the strike after it was already well known. It was the match workers themselves who had had the tenacity and foresight to advertise their plight, ensuring that it would get maximum publicity. Besant’s article was a well-publicised and widely read piece about the match workers’ situation, but rather than proposing a strike, it suggested that middle-class consumers should lead a boycott. Besant, therefore, was working in parallel to the match women, not directly with them. She wasn’t even keen for them to form a union, although she did help to form a strike committee. The women on that committee, those whose work was absolutely vital to the strike, were Sarah Chapman, Mary Naulls, Mary Cummings, Alice Francis, Kate Slater, Mary Driscoll, Jane Wakeling and Eliza Martin. A photo of them still exists, sitting with Besant in a meeting hall, many of them proudly wearing the jaunty neckerchiefs for which they were so well known.

As the summer went on, more and more match women came out in support of their fellow workers, and there was a growing public feeling that their treatment was appalling. The Star called it ‘The female revolt against the iron rule of wages’, and reported on 7 July 1888 that more than 300 match workers came out for a meeting at Mile End. The news around the strikes led to independent investigations of the factories, which concluded that their pay systems were terrible. Public interest and solidarity was growing.

On 16 July, the strike leaders met the factory bosses and hammered out the following demands, among others:

1. An abolition of all fines

2. An abolition of wage deductions for materials

3. Further grievances to be taken straight to the managing director (and not the foreman)

Although not a perfect resolution, it was a huge victory. The match workers had shown in only a few weeks how vital their labour was, and how easily it could be taken away. The Union of Women Matchworkers was formed on 27 July, becoming the largest female union in the UK at the time.

The strike effort had not only brought attention to the match workers’ plight, but had also, at last, forced factory bosses to abandon their fines system, and to improve pay. In 1908 the use of phosphorus was finally banned in matchmaking. It was one of the first times in history when working people proved that they could change their lives and challenge the systems that kept them in their place. Today, a plaque commemorating the workers (calling them ‘girls’: perhaps an update is in order?) can be seen on the former factory building in Mile End.

Contrary to popular beliefs that the match women were simply cheeky teens looking to skive, and whose actions had no real impact on future strikes, the Bryant & May workers didn’t exist in a bubble. They would have been well aware of social activism in the East End, and may have already participated in it. Many of them would have been the wives and daughters of dockers, whose own strike was given a much bigger place in history, partly due to the sheer numbers involved: more than 100,000 people. As research by Raw and others shows, the match workers were often directly involved in the dock workers’ strikes. According to Raw, Ben Tillett, one of the leaders of the dockers’ strikes, directly attributed the birth of the new unionism movement to the actions of the match workers, a momentous achievement. As well as being embedded in their communities, a large proportion of the match women were also of Irish heritage, and these close cultural ties helped to ensure a spirit of solidarity among the workers. It’s undeniable, therefore, that the match workers had a direct impact on the strikes that followed.

Today, the match workers’ strike is still fairly under-researched, with the exception of a few excellent texts, such as Louise Raw’s Striking a Light, which has been a crucial source for this chapter. Why today do we still know so little about the details of the strike, such as testimony from primary witnesses? There are barely a handful of photos of the events, and no first-person accounts from strike leaders – no letters or diaries have even been found or published. In contrast, dozens of photos portray the dock workers’ strike of the following year; crowds of men demanding their pay and marching the streets. For such a significant event, it seems odd that the match workers’ strike left little more than an image behind – that of a spunky, scruffy match girl giving cheek to her boss.

The fact is that like many, many other events concerning women throughout history, the great and the good of the day just didn’t think it was very important to make a record of it. It made the Victorian public uncomfortable to think of these women subverting their gender roles, that of gentle, passive homemakers. Even the way in which Besant’s role in the story took on such prominence suggests that socialist leaders and historians found the idea of working-class women leading their own strike a little unbelievable. The centring of Besant, and the lack of interviews with the match workers, is telling. No one, it seems, bothered to ask the women themselves how they felt, and these workers, most of whom were wives, mothers and daughters within large families, probably had too much to be getting on with to write any of it down. A few surviving grandchildren were able to relay their impressions of their striking grandmothers to Louise Raw in 2009, but before Raw’s research, it seems that little had been done to dig into the pasts of these fascinating women. Considering how much Victorian reformers loved mapping and analysing the stats of the working poor, it’s incredible that they did not, apparently, actually talk to women concerned.

Luckily, this is finally changing. In addition to Raw’s vital research, in 2019 the Matchgirls Memorial Charitable Trust was established, aiming to raise awareness of the match workers and their achievements, as well as to fund a statue in their honour. With the help of their descendants, the names of more and more strikers and their stories are being uncovered.

History has underestimated the match women. What struck me on the Jack the Ripper tour (aside from the fact that, for some reason, Kelly Osbourne was also on it: true fact) was the way that the guides emphasised female helplessness in the face of the killer. Working-class East End women of the period are often portrayed as downtrodden or destitute, even as ‘creatures of the night’. But the truth is that, hard as life was in the East End, the women who lived there had an extraordinary ability to persevere, even in the toughest of circumstances. As Hallie Rubenhold discusses in her book, the women of the East End were not simply helpless victims, but real, rounded and resilient people: ‘By permitting them to speak, by attempting to understand their experiences and see their humanity, we can restore to them the respect and compassion to which they are entitled … they were daughters, wives, mothers, sisters and lovers. They were human beings and surely that, in itself, is enough.’ They also demonstrated that work done by women was just as valuable as that done by men, something that later female strikes over the course of the next century continued to prove. On 24 October 1975, the women of Iceland – nearly 90 per cent of them – decided to show just how important they were by striking. Everyone from typists to housewives to teachers simply stopped. The result was immediate. Schools had to close, airlines and banks were shut down – the women brought the country to a standstill simply by refusing to show up to work. Men who had previously thought the strike a bit of a joke suddenly stopped laughing. The following year, the Icelandic parliament passed a gender equality bill.

In today’s economy of zero-hour contracts, Amazon warehouses, and eating lunch at your desk, it might be easy to feel as if we’ve gone backwards. Strikes and protests continue to be as challenged by the authorities as they ever have been. And the response to recent UK rail strikes seems to indicate that many of the public and parts of the media still cling to the belief that asking for a fair wage is, somehow, getting above yourself. That we should all shut up and sit down and be grateful for what we’ve got. The match workers might not feel relevant to you – how can the struggles of today’s office workers, with nine-to-fives and Tesco meal deals, be compared to phossy jaw? But, obvious differences aside, the story of the match women does remind us that, throughout history, there have always been people seeking to put profit before all else. That is something that has certainly not changed. If we can channel the spirit of those match women, perhaps we can challenge that which is unfair in our own lives.

Speaking to Louise Raw in 2009, Ted Lewis, grandson of match worker Martha Robertson, said of the strikers: ‘They knew it was wrong, morally wrong, and they didn’t need anyone from outside to come along and tell them that. They weren’t the sort of women to be told what to do by anyone anyway.’

The match workers did not end bad labour practices, but they did help to start a movement that would. They also proved that working-class women had been (and continue to be) underestimated. They were clever, resourceful, tactful and, perhaps most importantly, community-minded. Without their bravery in standing up to big business, risking their jobs and livelihoods, workers might never have been granted the rights that protect their health and wages. And if we don’t keep fighting like the match women, those rights might be eroded once again.

MARY BRYANT

How to See the World

I am pretty sure that if I ever go to Australia, I will be killed on arrival. Not by the people, I hasten to add, just everything else. The weather. The animals. The ocean. The outback. The flat whites. The chilled-out demeanour that goes against everything I hold dear. New Zealand seems much more my cup of lukewarm tea – it’s rainy, it’s hilly, the people seem more cynical. Truly, it’s the Scotland of the Antipodes.

I’m also convinced that the sea is trying to kill me. I don’t even really like boats. The closest I’ve come to a cruise is the overnight ferry to Zeebrugge in Belgium, and even then I wasn’t a fan. I get seasick, I don’t trust buffets and I’d rather see tourist sites from ground level, like a normal person. I’m also prone to claustrophobia, and the thought of being stuck with hundreds of boomers in a floating salmonella incubator for weeks at a time is something straight out of my nightmares. No. Thank you. I do not have sea legs. Mine are land legs, they like standing on land. Where they’re supposed to be. I look at water and all I see is yet another thing that’s trying to end me. And oh boy, has water tried to end me. Case in point: I once fell into a well as a six year old, and if you know me, that’s a very on-brand childhood mishap. In reality I was probably submerged for about 20 seconds, but it was long enough to teach me that I didn’t belong there. Look, we are not designed for the sea. We are not smooth and aerodynamic and we don’t have gills. I say we’re better off out of it.

One historical figure whose life combines my two biggest fears was Mary Bryant, who won an exclusive one-way cruise to Australia in the 18th century. Bryant was a Cornish woman born in 1765, as Mary Broad, and her incredible life story is like something straight out of blockbuster Hollywood, albeit with a bittersweet ending. Mary’s epic story is not as well known as that of people like Grace Darling, a Victorian lighthouse keeper’s daughter who remains famous in her home county of Northumberland for rescuing shipwreck survivors, or Violet Jessop, who survived the sinking of not one, but three ships (including the Titanic). This is likely because, unlike Grace and Violet, Mary was a controversial figure. She was a convict.

In trying to empathise with Mary Bryant, I’ve attempted to recall my own misspent youth of petty crime, but, to be honest, it’s not that impressive. I was not a rebellious teen. I was not even a sullen teen. I was a painfully enthusiastic, anxious and law-abiding teen. The closest I’ve come to crime was to sometimes eat grapes in the checkout line before mum had scanned them. Or sometimes sneaking snacks into the cinema so I wouldn’t have to pay £15 for an Aero. Oh, and as a teen I once stole a lipstick tester and then stayed awake all night, waiting for the fuzz to smash the door in and cart me off to jail (in my head, for some reason, the Edwardian one from The Wind in the Willows). But, as unimpressive as my crimes were, incredibly, in Georgian Britain, they could have been enough to send me to the gallows. And being a child wouldn’t have saved me.

Georgian Britain was an incredibly dangerous place. We now think of the Georgians as rather silly, bewigged fops: Hugh Laurie in Blackadder, Keira Knightley in a big dress, or Lord Byron, writing mopey poetry while trying to shag everything in sight. But to be an ordinary person in 18th-century Britain was dangerous. Diseases like smallpox, cholera and syphilis were rife. Hogarth’s satirical etchings reveal long-standing fears about the poor as degenerates ruining themselves with gin, promiscuity and violence. The slave trade was in full swing, and many of the several thousand Black Britons alive at this time were or had been enslaved. The list of dangers goes on and on: kidnappings, highwaymen, piracy, duels, murder, fires, unsafe buildings, poisonous cosmetics, domestic violence, a lack of an established police force, and no street lamps. If you wanted to walk after dark (and trust me, you didn’t) you had to hire someone to walk ahead of you with a torch or lantern. The Grim Almanac of Georgian London, a collection of crime reporting from the era, gives us a window into just how dangerous everyday life was. Let’s take the date I’m writing this, 12 January, as a random example: ‘Today, in 1731, Mrs Goodchild, wife of a Charing Cross linen draper, had a fit. Unfortunately, she pitched forward into the fire and was burnt to death. She was two months pregnant.’

Yikes.

Jails in Britain were filling up rapidly in the 18th century. The fact was that we had too many criminals and there was simply nowhere left to put them. Previously, if you committed a crime, you were usually executed, fined or found not guilty. The concept of locking people up as punishment was really something reserved for political prisoners or the occasional mad wife. We just didn’t have the space. But over the course of the 1700s, more and more people were being sent to jail.

So why were there so many criminals in 18th-century Britain? Well, partly because there were so many crimes you could be convicted for. The ‘Bloody Code’ was the retrospective name given to a series of capital crimes (punishable by death) introduced in England and Wales (Scotland had, and still has, its own, separate legal system) in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1689, there were 50 capital offences; by 1800, there were 220. The classics – murder, treason, piracy – were all punishable in a series of horrible, fatal ways, but over the next century or so an astonishing number of petty crimes were added to the roster, including, among many other things:

- Thefts of goods worth more than 12 pence

- Thefts of animals like horses or sheep

- Being an unmarried mother and concealing a stillborn child (I cannot emphasise enough how often this happened)

- Being out at night with a blackened face (I assume in case you were involved in hijinks, not because they thought it was a hate crime)

- Wrecking a fishpond

- Poaching

As you can see, most of these crimes are the sort that would have been committed by the very poor and desperate. The Bloody Code was deliberate in its attempt to criminalise the very idea of being poor. It worked very much in favour of the ruling classes. In a way, the code was a form of eugenics, snuffing out the lives of anyone desperate enough to do any of these things. The ruling classes were convinced that Britain was in the middle of a crime crisis, and they needed to expunge the guilty. Those crimes that weren’t punishable by death had stuffed jails to their rafters.

As well as overcrowded jails, Britain’s other problem was a labour shortage in their many new colonies all over the world. Although today moving to the US or Australia is seen as exciting and glamorous, back then it was much harder to convince people that sailing halfway around the world to start all over again was an enticing prospect. Britain needed people to build, manage and farm these ‘new’ lands, but finding those people was tricky. There was just something about the distance, the disease, the hardship, the food shortages and the prospect of facing some very justifiably angry natives that didn’t appeal to the common Jane or Joe of 18th-century Britain.

So, you had a whole bunch of people sentenced to death for very minor crimes and clogging up the jails in the meantime, and some colonies that needed workers. The solution? Make the courts look super-nice and merciful by giving the prisoner the ‘option’ of transportation instead of death. Most of them would leap at the chance – labour shortage solved!

Transportation to the colonies had first begun as a form of punishment in 1717, but the First Fleet (a fleet of ships that took the first colonists and convicts to New South Wales) wouldn’t colonise Australia until later that same century. Convicts in the Antipodes would be set to work building, farming, fishing and doing any other work necessary to maintain a successful colony. For the government, this was a much better way of colonising a country than the one they had tried in 17th-century Virginia – rather than entice people over with promises of gold and abundance, they simply forced them to go there. Once they had done their time, convicts could choose to return to Britain or, as happened more often, stay as freemen in their new home. That is, of course, if they didn’t die of hunger, disease or in any number of other ways during their sentence. Over the course of about 80 years, more than 165,000 people were transported to Australia, and many white people living there today can trace their ancestry back to these convicts. Brits sometimes joke (rather lazily) that Aussies today must therefore be a bunch of criminals, but the truth is far sadder. Their ancestors, often in dire straits, made choices that saw them leave their family, home and everything they had ever known rather than face the noose.

I was going to write about how ludicrous it seems to the modern reader that in the 18th and 19th centuries we dealt with our convicts by simply shipping them somewhere else, but then in recent years we have had the Tories’ controversial Rwanda scheme, which aims to send asylum seekers to a country in Central Africa, treating those seeking refuge as little more than criminals. How much has really changed?

In 1785, Mary Bryant was arrested for stealing the Georgian equivalent of a tester lipstick – a silk bonnet valued at 12 pence. Mary and her friend did assault their female victim, ambushing her on the road, but while today that might get you community service or a month in prison, Mary was sentenced to death.

Luckily for Mary (sort of), her sentence was commuted to seven years’ transportation, and she was to become one of the convicts aboard the First Fleet (these guys must have gone to the Junko Tabei school of naming stuff). While she waited for her trial and then transportation, she would have been kept first in a jail, then a prison hulk, the conditions of which would have been appalling. Prisoners slept on straw in cells that were rarely cleaned, they were crushed in together, and sanitation was pretty much unheard of. If the authorities were lucky, you would die while in prison (a not uncommon occurrence) and save them the trouble of transporting or hanging you. Don’t worry, though: if you wanted to avoid transportation, there was an easy way out – you just paid a fine. Oh, you had to be rich, obviously.

Again, the way Mary was treated should seem incredible to us; kept, as she was, aboard a prison hulk on the Thames, a huge ship permanently moored on the river for the sole purpose of housing prisoners. Yet in recent years exactly the same thing has been done with (you guessed it), asylum seekers housed in the Bibby Stockholm in Portland Port. It’s so nice to have some vintage human rights abuse, isn’t it? I really appreciate how our politicians have taken inspiration from the best bits of our history.

Transportation had a big impact on popular culture – characters like Dickens’s Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist and Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations are transported. Real-life transportees included protesters like the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who campaigned for better wages and workers’ rights, as well as mutineers and political prisoners. Some people may have relished the chance to begin afresh in a new place. But for others, transportation must have seemed far scarier than death – starting your life again, in extremely hard conditions, thousands of miles from everything and everyone you knew.

Most of those sent to Australia were male, and they ranged in age from the very young to the elderly. Women were transported too, albeit in smaller numbers. Babies were also born on ship mid-voyage with fair regularity.

So how many women were transported? Contrary to popular belief, sex workers were not transported, as it was not a transportable offence. Female prisoners were far more likely to be transported for trivial crimes like theft or assault, like Mary. Of the 124 people transported to Australia on board Mary’s ship, the Charlotte, only 24 were women: essentially, the gender split was pretty much identical to any Saturday comedy club bill. Sexual relations on board were fairly common. Although separated by bars, the female and male prisoners would have had the opportunity to talk and plan for their time ahead in Australia. Due to their relatively small numbers in comparison to the men, most female convicts immediately attached themselves either to another convict or a soldier for safety reasons. In a world where sexual violence was rife, it was best to choose a partner as quickly as possible to ‘protect’ yourself. Mary was already pregnant when she boarded the Charlotte, and quickly found herself a partner and protection in the form of William Bryant. We don’t know who the father of Mary’s baby was, but it was conceived (whether consensually or not) on board the prison hulk she had been held on in England. Giving you some idea of the safety (or lack thereof) that Mary experienced as a prisoner.

Conditions on a ship crossing the world in the 18th century would have been only slightly more unpleasant than a modern cruise liner. Apart from the incredibly long (about eight months) and dangerous voyage, during which storms battered the ship, there would have been no fresh food and little fresh water. Prisoners were kept below deck most of the time, and female prisoners were in danger of assault from officers. They would also be chained at all times, a dangerous move in times of emergency. Of the 1,500 people aboard the First Fleet, 48 would die during the voyage. The Second Fleet would fare even worse – more than 250 people died from the conditions aboard. Either way, you wouldn’t want to pay for a week on board, not if the buffet was hard tack and the entertainment was playing bingo with the lives of the other prisoners. During this voyage, Mary gave birth to her baby, naming her Charlotte. Giving birth is bad at the best of times, in a hygienic hospital with doctors and nurses nearby, but to do so on a crowded prison ship, in the middle of the ocean, with no pain relief or access to clean water, must have been something else.

The Charlotte, along with the rest of the First Fleet, arrived in Botany Bay, Australia on the 20 January 1788. What must Mary have thought as she stepped onto Australian soil for the first time? Today, Botany Bay is a rather nice beach. In the 18th century, it must have felt like going to Neptune. And what about the Aboriginal people? What was their first impression of these odd newcomers? It was probably easy to underestimate the damage these weak, pale people were about to inflict on their way of life.

In her book, Dancing With Strangers: The True History of the Meeting of the British First Fleet and the Aboriginal Australians, 1788, Inga Clendinnen also questions the impact of the colonisers on the local peoples during this time. Initially, the British were met with apprehensive curiosity. First contact was hesitantly friendly, a swapping of weapons, ideas and languages. This, of course, would not last, but the British were aware that they needed to keep the Aboriginal people onside for now if they wanted to make Botany Bay work for them. They may also have been thinking about the very recent death of Captain Cook, who thought it might be a good idea to charge into Hawaii and kidnap a king, and was killed in the attempt.

Clendinnen’s research also highlights the life of an Aboriginal woman called Barangaroo, of the Cammeraygal clan, whose husband Bennelong was captured by the British and afterwards became a diplomat of sorts for his people. Barangaroo, on the other hand, was not remotely interested in the customs or rules of the Europeans, and did her utmost to disrupt many of their meetings. Barangaroo seems like a fascinating person who could have told us much about Aboriginal life in the 18th century. However, like Mary, Barangaroo was not able to leave a written account of her life, which is only documented in the ways it related to male British officers and observers. We know only what they chose to record. This is the fate of so many women in history, especially women of colour, and historians have only just started to unpick this complicated colonial tapestry.

On 10 February, a few weeks after they had landed, Mary married William Bryant, and they went on to have a son, Emanuel, born in 1790. So here Mary was, stuck on the other side of the world with two young children and a new husband, with years until she had any chance of freedom, and a life of hard labour ahead of her.

Life in the colonies was not necessarily harder than that in England, but its challenges were different and unfamiliar, and the convicts were not free to make their own choices. Mary and the other women would have been set to work preparing food, sewing and cooking, doing laundry or working in the households of officers as maids or servants. Food would have been scarce, especially when crops were damaged. Hunting was difficult, and, unlike the Aboriginal people, the colonists did not understand that over-farming or hunting would damage the ecosystem and reduce supplies. If life in Australia was hard, punishment for any indiscretions was even harder. As Inga Clendinnen notes, these were particularly unforgiving. On 4 February 1789, Mary’s husband was given 100 lashes for selling fish on the side, and deprived of his boat and hut. Lashing was an excruciatingly painful form of punishment, and many people subjected to it did not survive. Being lashed would mean that William would have been unable to work for several days afterwards, rendering him incapable of earning money, and his wounds could easily have become infected in untreatable ways. On top of all that, a lashing would have been a very public and very humiliating penalty. It’s thought that this incident made them both determined to escape. As a fisherman, William had easy access to the sailing supplies they needed, and over the next few years, they began to plan their getaway.

On 28 March 1791, just over three years since she had arrived, Mary, her husband, their children and seven other men all left the colony by fishing boat. They left under the cover of darkness, probably praying that the children wouldn’t cry out and give them away. Guards would have patrolled the settlement; neighbours may have heard noises as they crept through the makeshift streets and down to the beach. Did the curtains twitch? Or did the other convicts sleep on, unaware of the events unfolding around them? Mary and her husband must have had to hide food supplies, storing their meagre rations carefully, bit by bit, leaving themselves hungry and weak, hardly in top form for a sea voyage. Now they had to get their supplies down to the shore without being caught. As Mary boarded the rickety fishing boat, suitable only for trawling in shallow waters, she must have felt at a crossroads. If she went back, she would be punished as a collaborator, and left to raise her children alone. If she went forward, she could be condemning herself and her children to death. So far, Mary had survived every ordeal – would she survive this? She stepped onto the boat, holding her youngest child in her arms.

The Bryants and their fellow convicts hoped to get to the Dutch colonies in Indonesia, thousands of miles away on the other side of Australia. Incredibly, they travelled more than 5,000km over a period of 69 days, during which they kept close to the coast to restock their supplies and catch fish with nets they had brought. Despite this access to fresh food, they would have spent much of their time dehydrated, undernourished, sunburned and exhausted. The boat would have been cramped and unhygienic. There would have been no privacy for anything, including going to the toilet. The children would have been easily upset and difficult to soothe. Nights would have been freezing, days burning hot. Much of their journey was through as yet uncharted waters, in an open boat. What makes Mary’s journey even more amazing is that they succeeded even though none of them were seamen or navigators, or even had any real sailing experience. And, of course, Mary was truly brave in a way I could never be: she voluntarily chose to spend months in a cramped boat with no one to talk to but eight men. Can you imagine?

One person who might be able to sympathise with Mary’s journey is Dame Ellen MacArthur, famed for her record-breaking voyages circumnavigating the world solo. In a Ted Talk from 2015, she describes conditions in waters close to where Mary would have sailed:

You really are in the middle of nowhere. If you need help, and you’re still alive, it takes four days for a ship to get to you and then four days for that ship to get you back to port. No helicopter can reach you out there, and no plane can land … If we didn’t sail fast enough, we’d be engulfed by that storm, and either capsized or smashed to pieces. We were quite literally hanging on for our lives and doing so on a knife edge … You’re alone on a boat you can barely stand up in, and you have to make every single decision on board. I was absolutely exhausted, physically and mentally. Eight sail changes in 12 hours. The mainsail weighed three times my body weight, and after each change, I would collapse on the floor soaked with sweat with this freezing Southern Ocean air burning the back of my throat.

Sailing through the Southern Ocean in the 21st century is an incredible feat, and Mary and her shipmates had none of MacArthur’s technological support. Yet somehow, eventually, they reached the Indonesian island of Timor, landing in Kupang on 5 June 1791. Kupang was a Dutch colony at the time, and they managed to persuade the colonists that they were shipwreck survivors – this is only a few years after the captain of the Bounty also popped up in Timor, after the famous mutiny, so it seems the Dutch had come to expect this sort of thing from the British. Mary and her family lived in relative ease and comfort until they were found out – it’s thought that one of the men got drunk and boasted of their trip to the governor, who immediately threw them in prison. They were then placed in the custody of British Captain Edward Edwards (easy for his dad to remember). They travelled first to what is now Jakarta, then on to Cape Town, and finally back to Britain to stand trial. During the journey, Mary’s children and husband all perished: first Emanuel and William in Jakarta, and then Charlotte, her daughter, on 6 May 1792, just before they reached Britain. Charlotte left the world as she came into it – in the stinking hull of a prison ship, with her mother in chains.

Mary returned to her homeland, with no family and no prospects. It’s pretty hard for anyone to imagine just how Mary was affected by these deaths. Few of us can truly empathise with someone whose family, having survived incredible odds intact, were wiped out by the drunken boasting of one idiot. It’s also reasonable to assume that she must have felt some guilt, however unwarranted, for her children’s deaths, for making the choice that put them in that situation, not knowing the outcome. Mary must have felt more alone than ever.

Mary stood trial for her extraordinary escape attempt along with the other surviving accused. The penalty for escaping was usually death, but Mary and her story had become something of a cause célèbre in the time since she had returned to Britain. People were clamouring to hear all about the woman who sailed thousands of miles across the ocean in order to escape the colonies. It was a perfect Georgian story, an almost Hogarthian morality tale of the dangers of a degenerate criminal life. Mary became popular with common people and the great and the good, with none other than Scottish lawyer and writer James Boswell (pal of Samuel Johnson) taking up her case. Mary and the others were eventually all released, almost certainly because of the publicity surrounding the trial and Boswell’s intervention, and she returned to live in Cornwall, with Boswell gifting her £10 a year for the rest of his life (a pretty helpful sum, at least a couple of grand in today’s money).

Mary died sometime after 1794, although we’re not sure entirely when. She seems to have melted back into the landscape she came from. The last record of her is from Boswell, who wrote of meeting with her in an inn before she returned to Cornwall:

She said her spirits were low; she was sorry to leave me; she was sure her relations would not treat her well … I assured her of ten pounds yearly as long as she behaved well … Unluckily she could not write. I made her leave me a signature M:B, similar to one which she carried with her, and this was to be a test of the authenticity of her letters to me, which she was to employ other hands to write. I saw her fairly into the cabin and bid adieu with sincere good will.

How nice of Boswell to have promised her the £10 only if she ‘behaved’.

Mary’s story simply wasn’t recorded past a certain point. That her life was documented at all is extraordinary, given that almost all the other First Fleet women have no legacy at all, beyond a few words stating their name, their sentence and their crime.

Writer Meg Keneally, whose novel Fled recounts a fictionalised version of Mary’s life, told The Guardian that Mary’s story is not more widely known because of our attitude towards the convicted. Mary is not seen as typically heroic because, to many, she ‘deserved’ what happened to her. But I think, regardless of her crime, she demonstrated an incredible will, and a fearlessness, not just on her own account, but for her two children, who would, she knew, suffer hard lives in the new colony. Keneally agrees. ‘I think her story is one of courage, bravery and tenacity under extreme circumstances … She appears to have had great strength of character and a real survivor’s instinct.’

Mary was determined to make a better life for herself than the one she had had. Her time on prison hulks, convict ships and in the colonies of Australia had taught her that she was capable of surviving anything. Having a daughter of her own must have convinced her of the importance of not exposing her to a similar life. She was not going to let anyone dictate her destiny. The choice she made on that March night in 1791 is one that mothers still make today when boarding migrant ships in the hope of offering their children a better life. According to the refugee council, in 2022, over 4,000 women and over 7,000 children made the dangerous and sometimes fatal crossing between France and England. If we can sympathise with Mary’s choices, might we also be able to show compassion towards the women and children who make that journey today? Mary’s voyage teaches us that, although such decisions are never easy, they are at least something that we can actually control: the choices we make for the people we love. It’s impossible to judge Mary Bryant from our position of relative safety and comfort in the 21st century. Some people might regard her as irresponsible for putting her children in that situation, but simply being alive in the 18th century was dangerous. For many women and children, all over the world today, it still is. Above all, Mary recognised that taking her fate, and that of her children, into her own hands was one thing she could do to change it.

JOSEPHINE BAKER

How to Multitask

INT. HOLLYWOOD PRODUCER’S OFFICE, 1947

(ELEANOR, SCREEN SIREN, SCREENWRITER AND SCREENED BY AIRPORT SECURITY, enters, dressed in elegant furs perfect for a Los Angeles heatwave, and holding one of those long cigarette holders. She sweeps up to the desk, where CLACTON J. THERMOS, PRODUCER, is pouring himself yet another bourbon. Eleanor perches casually on the edge of the desk.)

ELEANOR

Say fella, have I got a tale for you.

(She takes the cigarette out of the holder and eats it. It is made of candy. Clacton pours another bourbon; the first has already disappeared.)

CLACTON

A movie pitch, eh? Listen here, doll. We don’t take no unsolicited pitches from no Limey broads. Email it to my secretary’s secretary.

ELEANOR

Trust me, you’re gonna want to hear this straight from the horse’s pie hole. It’s the story of the century. Picture it now: St Louis, 1906, a star is born; she’s an all-singing, all-dancing actor, comedian extraordinaire.

CLACTON

I’m listening.

ELEANOR

She rises up from a tough childhood on the wrong side of the tracks to be the biggest star in all of Paris!

CLACTON

Paris, Texas?

ELEANOR

No, Paris, France ya big lummox!

CLACTON

Europe, classy, I like it.

ELEANOR

Then, uh oh, here come those pesky Nazis! Soon she’s a resistance fighter and spy, smuggling documents, flying planes, charming enemy ambassadors and hiding refugees in her chateau! After the war, she heads back to the States to fight for civil rights! Then, she adopts kids from all over the world! Oh, and she dresses in diamante banana skins and has a pet cheetah!

CLACTON

Hold it there! That just got way too silly! An all-singing all-dancing spy with a pet cheetah? Get outta here and don’t waste my time! Audiences want BELIEVABLE stories with REAL people in them! You’re fired!

ELEANOR

You haven’t hired me!

CLACTON

And I never will!

(ELEANOR flounces out, disappointed. She turns to CLAUDETTE THE SECRETARY, who is mechanically dumping a huge pile of papers marked ‘SCRIPTS TO BE READ’ straight into the bin.)

ELEANOR

I’ve had it with Hollywood! From now on, I’m only making low-budget two-minute internet comedy videos for middle-aged men to creep on!

As far-fetched as it sounds, the life of Josephine Baker really was one of the most incredible stories ever told. Not only was Josephine a very talented performer, she was also a part of the French resistance, a human rights campaigner and a generally an all-round cool guy.

We love a woman who can do it all. Have children, keep up a career, sabotage the Nazis. I think that is why Josephine and her life have such great appeal for us today. We like a woman who’s a multitasker. And Josephine has become one of history’s most iconic multitaskers – put on a glittery banana skirt and everyone immediately knows exactly who you’re referencing. So just who was the woman of whom Shirley Bassey said; ‘I swear in all my life I have never seen, and probably never shall see again, such a spectacular singer and performer’?

Josephine Baker was born in 1906 in St Louis, Missouri, as Josephine McDonald. Her origin story chopped and changed as she liked (or, as she put it ‘I don’t remember, I improve’) but there can be no denying that it was a tough childhood, with Josephine enduring poverty, racism and hardship. She was raised by a single mother and remained elusive about her father’s identity until her death. ‘A black childhood is always a little sad’, she is quoted as saying. Dropping out of school at 11, she was married at 13 and on to her second husband by 15 – a sentence I did not enjoy writing. We can assume that Josephine did not have a lot of agency in any of this; perhaps her mother felt that marriage would provide a sense of stability in a world in which being a young Black female was already harsh. Certainly, it seems her mother felt that being a wife should be the number-one priority of her 13-year-old daughter. When I was 13, the closest I got to a relationship was logging off and on MSN messenger in quick succession in the hope that my crush would notice and assume I was mysterious and alluring.

Growing up in early 20th-century Missouri would have been very difficult as a Black girl. Some sources are confident that Josephine was in fact biracial, or had a white father. Regardless, as a light-skinned Black woman, Josephine would have found herself caught between worlds, discriminated against and treated with suspicion. Josephine grew up during the height of segregation. Also known as the Jim Crow era, this manifested in a series of laws prohibiting Black people from using the same services as white people, such as railway carriages, water fountains, public toilets, restaurants, workplaces and shops. The Great Migration caused workers to flood into St Louis during the 1910s, creating tensions between white and Black workers, and in 1916, when Josephine was ten, the Delmar Divide was implemented. Referring to a specific segregated neighbourhood and named for Delmar Boulevard, this was symbolic of a segregation ordinance, which stated that if a neighbourhood was 75 per cent or more of a certain race, no other race could move into that area. The impact in further dividing people in St Louis was huge: even in the 21st century, neighbourhoods around the Delmar Divide continue to be largely racially separate. House prices vary massively between those two areas. Poverty and racial violence continues to be an issue. One year after the Delmar Divide was instigated, in 1917, 11-year-old Josephine witnessed race riots, fuelled by white paranoia about jobs in St Louis. These riots, or the East St Louis massacre, as it became known, terrorised and displaced thousands of Black Americans, and led to the deaths of dozens of others. Josephine recalled these riots and the effect they had on her:

We children stood huddled together in bewilderment … frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across this bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings … So with this vision I ran and ran and ran.

Josephine had to get out. All she really knew was that she wanted to dance, and she left her second husband in the early 1920s to travel as a dancer. Soon she was in New York, appearing in chorus lines and enjoying her place in the Harlem Renaissance. Josephine was not yet the star she would become, but the greener pastures of Paris were already beckoning to her.

Anyone who’s ever been to a beach in France knows that they are pretty blasé (their word, not mine) when it comes to nudity. I remember being on holiday there as a child and seeing actual female nipples during a shampoo commercial, and nearly falling off the sofa in shock. The Moulin Rouge and cabarets like it had made Gilded Age Paris a daring, sexually vibrant place, even if the cancan dancers in those photos now look pretty frumpy by our standards. Josephine became part of this culture when she was asked to be part of an all-Black revue at Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1925, at the age of 19. From there she went on to perform in other prestigious night spots like the Folies Bergère. Josephine’s popularity arose from her striking looks, her passionate dancing style, and her erotic routines. Even in the roaring twenties, nudity was shocking – remember that these people are only just getting over the fact that women have ankles. You might picture the racy, revealing costumes from the musical Chicago when you think of the 1920s, but actually most women were only just getting comfortable with the idea of showing their calves. Have a look at photos from the period and you’ll see how incredibly modest the flappers were by our standards. A lot of women are wearing what I can only describe as fancy sacks. Josephine, on the other hand, was wearing almost nothing at all.

Josephine obviously had a star quality that pushed her to the top, and even today, watching grainy footage of those early years, it’s easy to see why she made it. There is an undeniable allure to Josephine. Her face is bright, open and friendly. She had a ‘girl-next-door’ appeal and a cheeky, dimpled grin that is infectious. Everything about Josephine makes you want to get up and dance.

Her most iconic look was an outfit consisting of a diamante banana skin skirt – and basically nothing else. Her ‘Banana Dance’, as it was known, was a high-octane, hip-thrusting twerkathon, in which Josephine mesmerised the audience with the movement of her pelvis alone. In one 1927 film recording, she sexily gyrates in her glittering skirt, before turning to camera and knocking her knees together goofily. In another recording from 1925, she Charlestons frantically before gurning at the audience, cross-eyed. It’s the very embodiment of what people loved about her; sexual confidence mixed with a silly, free sense of humour.

Her charm (and novelties such as a badly behaved pet cheetah) meant that every performance with Josephine was guaranteed to be an evening to remember. The cheetah, named Chiquita, was notorious for getting into the orchestra pit and harassing the musicians. Diana Vreeland, later fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, recalled a typically chaotic meeting with Josephine and Chiquita in a Parisian cinema in 1932:

She was alone with the cheetah on a lead. She was so beautifully dressed. She was wearing a marvelous little short black skirt and a little Vionnet shirt – no sleeves, no back, no front, just crossed bars on the bias. Don’t forget how hot it was, and, of course, the great thing was to get out of this theatre we were in. The cheetah, naturally, took the lead, and Josephine, with those long black legs, was dragged down three flights of stairs as fast as she could go, and that’s fast … The driver opened the door; she let go of the lead; the cheetah whooped, took one leap into the back of the Rolls, with Josephine right behind; the door closed … and they were off!

Josephine was soon dubbed ‘the Black Venus’ by an enchanted French public. France between the wars was not a picnic, but on the other hand, there was no segregation or outright legal discrimination against people of colour. At that time the French offered a rather refreshing take on racism: they saw Josephine as exciting, sexual and exotic, which is of course problematic, but perhaps the lesser of two evils to someone who had grown up in segregated St Louis.

It’s hard to overstate just how much of an icon Josephine became in France. She was absolutely beloved. For them, she embodied the exciting idea of the ‘exotic colonial’ who they imagined lived in their African colonies: a sexually free, charming and straightforward Black woman who spent her days eating bananas and then wearing the skins. This is, of course, profoundly racist. But it was what the people of Paris wanted – someone ‘tropical’ who brought to mind a beautiful, faraway paradise where nothing bad ever happened and where life was simple, much as Carmen Miranda did for the Americans (her with the fruit on her head). Josephine Baker had a star power that was not seen again until the rise of Elvis. She was not just a star, she was a product. She was almost like a logo for herself – her image reduced to a few easily recognisable traits. She could sell hair cream, make-up, jewellery, records, theatre and cinema tickets. You could buy a special Josephine compact bracelet (and in fact Kerry Washington came out with a Josephine-inspired jewellery line as recently as 2021). You could buy ‘Bakerfix’, a hair product that gave you that perfectly set Josephine Baker bob. Or maybe you wanted some ‘Bakeroil’, a sun tan oil to give you that brown Baker glow. Beautician Helena Rubinstein used Josephine’s allure to promote her own tanning products. Now, Josephine’s darker skin worked for rather than against her, as for the first time being tanned had a desirable glamour to it.

Baker was also the first Black woman to play the leading role in a feature film, Siren of the Tropics, in 1927. The film is set on a rather ambiguous Caribbean-Polynesian-Tropical-South American island, and Josephine plays Papitou, an island girl who falls for a French man even though he’s in love with his god-daughter (yuck). As suggested by the title, the film plays into plenty of stereotypes about women of colour, as temptresses from exotic lands, but it also showcases the qualities that made Josephine so watchable. She flirts and pantomimes, jumping on top of a wardrobe to display her athletic skills and to avoid the unwanted advances of her landlord, and generally runs circles around the men of the island.

Josephine became one of many American figures making Paris the place to be, alongside Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and basically anyone else who was in that Woody Allen movie. Paris in the 1920s was brimming with ideas, experiments and expressionism, and Josephine epitomised it. She was painted by Picasso, promoted by Jean Cocteau, and chatted up by Hemingway, who described her as ‘the most sensational woman anyone ever saw’.

But darker times loomed on the horizon. As the Nazis’ rise to power took hold in the 1930s, racist views became much more openly commonplace in Europe. In Vienna, her car was chased down the street by angry onlookers. Josephine had a full hand here: not only was she Black, she was also American, female, bisexual, promiscuous and had had relationships with Jewish men, including her third husband. In short, she embodied everything the Nazis despised and wanted to get rid of, especially what they called the ‘degenerate’ art of cabaret dancing. Her face even appeared on a propaganda leaflet created by Goebbels, and Mussolini went so far as to ban her from Italy, which, let’s be honest, is pretty impressive. You know you must be doing something right if dictators are banning you and using you as the poster girl for danger. Sort of like a parental advisory sticker on a 2000s rap album – your 12-year-old is definitely going to listen to it now.

Like many other Parisians, Josephine, who divorced her third husband in 1940, fled to the south of France as the Nazis entered the city. In her car she had a load of champagne and an elderly Belgian refugee couple. Soon, she began working with the Resistance, housing members in her chateau. She was determined to help France in any way she could. When Jacques Abtey, the head of French counter-military intelligence, approached her with the proposition of spying for the Resistance, she told him: ‘France made me what I am. I will be grateful forever. The people of Paris have given me everything … I am ready, captain, to give them my life. You can use me as you wish.’

Josephine had one thing that most members of the Resistance didn’t: star power. Her fame and charm allowed her to hide in plain sight, and, travelling between countries under the guise of her performances, she avoided arousing suspicion. Josephine had many fans, including some helpfully loose-lipped officials, such as the Italian ambassador. She started work before Paris had even fallen, attending parties and soirées at the Japanese, German and Italian embassies, and gathering intelligence from drunken diplomats infatuated with her.

Once Paris had fallen, she became ingenious at smuggling out documents – she would write codes and letters on her arms and legs, and pin notes in her underwear, knowing the border guards wouldn’t dare to strip-search her. And let’s face it, if they really wanted a look at her knockers, they could probably buy a postcard of them somewhere. During her escape from France to London, she carried more documents by writing the information in invisible ink on her sheet music.

Josephine was also able to use her glamour and celebrity status to shoo Nazis away when they tried to search her chateau, Milandes, in the Dordogne, where she also hid weapons, Resistance fighters and Jewish refugees. Oh, did I mention she was a pilot? Yeah, she flew planes. Of course she did. Inspired by her friend Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s licence, Josephine trained and gained her own licence in 1935. She used her skills to ferry Red Cross supplies (in her own plane, naturally) during the war, and joined the French Air Force officially in 1944.

Aware that the Nazis were catching up with her, she decamped to North Africa in 1941, continuing to pass information between agents. She became seriously ill while in Morocco, and was confined to her bed for a year. Even this proved useful; she essentially became an intelligence hub – spies could visit her under the guise of dropping in on a sick friend and relay information to be passed on to the next visitor.

As the New Yorker suggested in an article on her war years, Josephine was drawn to spying because she was already living a life of shadows, secrets and espionage. Her entire life she ‘ran and ran and ran’, from her childhood, her country, and the discrimination she faced. She had the ability to comfortably slip into whatever mould was required at the time: fun-loving, exotic dancer; resistance heroine; screen icon. She came from a community that was well versed in living in the shadows and conducting business where it couldn’t be seen, for the sake of safety. Josephine wasn’t daunted by the prospect of being a spy, because it wasn’t any scarier than anything she had already faced in her life.

Josephine’s wartime exploits had allowed her to meet people from all over the world, and to see that the Nazis were not the only evil that needed to be tackled. She was all too aware that back in the US, Black civilians had continued to suffer under segregation laws, even though many of them had fought or even given their lives in the war. She made promises that she would help them fight for a better America. During the 1950s and 1960s, Baker began to make it clear she would not perform in segregated American clubs, and even staged walkouts on occasion. Some in authority didn’t like this, and soon her visa was revoked under the guise that she held ‘Communist sympathies’. (‘Communist sympathies’ was used a lot in those days to harass people. Don’t like a certain actor? Accuse him of having ‘Communist sympathies’. Brand of chocolate stopped making your favourite flavour? Probably ‘Communist sympathies’. Your mum made fish fingers for tea AGAIN? COMMUNIST SYMPATHIES).

In 1963 she flew in from France and spoke at the march on Washington. She was dressed in her French military uniform, medals pinned to her dress, a far cry from her diamante banana skirt. Addressing the 250,000-strong crowd, she described her life and experiences as a Black woman:

You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.

In her later years, Josephine suffered money problems. She had also decided to adopt a ‘rainbow tribe’ of 12 children from all different races and nationalities, with the idea of raising a harmonious group of humans and showing that it was possible. A sort of UN crèche. Josephine even fabricated exciting life stories for each child, just as she had done for her own childhood. As you might expect, raising 12 adopted children is not easy even when you’re a famous celebrity, and several of these children expressed in later years the pressure they felt to live up to Josephine’s vision of them as world leaders and examples of human greatness.

I can deeply sympathise with Josephine, after her own hectic and short childhood, wanting to create a safe and harmonious life for her own children. Children whom she did not want to have to witness race riots, or people fleeing their homes, or racial discrimination. But she had no guidance, least of all from her own mother, who was more than happy to see her married at 13. It’s understandable that she didn’t always get it right.

Josephine died on 12 April 1975, aged only 68. Until the end of her life, she had retained a deep love and loyalty for France. She received full French military honours at her funeral, which was attended by over 20,000 mourners. Always shocking and daring, Josephine’s lust for life, and her passion for human rights, makes her more than worthy in my (literal) book of a place in history. Kerry Washington, when discussing her Josephine-inspired jewellery line, said it best in a 2021 issue of Vogue:

She was unstoppable, one of the first multi-hyphenates. She had her own makeup line, a haircare company. She sang, danced, produced, and was a phenom professionally, but she was also a spy for the resistance in Europe during World War II and a complete badass!

Josephine Baker teaches us that you don’t have to limit yourself by conforming to anyone else’s standards. She didn’t fit neatly into one box, and no woman who wants to lead a full life should. She was inspiring, goofy, messy and sexy; brave, heroic and hedonistic, and truly the epitome of joie de vivre. So go out there! Get that pilot’s licence! Join that tap class! Turn up for the protest! Don’t limit yourself to one identity! Be everything you want to be! But don’t get a cheetah. They’re a lot.

10 Random Everyday Things You Didn’t Know Were Invented by Women

1. Pizza Saver (1983) If you’ve ever wondered who came up with that little plastic object that keeps the box lid off your cheese, you have Carmela Vitale to thank.

2. Coffee Filters (1908) Melitta Bentz just needed that sweet, sweet joe, and thanks to her, I had the energy to write this book.

3. Ironing Board (1892) Black American Sarah Boone was the first person to give the ironing board collapsible legs and a double-sided sleeve, bringing it into the modern age. Just don’t try to use it as a surfboard.

4. Pedal Bin (1920s) If you threw something away today without bending down, congratulations, you have Lillian Gilbreth to thank. The film Cheaper by the Dozen is based on her life, and no, I’m not making that up: google it.

5. Food Mixer (1892) Anna M Mangin, another Black American, invented something she called a ‘pastry fork’, though it’s more akin to a masher/egg beater/dough kneader – basically, it’s the kitchen equivalent of a Swiss army knife.

6. Windshield Wipers (1903) Mary Anderson saved the lives of countless people with her simple invention – especially if, like me, you live in a country of perpetual rain.

7. Dishwasher (1886) Josephine G Cochran invented a dishwasher that used water pressure, not scrubbers, to clean the dishes, and it thus became the first commercially successful dishwasher.

8. Monopoly (1904) Lizzie Magie originally created The Landlord’s Game to teach people the evils of capitalism. In a not-so-ironic twist, it was nicked and changed and eventually became Monopoly, arguably the most pro-capitalist game in the world.

9. Folding Umbrella (1929) Polish designer Slawa Duldig patented an improved folding, collapsible umbrella. Later she would have to hide the prototypes from the Nazis.

10. Waterproof Mascara (1930s) If this book has brought you to tears, fear not – Helene Winterstein-Kambersky has saved us all from streaky faces with the invention of waterproof mascara.

BOBBI GIBB

How to Get Fit

I think everyone has a period in their lives where they get into running – could last ten years, could last two days, but sooner or later, we all get that Forrest Gump instinct to run. I ran when I was in the middle of a university-induced breakdown that finally saw me diagnosed with the OCD I’ve been living with since the age of seven. It became very, very hard to concentrate on anything in my life except the constant swirl of intrusive thoughts. The one thing I could do, every day, was run.

Somehow, the physical act of running put distance between me and my thoughts. I would run in the woods near my parent’s house on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where no one but the occasional dog walker and potential serial killer could see me. (According to the thousands of true crime podcasts I regularly consume, you’re actually more likely to find a body while out running than become one. So there, MUM.) I would run over centuries’ old bridges and ancient rivers and through wheat fields until my lungs felt like they were bleeding, and it was the most alive I’d felt in a long, long time.

I don’t really run now. I have asthma, which makes running in cold weather feel like you’ve got knives in your bra. For five years I lived in a part of London where everyone is constantly Lycra-ed up, jogging about the place, pushing prams with one hand and sipping a cappuccino with the other, and I feel a lot more self-conscious about running in public. It was one of those weird, in-between parts of the city where there were always helicopters circling overhead, but you’d never know if it was millionaires or the police.

Now I live in Edinburgh again and, truthfully, I think I’m at a place where I don’t need to run from my thoughts anymore. I can sit with them. The only time I’ve come close to running recently was at Parkrun, a 5km community event that takes place every Saturday in parks all over the world. I’ve only done it once, and when I did, I walked the entire way, ostensibly to keep my pregnant friend Nicole company, but let’s face it, I would’ve walked anyway. But that’s the brilliant thing about Parkrun. No one minds if you walk it. I’ve always been a bit put-off by running culture. It seems intimidating: the timings and the logging apps and the high-end trainers. But Parkrun is for everyone. There’s no urgency, no sense of competition. The only person you’re racing against is yourself. Best of all, it’s for everyone; all genders, all ages, all backgrounds. I was struck by the friendliness, the camaraderie and everyone’s excitement. I liked Parkrun. Marathons, on the other hand …

Here’s the thing. My Controversial Opinion. I do not understand marathons. I do not see the point of them. As proud as I am of my friends who have completed them. I have no idea why we’ve decided that running this very specific distance should be a measure of human goodness. It’s literally just the distance from one city to another in an old Greek myth. As a culture, we place way too much significance on random rules the ancient Greeks made up. There are lots of other things the ancient Greeks did that we don’t, like pederasty and the naked Olympics. And democracy. So why do their marathons? Also, that guy who ran the first marathon? He DIED FROM EXHAUSTION. No thanks, I’ll pass. When people come to me with their marathon sponsor emails, I think ‘I wonder what would happen if you didn’t run it? Am I allowed to keep my money? Better still, what if I sponsored you NOT to run it, would you do that?’ They always run. And they’ve also stopped asking me to sponsor them for things.

It takes a certain type of person to be a ‘runner’. Not people like me, who run from mental health breakdowns: I’m talking about the every-day-at-5am, with-that-weird-water-bottle-pack-on runners. I watch them from the bus, jogging through mud and rain, sleet and snow. They always have clenched teeth and a slightly mad look in the eye. Which is understandable – they have committed to the least enjoyable form of exercise. It’s lonely, cold, and if you’re running on concrete you might as well be taking a sledgehammer to your shins. I’ve come to the conclusion that people who ‘run’ aren’t in it for health or the endorphins. They’re in it because something in the universe has personally attacked them, and running is their only revenge. They’re driven only by grit and anger. They’re the kind of people who make £200,000 a year and read about economics for fun. They never wear suits or shirts, but their trainers and hoodies cost more than your monthly salary. They only ever shout, never talk, into their phones. At least that’s what it looks like to me. From my seat on the bus.

In 1966, Bobbi Gibb wanted to run a marathon. She wanted to run a marathon maybe more than anyone in history has ever wanted to run a marathon. She certainly wanted to run one about a million times more than me. Specifically, she wanted to run the Boston marathon, one of the most prestigious in the world. I only know Boston from holidays I’ve had there, so I’m picturing the route as starting at the Tea Party museum, doing a lap of the Red Sox stadium, passing by the original Dunkin’ Donuts, and finishing up with a drink at the Cheers bar, but I have no way of knowing if this is accurate.

There was just one problem with Bobbi running the Boston marathon. In 1966, women weren’t allowed to.

These days running, far from being off limits for women, has almost taken on a feminine quality. Running is seen as a graceful way for women to exercise, and an opportunity to show off high-end designer running gear. It’s associated with long, lean limbs and flat stomachs. If you’re at all familiar with the ‘That Girl’ trend that’s taken over social media in the last few years, running, along with yoga and pilates is the number one form of exercise for ‘That Girl’ girls. It’s the pinnacle of cool. But it wasn’t always like this.

*

Bobbi was born on 2 November 1942, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She ran from an early age. She ran the eight-mile route to school and back every day. She ran it in nurse’s shoes, because women’s running shoes didn’t even exist back then. In her book, Wind in the Fire, Bobbi remembers her early passion for running: ‘I loved to run as a kid. I’d see a green field and I’d feel so much joy at its beauty that I’d just have to tear across it at top speed.’

It was during a conversation with a family friend in spring 1964, aged 22, that she first heard about the Boston marathon. At first, she thought it sounded crazy – 26 miles? She had to see this for herself. On 19 April 1964, she goes along to watch the marathon. She can’t believe what she’s seeing.

I’ve never seen people run like this before. How strong they are! They run with such grace … I know how they feel; it is the way I feel when I run, turned inward, listening to the inside of their bodies. Here at last are people who feel the same way I do … something shifts deep inside me. At this moment I know that I am meant to run this race.

So why couldn’t Bobbi run the Boston marathon? Until Josephine Baker did the Charleston, nobody was actually entirely sure whether women even had legs. Bobbi grew up in an era where female runners were still fighting for the right to run major events such as marathons. Before 1966, there were only a few running events specifically for women, particularly amateurs, in the US, the longest being 1.5 miles. The prevailing view, even well into the 20th century, was that women simply weren’t physically capable of longer distances. It would be too much for them. It would be dangerous to even try. A bit like when the train was invented and lots of panicked think-pieces came out in the papers about how the human body would surely explode if it travelled at more than 12 miles an hour. Yes, they really thought this, look it up.

This won’t be the first example in this book of the particularly maddening scenario in which men dictate what women can do, apparently for our own good. Not lifting heavy things, not running too much. Never mind that it’s us women who endure the hours involved in pushing an entire human being out of ourselves; never mind the thousands of years in which women have been forced by necessity to do back-breaking labour alongside men (and continue to do in many places today). And we can’t run marathons? I mean, I can’t. But my strengths lie elsewhere (specifically in identifying voiceover actors in adverts).

Bobbi had to run this marathon. Bobbi saw marathons as ‘the epitome of life. It was courage and strength and dignity. Something deep inside of me fell in love with this, and decided I was going to run this race.’

Back in California, where she was studying at university, Bobbi had started to run longer and longer distances around her local neighbourhood. At first, she wanted to run the 1965 marathon, but a sprained ankle stopped her, quite literally, in her tracks. But that wasn’t going to stop her for long. Soon Bobbi was back to training, readying herself for the 1966 race. She knows women aren’t allowed to compete, but she sends in her application anyway. According to Bobbi, this is the response she receives:

Dear Mrs Bingay [Bobbi had married her husband Will earlier that year]

We have received your request for an application for the Boston Marathon and regret that we will not be able to send you an application.

Women are not physiologically able to run twenty-six miles and we would not want to take on the medical liability. Furthermore the Boston Marathon is a men’s division event. The rules of International Sports and the Amateur Athletic Union do not allow women to run races more than the sanctioned one and a half miles.

Sorry we could not be of more help.

It seems insane now that even as little as 60 years ago, professional athletics bodies and governments didn’t think that women could run more than 1.5 miles. Even I can run more 1.5 miles. (But please don’t make me.)

By this point (February 1966), Bobbi had been running up to 40 miles a day for two years in preparation. It was this letter that gave Bobbi the kick in the arse she really needed. Now, it wasn’t just that she wanted to run this marathon. Now she HAD to run the marathon, to prove to everyone that women were just as capable as men of running the 26.2 miles that we as a society have decided is impressive.

Now, I hate breaking rules. Not because I’m a morally good person, but because I hate getting into trouble. Severe anxiety has rendered me the perfect citizen for most of my life. You know in primary school when the police came in to tell you that drugs will kill you if you do a single one, and you snorted and thought ‘Oooh, I want to try that’, and then there was one kid who was so scared they were crying? I was that kid.

Bobbi, luckily, had no such worries. She took a four-day bus from California to the East Coast, and donned her brother’s shorts, a tank top and some men’s running shoes – no Lululemon in those days. She was reluctant to tell anyone about her plans, even her own family, in case they tried to stop her. She thought they’d consider her crazy. Her dad definitely did. In fact he was convinced that it would kill her and pleaded for her to change her mind.

On the morning of 19 April 1966, a chilly spring day, Bobbi woke early and headed for the race. Not helping with the ‘crazy’ image, she decided to hide in the bushes near the starting line, like a stealthy sporting stalker. In Wind in the Fire, Bobbi recalls realising how pivotal this moment was for women in sport: ‘If I’m detected and prevented, no one will ever know that a woman can run a twenty-six point two mile marathon. A sense of urgency grips me.’ (I can’t say I’ve ever crouched in a bush knowing it would change history, except that one time I weed behind a tree in Kew gardens and accidentally over-watered some endangered lilies.)

*

After the main runners had gained a bit of distance, Bobbi jumps out and starts running, losing herself in the crowd. As she gains pace, other runners start to notice her, and soon they start to notice that she is a WOMAN. Bobbi had been scared about this; she had no idea how they would react when they found out a woman had infiltrated the race. They might harass her, mock her, even attack her. But, to her surprise, instead she is met with delight. ‘Hey, there’s a woman running!’ says one guy. ‘I wish my wife could run!’ says another.

Buoyed on by this unexpected enthusiasm, Bobbi keeps going. She’s dreaming of a three-hour marathon finish, which, I’m reliably informed by running nerds, would be a very impressive time. Now others have noticed there’s a woman in the race. There’s a local news station charting her progress, photographers snapping her picture as she races past. At the halfway point, she passes Wellesley College, where female students are waiting to cheer her on. At the 17-mile mark, she faces the Newton Hills, a notoriously tough section of the race. At five miles to go, with burst blisters, no water, and her three-hour goal out the window, Bobbi starts to falter, but she knows she can’t stop now.

At last, after four billion years, just as human life first appears on earth, the Citgo sign passes into oblivion. I wonder if anyone will still be at the finish when I get there. I follow the scattered herd of runners along Commonwealth Ave. As I turn right … people are hanging out of windows holding beer cans and screaming. So many people crowd into the street that only a small passage is left through which to run. I look at their smiling faces and see such incredible beauty. In the end, nothing is as beautiful as the human face.

It’s all over. Bobbi has done it. She’s proved women can run marathons. Nothing caught fire, no one got raptured, her uterus didn’t fall out on the tarmac and comically cause other runners to slip on it like a banana peel, Mr Bean style. She finishes with a time of three hours and twenty minutes. According to Sports Illustrated, who called her ‘tidy-looking and pretty’, she came in ahead of two-thirds of the other runners. What’s more, Bobbi has proved that the majority of male runners also think there’s nothing wrong with female runners, and that, actually, they wanted to see more of them. Afterwards, some other competitors invite her to join them at the post-marathon event. But women aren’t allowed inside the venue. She slips away and takes a taxi home. She knows women still have a long way to go.

Progress isn’t always straightforward. Bobbi’s success didn’t immediately pave the way for female marathon runners in Boston. In 1967, a year after Bobbi’s race, little had changed. Athlete Kathrine Switzer decided she wanted to run the marathon too, and, like Bobbi, was told women could not compete. So she entered the race under her initials, and, being assumed to be a man, was given a registered number. Thus Kathrine became the first woman to run the Boston marathon officially (although women weren’t actually properly recognised in the race until 1972), without being forced to hide in a bush first. Although she had the support of her partner, her coach and other runners, she still wasn’t completely safe. During the race, she was attacked by one of the officials, race manager Jock Semple, who grabbed her, yelling ‘Get the hell out of my race!’. Kathrine managed to fend him off and complete the race, but the result was that the American Athletics Association officially banned women from competing with men. In 1972, when the ban was lifted, instead of integrating the marathon, female runners were given their own, separate race, something they found to be deeply insulting. They didn’t need a separate marathon, and they didn’t want one. Six women due to run the New York marathon that year instead chose to sit at the start line in protest at their unequal treatment.

Bobbi had been right to be wary. Maybe the idea of a woman running unofficially had been fun, and plenty of men seemed supportive, but the idea of a woman officially competing seemed to have set off a primal fear in the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) officials. This was their territory. This was their race. How dare she. It would not be until 1996 that Bobbi’s participation in the 1966 Boston marathon was officially recognised by the AAU, but at last there was progress. Now in the 21st century it’s almost unbelievable that women were once banned from marathons.

Reflecting on that day in 1966, Bobbi said: ‘Part of what I wanted to do was to show that men and women can do things together, and share all of life together, and change the way people thought about women.’

Gender in sport is, sadly, not an issue of the past. In fact, it’s been a hot topic in the last few years, particularly in relation to trans female athletes and the debate around whether it’s ‘fair’ to let them compete with cis women. Some people have the idea that trans women could be at an advantage in certain areas, such as levels of testosterone, among other things, although this ignores the fact that there exist cis women who also have higher levels of testosterone. In fact, some cis female athletes are now the targets of harassment and scrutiny themselves about their gender identity. As well as showing a woeful lack of understanding about the nuances of biology, this supposedly ‘well meaning’ attempt to ensure that ‘real’ women are given the best opportunities has ended up hurting the very people it claims to protect. There are now cis female athletes being tested, examined and discriminated against for high testosterone levels, which would be fine if testosterone levels were the method by which we divide up athletes. But it’s not: it’s gender. By their own rules, testosterone levels shouldn’t be counted. This notion that trans women are out to steal cis women’s place in sport may be a tad exaggerated. None of the trans women I know want to do any sport at all, but that could be because I’m in comedy, which is the opposite of sport.

Personally, I’d love it if we stopped doing all sports ever, but I understand that that’s not a popular view. What strikes me as interesting is that we have decided to divide our athletes up by gender, as opposed to, say, other physical or biological markers. Everyone knows that the best woman athlete is not considered as impressive as the best male athlete. That’s why she’s the best FEMALE athlete, but he’s simply ‘The best athlete’. That ‘female’ tag somehow implies, by dint of being there, that it’s a lesser achievement. Sometimes people (and I’m very grateful for the praise) tell me I’m their favourite female comedian, which I know is meant well, but I’d much rather be described as your 48th favourite comedian overall, Junko Tabei style. There is a deeply ingrained societal belief that a female expert, whatever her credentials, can be beaten by a man. As an example, I recently watched an interview with snooker champion Melissa Helland, ranked eighth in the world, who explained that every time she told a man who she was, they would challenge her to a game, confident in the belief that they would beat her. They didn’t. Obviously. But is it obvious? If it keeps happening? Serena Williams has spoken of similar interactions. What must it be like to grow up with that confidence drilled into you that you are, in some way, better, even than the very best woman?

I once saw a viral online experiment where women demonstrated the differences between male and female strength. Specifically, women would bend forward at 90 degrees with their head against a wall, and lift a chair up to their chests. When the men tried, they could not do it. They strained and panted and puffed, but they could not lift the chair in that position. Why? Because men are weak and are worse at sport? No, simply because women and men have different centres of gravity and therefore different abilities in certain positions. More specifically, (most) men have (on average) more upper-body strength, but women’s strength is (mostly) in the lower body, in our hips and thighs. But because men have designed most of the exercises and games in sports, none of them cater for this type of strength. If it had been the other way round, and women had been designing the exercises, maybe there would be a whole load of lower-body events that men would find challenging.

Bobbi and Kathrine’s legacies have in a way been forgotten, at least by the general public. It’s now so normal for women to run that the idea that they ever had to fight for this right, especially well within living memory, seems ludicrous. But they have never been forgotten by women who run. In 2016, Boston marathon winner Atsede Bayisa (sometimes spelled Baysa) gave her trophy to Bobbi, as a thank-you on behalf of female runners everywhere. Bobbi’s determination, self-belief and resilience were incredible, but her lesson for us all is a simple one: ‘no’ is not an acceptable answer. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t run your marathon.

Unless you’re me. Because I don’t want to run a marathon. Please don’t make me.

ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI

How to Express Yourself

Here’s an interesting experiment you can do. Go into any classical art gallery and count all the depictions of naked women. Now count the number of female artists whose work is in the gallery. How do those numbers work out?

If you do happen to see a work by a woman, it may well be by Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Like many, many other women throughout history, her work and reputation has often been overshadowed by the trauma she endured, and yet her life is so much more than that one terrible moment.

When we think of the 16th and 17th centuries, especially in Italy, we immediately have visions of an enlightened, golden period of art, science and progress. Names like Raphael, Michelangelo, and the other Ninja Turtles spring to mind. We think of beautiful frescoes, the Mona Lisa, lute playing, da Vinci hiding clues for Tom Hanks to find hundreds of years later. It was an incredible period of history.

Now, I’m not going to lie. Renaissance and Baroque art tends to blend into a homogeneous, religious blob for me a lot of the time. Jesus on the cross, Jesus in the manger, Jesus and his mum, Jesus and some pals, Jesus in a temple, Jesus getting his hair done, Jesus calling customer services, Jesus getting a chippie.

Of course, with context it’s a bit easier to understand exactly why they wanted so many depictions of Jesus. Religion was obviously hugely important, but it was also changing rapidly. This was the period of the Reformation, and religion was at the forefront of most cultural discussions. Plus, we’re in Italy, and if there’s one thing I know about Catholics it’s that they love a good piccy of Christ. And the Church was paying for most of this art, so of course it’s going to be religious. The pope can’t commission any old painting, even if he would prefer a mural of some cats dressed as sailors.

It’s hard to deny that they were on to something with this art lark: you can get completely lost in some of these paintings – the scale alone is enough to enthral you. The hours of work it must have taken to complete these is astounding. In fact, it took so many hours that notorious slacker Leonardo da Vinci didn’t actually finish half of his projects, unless his patrons starting sending angry letters. Now THAT’S a real artist, procrastinating up until he’s threatened with arrest. Respect, Leo.

Who was the woman who managed to cement her place among the greats of Baroque art? And was she any better at keeping to a schedule than Leonardo?

Artemisia Gentileschi was born in 1593 in Rome. While it was an incredible time for art, it was perhaps not an incredible time to be a woman. Although it’s pretty hard to find a particular moment in history when it WAS a great time to be a woman. I’ll keep looking.

Artemisia’s mother died in 1605 when she was just 12, which was devastating for her, and left her the only female in her household. She grew up in a family of artists, and excelled well beyond her brothers at an early age, much to her father Orazio’s pride. He ensured that she received an excellent education in art from himself and other tutors.

Artemisia, like her father, was a Caravaggisti (or, as art historian Mary D Garrard put it, a Caravaggista), a follower of the style of Caravaggio. Her talent was obvious from the beginning. Susanna and the Elders (1610), her earliest surviving work, was painted when she was just 17, and yet it has all the hallmarks of skill beyond her years. Even as a teen, she has already mastered light, composition and texture.

The painting depicts a scene from the Bible in which a woman, Susanna, is being sexually harassed and assaulted in her garden by two elders of the Church. Looking at Artemisia’s version of Susanna, you can’t help but notice how it differs from other, male interpretations of the story. In many of those versions, Susanna is depicted as slightly coy – sometimes she looks out, shyly to the viewer, sometimes she looks to her assailants with more curiosity than fear. In Tintoretto’s Susanna, for example, she stares directly at you as her maids attend to her, in a way that almost says ‘Come and have a look too, wink emoji’. The elders are demoted to a back corner of the painting, not within the sightline of any boobs. The nude female form is clearly the most important part of many of these paintings, and it’s a lustful, sensual form, designed entirely for the male gaze. Artemisia’s work is different. Her Susanna is actively flinching, arms raised at odd angles, as if Artemisia has snapped a photo of her in the middle of the attack. Her face is not coy, or blank, or ‘come-hither’. It’s full of disgust. She is looking down and away, not at her attackers or the viewer. She is shamed and angry. As a woman, I find Artemisia’s Susanna far more relatable than those painted by men – here, for once, is a realistic depiction of how women feel when they are violated.

For a first painting, it is a strong, defiant piece that would mark the start of an incredible career. However, the painting would also come to symbolise not only Artemisia’s talents, but her struggles too. The painting, which now hangs in Schloss Weißenstein in Germany, has become the poster child for the Susanna series, and yet it is also unique: how many paintings hanging in the world’s grandest galleries have been painted by 17-year-old girls? I’d wager very few.

Artemisia’s father was keen to shelter her from the seedier side of the art world, and so he arranged for a colleague, Agostino Tassi, then 34 years old, to tutor her. You can find another book that talks about Tassi’s work if you want. I don’t have space for it.

In 1611, Artemisia was raped by Tassi in her house while they were supposed to be working together. She was 18 years old. Even today, over 400 years later, reading Artemisia’s testimony of the crime is difficult, and I’ve avoided quoting the worst of it:

He put a knee between my thighs to prevent me from closing them. Lifting my clothes (which he had a great trouble doing) … I felt a strong burning and it hurt very much. However, I tried to scream as best as I could, calling Tuzia. I scratched his face and pulled his hair

Artemisia was furious, and ashamed. She even lunged at Tassi with a knife, and Tassi, no doubt trying to save his own skin, at first assured her that he would marry her. Reluctantly, she allowed sexual relations to continue for a few weeks afterward, but soon it became apparent that her rapist had no intentions of honouring his promise. She informed her father who immediately took action. Artemisia was saved only by the virtue of coming from a good family with a father who wasn’t afraid to take this issue to higher courts.

It’s impossible to know if her father fought the case because he was angry about the way his daughter had been treated, or if he felt that his ‘property’ had been damaged, but given that they seemed to have had a pretty close relationship, we can hope it’s the former. More likely, it was both – at the time, even fathers who loved and respected their daughters found it hard to separate them from the idea that women were subservient to men.

Now before you go thinking, ‘How progressive of Italy to have a rape trial in the 17th century!’, let me explain further. The trial hinged entirely on the fact that Artemisia’s virginity had been taken by Tassi. If she’d already been sexually active, there would have been no trial. The thing that mattered was not the assault, but the ‘damage’ done to the ‘goods’. This is the very essence of the Madonna–whore complex that so many Renaissance and Baroque paintings explored. In the eyes of the patriarchy, there can only ever be two types of woman: the pure, chaste Madonna, and the brazen, sluttish whore. A woman who has had sex, ANY sex, has brought assault on herself. She is now the ‘whore’, the ‘fallen woman’, and she can never again be seen as pure, innocent or wholesome. In the 21st century, this 17th-century attitude still prevails in many aspects of women’s lives.

Artemisia was tortured during the trial, as way of testing her honesty, as if any more proof was needed that this entire event was purely for the sake of the men it affected. Yet her testimony was gruesome and defiant, and she never changed her story. The idea at the time was that a witness must surely be telling the truth if they stick to their story under torture, but you can’t help but look at her treatment as a punishment, as if she had somehow brought it upon herself. Even the alleged method of torture tells us that Artemisia was being punished – thumbscrews were used on her, which, as well as being horrifically cruel, would also have affected her ability to paint.

Is it any wonder that we don’t hear about more of these cases in history? What woman, having gone through a sexual assault, wants to go through the public humiliation of interrogation and torture as well? Even today, being questioned about an event like this is incredibly traumatising, even shameful, for the victim to relive. In historical accounts, the idea that a woman’s rape is even worthy of mention is usually down to how important that rape was to the men around her. In this case, Artemisia’s father was furious that his daughter had been violated and that the rapist was refusing to marry her, ruining her reputation and that of their family, too. If marriage hadn’t been an issue, would we have found out so much about Artemisia’s life? It’s hard to say. As we will see in other chapters of this book, there are doubtless thousands more women’s stories lost to us because the men around them didn’t think they were important enough to document.

The trial was notorious throughout Italy. During its seven-month span, not only was it uncovered that Tassi had an unsavoury past (he had sexually assaulted both his sister-in-law and his wife), he was also accused of having murdered his wife, who had mysteriously disappeared. (I’ve tried to find out more about this juicy historical footnote, but alas details are scarce.) He was found guilty of the rape, but served less than a year in prison.

Artemisia was married soon afterwards, to fellow artist Pierantonio Stiattesi, in a private, night-time ceremony that ensured minimum publicity. Her father must have been relieved to have found someone willing to wed his daughter. In all probability, Artemisia was relieved too – regardless of how happy she was with the match, she had just been ‘saved’ from a life of disgrace. It was the best outcome she could have hoped for. She moved to Florence, where she was less well known, and continued to work as a painter, and produced many more impressive paintings, particularly of female subjects, such as Judith and her Maidservant (1623–5), Minerva (1615) and Penitent Magdalene (1622–5). Plenty of her paintings were commissions from patrons in order to pay the bills. Like any savvy businesswoman, Artemisia knew that being able to eat was just as important as being able to create masterpieces.

Despite the publicity of the trial, Artemisia flourished in Florence. In 1616, she became the first female artist to be accepted into the prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. This gave her new-found freedoms as a painter and as a woman to control her own life and work. Not only this, she became very popular among the elites of Florence, including the Medicis, and the great-nephew of Michaelangelo. She also learned to read and write at this time. Yes, that’s right. Until then, she was illiterate. Even her father, recognising her artistic talents, didn’t think it was worth it to teach his own daughter how to write. Now she could sign her own contracts and dictate her own business without the help of men. She could even begin a correspondence with Galileo, although only one letter that she wrote to Galileo survives, asking him to intervene because the grand duke Cosimo owed her money. It’s a shame that I don’t know Professor Brian Cox because I’m sure I could get him to chase up a load of invoices for me.

Artemisia also set about teaching her own daughters to paint, something I can only imagine brought her a lot of joy. It must also have been a comfort to be able to teach them herself, and eschew the advances of any tutors. Artemisia continued to paint in Florence, then Naples, and then, towards the end of her documented career, London. Here she worked with her father at the court of Charles I, decorating a ceiling for the queen. Being received as a painter at a foreign royal court would have been a huge source of pride for Artemisia. It was in London that she probably produced her most famous self-portrait, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1638–9), in which she depicts herself side on, focusing intensely on her work, mid brushstroke. For the first time, she is in charge of her own depiction and she identifies herself here as an artist, first and foremost, not a mother, a wife or a member of high society. By making herself the allegory for painting, and with her unkempt hair and unladylike posture, she shows us that the focus is her skills, not her looks. Often artists chose to depict themselves as background characters – as mythical gods or smartly dressed businessmen – and Artemisia did so too, but in this portrait she wants everyone to know who she really is – an artist.

Attidutes towards female self-portraits are slow to change. When I was in my early 20s and staying with a friend in Berlin, we queued round the block for a Frida Kahlo exhibition that showcased almost all of her work. I love Frida Kahlo, but another friend who was with us didn’t see the big deal. ‘I just don’t get her stuff. She’s quite vain,’ I remember her saying. ‘It’s just loads of pictures of herself.’ I thought about this comment, and the dozens, if not hundreds, of male artists whose self-portraiture has never been described as vain. Would we call Rembrandt vain? Or Monet, or Da Vinci? Yes, Kahlo painted a lot of pictures of herself, but she did so because a lot of the time she was disabled, and alone with her pain and her reflection and nothing else. She looked in the mirror and saw her mortality, her limitations, and the children she was unable to bear because of an accident that had speared her right through the abdomen with a metal pole. And if Frida Kahlo didn’t have a right to document that, what right does any woman have? She was telling her story. In much the same way that, when I take eight identical selfies in a row, I’m telling my story.

It’s perhaps too easy today to equate Artemisia’s paintings with a feminist agenda. But it’s also difficult to deny that, even without a feminist lens, Artemisia’s work has a powerful righteousness about it. Her use of colour and light gives her paintings a great sense of movement and dimension. The passion in her work stands out.

Artemisia’s most famous work is undoubtedly Judith Slaying Holofernes (1612), painted in Naples when she was just 19. Even if you couldn’t identify the artist, you might well recognise the image. Again, it’s a Bible story: Judith tricks the drunken and horny Holofernes, who’s about to attack her home city, into letting her into his tent. Once he’s asleep she cuts off his head. It’s the classic tale – girl meets boy, boy wants to invade girl’s home, girl cuts off boy’s head with a sword.

As with Susanna and the Elders, Artemisia, despite (or perhaps because of) everything she had gone through, chose to paint the scene with elements of her own perspective in mind.

If we compare Artemisia’s version to that of her hero Caravaggio, we can see how stark the differences are in terms of their focus. Caravaggio’s version centres the action around a gruesomely dying Holofernes, with crimson blood spurting dramatically from his neck and out towards the viewer. His silently screaming face is a picture of agony, and behind him, a beautifully rendered red hanging underscores the bloodiness of the situation. His Judith, by comparison, looks hesitant, nervous and even slightly bemused. A slender, delicate young woman, she could almost, from her expression, be cutting up a courgette. Her actions seem unsure; there is no command or strength in her pose.

Artemisia’s Judith has a power all her own. Like Caravaggio’s depiction, it shows Judith and her maid cutting off the head of Holofernes. Instead of leaning away from her victim, Judith is right in the action, kneeling on him (as Tassi had knelt on her) so she might be able to plunge the sword in deeper. Her maid, no longer a passive observer, helps to hold Holofernes down, pushing him roughly as he helplessly grabs at her, eyes wide in terror. He is obviously still alive. Judith’s expression is of firm determination and concentration. She is robust, her powerful arms lit by a beam of light. Her maid is young, strong and unflinching. Unlike Caravaggio’s Judith, who is dressed in pure white, Artemisia’s heroine is spattered with her victim’s blood, which spurts towards her, not the viewer, staining her clothes.

Much of Artemisia’s work depicts confrontation between men and women. Notable examples include Jael and Sisera (1620), where Jael drives a tent peg through Sisera’s head; Esther Before Ahasuerus (1620s), which shows Esther fainting as she begs for the life of her people; and Corisca and the Satyr (1630s), in which Corisca flees an attempted rape. One of the most striking aspects of Artemisia’s work is how it portrays two popular subjects of the time: nude women and violence. It’s not hard for any woman who has been assaulted to see some of these paintings as revenge fantasy, a violent and sexual retribution in the vein of 1970s schlock horror films like I Spit On Your Grave. Some more canny historians have pointed out that Artemisia was perhaps looking to capitalise on her fame and connection with these topics and subject matter. If this is indeed the case, Artemisia was taking back her power the only way she could – through her art and through her earning potential, essentially sticking two fingers up to Tassi, his supporters and their attempts to ruin her. Either way, it’s almost impossible for us as viewers to separate the artist’s work from her life. Chances are that if you know anything about Artemisia, it’s that she was a female artist, and that she was raped. How many other artist’s monographs have an appendix entitled ‘Testimony of rape trial’ at the back?

We’re not sure exactly when Artemisia died. Some historians think she may have been killed in the Naples plague of 1656, as there are no records of her after this period. Like so many other women in this book, she simply fades out of history.

When Artemisia wasn’t being ignored by the art community, she was being sanitised. The whitewashing of her life continued well into the 20th century. The 1997 film Artemisia depicts the rape as a consensual love affair, which is just so 1990s. She might as well have been wearing brown lipstick and a plastic choker. I’m surprised it wasn’t pitched as a romcom: ‘She was the daughter of the richest man in Italy … he was a humble painter … but when they’re forced to work together on a project, they’re going to have to learn to get along … This summer, Sandra Bullock IS … Artemisia!’ Suffice to say that fans of Artemisia were not happy with a plot that paired her up with her rapist.

Artemisia’s experience is not ancient history. As in many other countries, in Europe and elsewhere, Italy’s view of rape victims remains steeped in misogynistic attitudes, and several sensational rape trials have hit the headlines in recent years. As Gaia Pianigiani reported in The New York Times in September 2023, ‘There is still a pervasive view in Italy that women who are abused were somehow at fault, courting the aggression … 27 percent of [Italian] women say they have experienced violence.’

In the same article, Pianigiani also reported that Andrea Giambruno, news anchor and husband of the far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni, suggested on national TV that women were partly to blame if they were attacked while drunk. There is little hope for substantial change in a country (or, indeed, a continent) where the establishment feels comfortable airing these views on television.

I wish Artemisia Gentileschi wasn’t so special. I wish we had access to the work and stories of the thousands of other women who would have undoubtedly changed history with their art. Was Artemisia successful because she was the only woman who displayed any talent as a painter? No. She was successful because, unlike most women, she had access to the tools and environment needed to inspire and nurture her talent. The potential of those other women has been lost to us. Today, the most famous women in art history are still the muses who inspired male artists, many of whom were actually little-known artists in their own right. We may never know the stories of every female artist in history, but we now have a chance to discover new ones. For all its downsides – plagiarism, the problems of AI – the internet has enabled millions of artists all over the world to share their work with anyone who wishes to see it. Now we just need to get it into the galleries.

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Female artists can never avoid connections being made between their work and their personal lives, and I’m all too aware of the irony that I am adding to the plethora of feminist analyses of Artemisia, who would probably not have recognised our modern concept of the word. Perhaps if we knew of more female painters from the past we wouldn’t have to ascribe our personal feelings to the famous few. Even today, as a comedy writer, I feel the pressure to write about my own experiences, my traumas; to be autobiographical even when I just want to be silly.

Artemisia’s life and work show us that self-expression can be powerful. It can be healing, but it can also say something when you would otherwise be silent. It’s so important for us all to be creative and to express ourselves; not just for likes on Instagram or for awards in art galleries, but for our own souls. So go, paint the painting, knit the hat, or simply stand on the beach and scream into the waves. You’ll feel better. I promise.

10 Queer Women from History We Should All Know More About

1. Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Almost as famous for her turbulent life and amazing fashion as for her art, bisexual artist Frida Kahlo was married to Diego Rivera, but had affairs with men and women, including actress Dolores del Rio and Leon Trotsky – yes, that Leon Trotsky.

2. Anne Lister (1791–1840) Anne is one of history’s most famous lesbians, partly because of the diary she left behind after her death. As well as cataloguing her life and lovers, Anne flouted conventional society in both her dress and her lifestyle.

3. Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) A composer and suffragist, Ethel had several unrequited crushes throughout her life, including Emmeline Pankhurst and Virginia Woolf. She was the first female composer to receive a damehood.

4. Lili Elbe (1882–1931) Perhaps best known from the film The Danish Girl, Lili Elbe was a Danish painter whose life was cut tragically short when a gender-affirming operation went wrong. An opera based on her life, Lili, premiered in 2023.

5. Sappho (lived end of the 7th century/beginning of 6th century BC) The OG lesbian, Sappho was an ancient Greek poet whose work is mostly now lost. She was one of the founders of lyric verse.

6. Felipa de Souza (1556–c.1600) A victim of the Catholic Inquisition, Felipa was a Brazilian woman whose love letters to other women resulted in her punishment and exile. A human rights award in Brazil is named after her.

7. Abigail Kinoiki Kekaulike Kawānanakoa (1926–2022) Hawaiian aristocrat Abigail was an equestrian and heiress and one of the last links to Hawaii’s royal family.

8. Gladys Bentley (1907–1960) Gladys was an American singer and a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance. She often dressed in top hat and tails to perform, and her gender-non-conforming style made her an icon of her time.

9. Princess Sun-bin Bong of Joseon (b. 1414) Princess Sun was banished from the Korean court after it was discovered that she had been sleeping with her maid. It’s possible that she was killed for this indiscretion.

10. We’wha (c.1849–1896) We’wha was a two-spirit, or Lhamana person from the Zuni people of New Mexico. A skilled weaver and cultural ambassador for Native Americans, We’wha performed both male and female roles in their tribe during their lifetime and usually dressed in female clothing.

POCAHONTAS

How to Stand Up For Your Community

Between the ages of five and seven there were two films that I watched over and over and over again. One was a taped recording of the 1998 stage musical Cats, truly the best musical of all time. The other was the Disney 1990s classic Pocahontas. Everything about that film appealed to me: the music, the beautiful animation, Billy Connolly, but mostly Pocahontas herself. She just seemed so God darn COOL. She spent her day exactly how I’d like to: barefoot, running through the forests with her quirky animal friends, occasionally bumping into incredibly hot guys and teaching them that Mother Earth was our friend, not our enemy, all while looking like a cross between Naomi Campbell and Nicole Kidman. Oh, and her grandma was a wise tree. Duh.

It’s fair to say that Pocahontas has not, as the saying goes, aged well. When I look back, it seems a baffling choice for a children’s movie – the colonisation of a land and of a people against their will, introducing years of systematic displacement and genocide? And there’s a goofy raccoon sidekick who eats everything!? Sold!!

Mind you, this was the 1990s, the decade in which Fox brought out my other favourite film, Anastasia, which is based on the heart-warming tale of a Russian girl getting shot in the head (but if she was Meg Ryan and she didn’t get shot in the head, but went to Paris with a talking bat and Kelsey Grammer). Clearly the 1990s was a boon time for historical revisionism, and turning tales of exploitation and murder into inspirational, Girl Power movies. I am honestly only half surprised that Anne Frank was never subjected to this treatment.

The Disney organisation was obviously painfully aware that they needed to include more non-white narratives, but instead of diving into the rich storytelling traditions of Native Americans, they thought it better to sex-up a historical event, and use, as their primary source, the diaries of some white guy who not only was NOT a six-foot blond stunner, but was also, in academic terms, a bit of a dick. Nowadays, the name ‘Pocahontas’ is synonymous with this whitewashing of colonial history, and brings to mind those uncomfortable Halloween costumes, sports teams, and a romantic view of a people who were systematically removed from their land and their identity.

The real-life Pocahontas was not only an incredibly interesting historical figure, but a determined and self-led diplomat, mother and member of her community. What’s more, she was a victim of a system that deliberately attempted to endanger and remove Indigenous women from their homes. As the Indigenous Foundation puts it: ‘Pocahontas was one of the first real-life Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW).’ She also lived through one of America’s most fascinating and turbulent periods. It’s safe to say that I find the real-life Pocahontas just as enthralling as seven-year-old me found the Disney version.

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To really understand Pocahontas, we have to unravel some of the most basic facts about her. To begin with, her birth name was Amonute, her secondary name being Matoaka. ‘Pocahontas’ was only a childhood nickname, which roughly translates as ‘naughty child’. In fact, Pocahontas’s community, the Powhatan, an Algonquian people, used several names throughout their lives, so to call her ‘Pocahontas’ is a bit like your boss or your teacher using your private family nickname at work. I will continue to call her Pocahontas for the sake of consistency, and because it was clearly a nickname used in affection.

Pocahontas was the daughter of Wahunsenacawh, also known as Powhatan, the chief of dozens of Algonquian tribes in the eastern Virginia area of the modern-day United States. She’s often referred to as a ‘princess’, but the term isn’t quite correct. While she was the daughter of a powerful chief, it was matrimonial inheritance that was prized in her community, and her mother was not the chief’s main wife or a princess in her own right. Thus, Pocahontas was a well-respected but not royal child. She was also, more importantly, her father’s favourite, which was probably more instrumental in her relations with English settlers than any royal status she possessed. Pocahontas spent much of her time around her father, watching him conduct business, receive guests and plan battles, and she would have been aware from a very young age just how important diplomatic relations were.

The British (or, more specifically, the English) established and colonised Jamestown in Virginia beginning in the early 17th century. This is pre-Pilgrims by the way, back when European governments were tentatively poking the Americas with a stick and asking ‘what should we do with this?’

So why did the English come to America? In a nutshell, they had taken one look at Cortés’s Spanish conquest of southern and central America and thought ‘We’ll have some of that.’ Having seen Spain’s success, what the English expected, basically, was to pitch up in an advanced agrarian culture, like that of the Incas, switch places with their leaders, and cart off all their gold. What they got was a bit different. The North American tribes were still mostly semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, who had only just started to farm. They often moved location and fought with one another, meaning that English officials couldn’t simply step into their moccasins and announce that they were now in charge. Virginia would have been particularly disappointing, as there wasn’t any gold at all, something the English quickly realised.

The settlers were also ill-equipped for life in America. Not only had they just endured a treacherous months-long sea journey to get there, leaving them exhausted, scurvy-ridden and ravenous, they also lacked knowledge about the local area, food sources, weather, diseases and, of course, people. It’s a bit like the time I thought that I could take my Californian friend Emma wild camping by getting a ferry from Mallaig and pitching up on Skye, with no plans, firelighters or knowledge of the local customs (i.e. literally nothing is open on Sunday). After about an hour sitting in a field, trying to light a fire (Emma: ‘Why is all the wood here so damp?’), we decided to get a hostel. I remember this incident every time I feel like giving up on humanity and going to live in a bothy in the Highlands, quickly reminding myself that not only can I not light a campfire, I also can’t get to sleep without my sleep mask, a Miss Marple audiobook and a hot-water bottle.

What did Powhatan and his people think of these interlopers? Sadly, we don’t have any direct primary sources, because their culture didn’t use the written word. We’ve just got to trust that English record keepers at the time were telling the truth, or at least some version of it. It’s important to note that the idea of the ‘awed native’, impressed by everything that the white man had to offer, from his gun to his soap, is not in fact a truthful portrayal of colonial interactions, as historian Camilla Townsend points out in her book, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma. The Native Americans did not view the white settlers as any cleverer, more capable or god-like than themselves. Rather, they assumed that these white men must have very powerful deities who were able to grant them things like metal weapons, giant sail boats and massive moustaches. They also assumed that the reason the English came to America and constantly demanded food and land was that they must have come from some terrible, starving kingdom over the sea. This, as Pocahontas would later discover first-hand, could not have been further from the truth.

Jamestown was founded in Virginia by a group of English men and boys in 1607. A few years earlier, Sir Walter Raleigh had attempted to start a colony on the island of Roanoke, now infamously known to history as ‘the colony that disappeared’. The English were determined to make it work this time, and they knew they would need the help of the locals to do it. New England might have looked like Old England, but it was full of animals, plants, weather and, most importantly, people that they had never come across before.

The colonists tentatively began reaching out to the Native tribes, and connections were established. Like most curious children, Pocahontas enjoyed visiting the settlement, playing with the boys there, and learning the English language. It was this knowledge of English that would make her so invaluable as a diplomat. Few settlers knew the local languages, and the English purposely brought male children with them with the express purpose of having them grow up bilingual, either by being adopted or traded with local tribes, and then traded back. There are also several examples of captured Indigenous children being brought to England for the same purpose. It was a bit like having Duolingo crossed with a Tamagotchi, only even MORE annoying.

Enter John Smith. Think less Hollywood hunk and more ‘everyman’ (Toby Jones or Paul Giamatti, say). If John Smith was alive today, he’d be one of those guys down the pub who tells tall tales that everyone has heard so many times that they just say ‘Did ye, aye?’ and get back to their pints. Having been at sea from a young age, he would tell anyone who would listen about his various adventures. Take, for example, the time he beheaded three Turks in single combat, and then got knighted by the Prince of Transylvania for it. Or what about when he was captured and sold as a slave to a Greek noblewoman, who then fell in love with him? Of course, there’s no proof these events didn’t happen, but there’s also no proof, except his own writings, that they did.

The most interesting aspect of Smith’s stories is the fact that in every single one, a beautiful native woman seems to have fallen in love with him. For some reason, everywhere he went, girls fell head over heels for this dumpy, straggly-bearded guy, who was so unlikeable they had to lock him up during the voyage over. I do have a girlfriend, I swear, but you don’t know her, she goes to another school. And it seems that John Smith was determined, at least after her death, to make Pocahontas fit this narrative in his own story.

John Smith arrived in Jamestown in 1607 with the rest of the settlers after a voyage in which he’d tried to mutiny (he was saved from execution when it was discovered that orders from the Virginia Company had designated him a leader of the new settlement). During his initial explorations of the local terrain, he was captured by Pocahontas’s tribe. His surviving writings actually show examples of Pocahontas (who would have been a tween at the time) and him practising each other’s languages, a fascinating insight into the cultural exchange that could have been if the white settlers had not chosen violent erasure. Smith was not, it seemed, a good diplomat: he much preferred marching into villages and waving a gun to having a sit-down discussion with the locals, despite his interest in learning the language. In his recollections, he claims that Pocahontas saved him from execution from braining, although historians agree that this is probably not true – Powhatan would not have executed prisoners (and they wouldn’t have chosen clubbing his head in as the execution method). In fact, he would have been far more likely to adopt Smith than kill him – a common practice among Algonquin tribes, which secured connections between them. But being adopted by the local tribe wasn’t a good-enough story for Smith, the Turk-beheading, Greek-lady-loving lothario. It’s also interesting to note that it was only after Pocahontas’s death that he really ramped up the idea that she might have had any romantic designs on him. How convenient.

Despite a tentative peace with the Powhatan people (both the English and the Powhatan feared the Spanish, and decided to ally against them), Jamestown faced disaster and starvation over the winter of 1609–10. In recent years evidence of cannibalism has been found, showing just how desperate the colonists must have been. Native people did what they could to help, but there’s only so much you can do when people have actively chosen the worst place to live and don’t really know how to look after themselves. It’s like when your friend gets too drunk on a night out and you have to cart them around, smacking away the sambucas. All you can do is put them in a taxi and hope they don’t vomit on the way home. The English kept turning up, demanding more and more corn with seemingly no notion that there was only so much food to go around. It’s also very likely that local women and children were subjected to sexual assault by the colonisers, who would have viewed them as ‘fair game’, as non-Christian ‘savages’. In all, it was an incredibly difficult time for Pocahontas’ people.

In the years after her meeting with John Smith, Pocahontas married a man named Kocoum, and may or may not have had a child with him. She continued her role as diplomat and translator for her father, honing her language skills as she grew older. However, the English were not flourishing, and frustrated by their lack of success, the colonisers decided to kidnap Pocahontas in the hopes of using her as leverage in deals for food and land. In 1612, Pocahontas was captured by the colonisers. Being kidnapped was probably not as much of a surprise for Pocahontas as it might be for you or me. In her culture, it was pretty standard practice to kidnap women and children in exchange for other goods. It was generally agreed that captives would be well treated and respected – she would not have feared violence or mistreatment from other tribes, and so she probably felt that when the English captured her, that the best thing to do would be to comply and wait it out. Of course, that doesn’t mean that she was treated well by the English. We don’t know if she suffered sexual violence at the time; diplomatically, it would have been unwise to subject her to assault, but according to the oral history of the Mattaponi people, who reside in modern-day Virginia, she was raped during her captivity.

While we don’t have the full picture of how Pocahontas was treated in Jamestown as a teen, the English seemed to have viewed her more as an exciting novelty than a prisoner. She converted to Christianity while in captivity, although that doesn’t mean she was super into it (in fact it’s very likely that she wasn’t) – she might just have recognised that it would be a savvy political move to get into the same god as her captors, who, remember, regarded any non-Christians as ‘heathens’ who needed ‘saving’. Over the years Pocahontas’s conversion to Christianity has been held up as a prime example of the behaviour of a ‘Good Indian’, an Indigenous person who saw the light of Christianity. In reality, it was almost certainly no more than a survival tactic.

Her adopted Christian name was Rebecca, and while on the one hand this was definitely a form of cultural erasure, we also need to remember that Pocahontas already had several names, one of which was so private only her parents knew it. She was used to using different names and it’s not difficult to believe that she saw this new name as her ‘English’ name, for her ‘English identity’, a way to protect her true self from the colonists. As with many British Chinese people today, she may have understood that it’s easier to be known by a European name than to get white people to learn anything remotely foreign.

Pocahontas also wouldn’t have immediately begun worshipping the Christian God in the traditional sense – it’s more likely that she would have simply added him to her pantheon of tribal gods. As we’ve already discussed, the local tribes assumed that this Christian God must have been powerful, but not so omnipotent that they needed to give up all other worship.

In 1614, aged around 17, Pocahontas married colonist John Rolfe, and while they didn’t marry in the most romantic of circumstances, they do seem to have got on with each other, which, depressingly, couldn’t have been said of all European marriages in the 17th century. Women of the time really just had to hope they got someone who was polite to them and didn’t leave his toenail clippings on the bedside table. Anything more was a bonus. However kind or loving Rolfe was, however, Pocahontas was still separated from her people, her culture and her family.

It was decided (by the men, obviously) that it would be a good look to bring an ‘Indian princess’ back to Britain to show what a great time everyone was having in the colonies – and to maybe give them more money please? Along with their infant son Thomas, the Rolfes sailed for England in 1616. It’s likely that Pocahontas, despite having been essentially forced into this position, would have seen this as a great opportunity for subterfuge, to make diplomatic pleas on behalf of her people, and to gather information on what the British were really after in her homeland. At last she would have the chance to meet and talk with their chief and explain that the Powhatan simply didn’t have the resources their colonisers were demanding.

According to numerous diaries and letters from the time, a huge deal was made of Pocahontas’s arrival in London. She and Rolfe were put up in a hotel under the watch of MP Sir Edwin Sandys. She was also given a £4 stipend (lot of money in them days) to buy dresses and food. In Stuart Britain it would have been rare to actually meet anyone from ‘the New World’, and so for Londoners it would have been the equivalent of meeting Taylor Swift. On top of that, the (racist) assumption that she would be an exotic and fascinating figure from a mythical land made her an extra-exciting prospect.

The English would have been desperate for the ‘noble savage’ Pocahontas to be awed by London, a thriving metropolis of immense technological sophistication. In Disney’s straight to video sequel, Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World (yes, they did ANOTHER ONE), Pocahontas leaps from the boat as it arrives at the London docks, and proceeds to wander, awestruck, down the cobbled streets of London, singing about how cool it is to see people baking bread and opening windows and stuff. In all likelihood, she would have found London dirty, crowded and abundant in the food that her people were so consistently harassed for. Even though at that point in time there wasn’t yet a Pret every 20 feet.

Although Pocahontas (whom the British viewed as a princess) and the dozen or so tribesmen who accompanied her seem to have been treated courteously, she was not regarded as important or prestigious enough to be formally introduced to King James (although they did meet at a masque). Instead, it seems that she was generally considered a novelty rather than a visiting diplomat or noble, even though that was exactly what she was. For the most part, she was treated with respect – to her face. Records of the time show that the English gentry were never truly going to regard this brown novelty princess as equal to themselves. According to Camilla Townsend, she was regarded by Londoners like scholar Samuel Purchas as little more than the embodiment of Virginia, a land ‘not yet polluted with Spaniards lust … not a wanton minion, but an honest and Christian wife’. Gross, Samuel.

Pocahontas also briefly reunited with everyone’s favourite fuckboi John Smith. According to Smith’s own recollections, she was more than a bit pissed off at him for going back on several of his promises to her father: ‘They did tell us always you were dead, and I knew no other till I came to Plymouth; yet Powhatan did command Uttamatomakkin to seek you, and know the truth, because your Countriemen will lie much.’

Pocahontas felt comfortable speaking her mind to Smith (although, as usual, we’re unable to verify what Smith tells us), calling him out for his lies and deception, showing just how confident she had become in her own status as a representative of her people.

Pocahontas died in 1617, on the way back to Virginia. She was taken off ship and is buried at Gravesend in Kent. She was, at most, 23 years old. I briefly visited the churchyard of her supposed resting place a few years ago. It boasts a copy of a statue of her from Jamestown, with her arms outstretched as if in welcome, and she wears a stereotypical feather headband. But there is no gravestone. Even though her arrival in England was met with excitement, it seems that nobody bothered to mark her final resting place. What must it have been like for Pocahontas, in those last moments, to know she would probably die and be buried on foreign soil, far away from her home and her father?

Today there are some theories, particularly in Indigenous communities, that she was deliberately murdered by the English, for some unspecified political reason, before she could leave. While this isn’t entirely impossible, I will say that it seems more likely that Pocahontas, like many Native Americans, was simply very vulnerable to the deadly European diseases she encountered (and that were later deliberately weaponised against Indigenous people) and for which her immune system wasn’t prepared. The English would have found her much more useful if she had returned alive to show the proof of a successful Christian marriage and to tell of the wondrous and all-powerful country she had seen. They needed her to convince the Powhatan that the best thing to do would be to surrender to the English and give them as much land and food as possible. On the other hand, of course, they may have realised that Pocahontas was astute enough to have seen that the English were not to be trusted. We will never know for sure how much her death impacted relations between the colonisers and the Powhatan.

There is only one known portrait of Pocahontas in English garb, as Rebecca Rolfe. It shows her in a high hat and holding a feather fan, and she has strong, dark eyes that look directly at you. We only have this European Pocahontas as evidence of her real likeness. There are no other pictures, except for later, romantic interpretations in which she flings herself, decked out in 19th-century ‘Indian’ costume, in front of John Smith to save him from braining. It’s this later image, of a selfless but slightly wild young girl, hopelessly in love with her coloniser, that has been passed down through the ages.

Pocahontas’s life is, sadly, still representative of the plight of Native women in modern America. In the US and Canada, Indigenous women continue to be the most at risk from murder, violence and discrimination. Pocahontas’s experiences are not part of ancient history, but a very real issue facing women today. According to the organisation Native Hope:

The numbers speak for themselves: Native American women make up a significant portion of the missing and murdered cases. Not only is the murder rate ten times higher than the national average for women living on reservations but murder is the third leading cause of death [my emphasis] for Native women.

Yet as much as Pocahontas was a victim of the early days of a genocidal system, I believe it’s important to remember the courage and strength she possessed in the bleakest of circumstances. The tangible historical evidence we have suggests that Pocahontas was not a simple-minded child, or an ‘Indian princess’ awed by the white man’s power, but a courageous diplomat, scholar and linguist who sacrificed her personal freedom to try to improve the lives of her loved ones. She showed us that both women and children have a place in deciding the fates of their people, and she deserves to be remembered as an intelligent, curious and passionate member of her community.

BERNADETTE DEVLIN

How to Get Into Politics

Do you remember those mean playground games kids had in primary school? Like the one where someone would say ‘If your hand is as big as your face, it means you have cancer’ and then you’d put your hand up to check and they’d biff it into your nose? Well, for some reason when I was about eight or nine, the funnest game the boys in my primary school were playing was to go round asking the girls if they were prostitutes. Haha. Classic nine-year-old banter. I assume they’d just found out what the word meant and were eager to watch the girls squirm with embarrassment.

Anyway, that same week, I had, coincidentally, become interested in my religious background for the first time, and I had just asked my dad what religion we were. ‘Well,’ he said, thinking, ‘your mum was raised Catholic, and I was raised Protestant, but we’re not really religious. I suppose if you’re anything, you’re Protestant, because you go to Church of Scotland with school.’ OK! Now I knew! I was a Protestant!

So when Jamie McKay came up to me at break time and asked ‘Hey Eleanor, are you a prostitute?’ I was delighted and ready with the answer. ‘Yes! I am, actually!’ I informed him confidently. Jamie’s mouth dropped. He had not expected me to answer in the affirmative, and with so much enthusiasm. ‘You’re … you’re a prostitute?’ he asked, not quite believing what was happening. ‘Well, sort of.’ I conceded. ‘My dad’s a Prostitute. At least, he was raised a Prostitute. But my mum’s Catholic.’

Growing up, I had a vague idea that my mum’s side of the family was Catholic, and that originally they had come from Ireland. About 10 per cent of the UK population can claim at least one Irish grandparent, and that rises to as much as 25 per cent in Scotland, where Irish immigration, especially to the West Coast, was high. I got the sense that my mum didn’t want to talk about her family history very much. It was, I realised, often too painful and upsetting to go back over the reasons why her family moved, and why their lives on the West Coast of Scotland could also be hard. What exactly had happened to make my English mother so reluctant to discuss the past?

Where to start. The Troubles are a daunting topic for any discussion, especially if you’re a Twitter comedian who’s only real skill is being able to eat all the chocolate off a Twix without touching the caramel. If you are Scottish or Irish, you’ll know how strange it feels when you first have to explain sectarianism to anyone else. ‘So, er, this group wears orange, and they have these clubs called lodges, and they support this football team. And this group wears green and supports this team. And if you support this team, it means you believe in a free Ireland. And if you support this team, it means you love the royal family. And hate the pope. And every year they have a march through the city and play drums and flutes like it’s Waterloo in 1815 … and there’s some bars you shouldn’t go into. Especially if you’re wearing a T-shirt in a certain colour. And if anyone asks your football team, say Partick Thistle …’

Northern Ireland’s turbulent history has impacted generations of people in Britain and Ireland. One of those people was civil rights campaigner and MP Bernadette Devlin. Bernadette, the youngest-ever woman to be elected to Parliament at the time, spent her youth fighting for socialism and civil rights in 20th-century Northern Ireland. Her bravery and determination during the Troubles made a great impact on her community and on British and Irish history.

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Bernadette Devlin was born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, in 1947, to a Catholic family. Her father, a republican, brought her up on Irish folk stories and history, and her mother’s religious beliefs helped shape her socialist convictions. In fact, were it not for her mother’s Christianity, ‘poverty would have made me bitter rather than a socialist’.

Bernadette’s conviction that socialism was the answer to the widespread poverty in her country was strengthened by the hardships her family endured, especially after her father died when she was just nine. What’s more, Bernadette was to come of age during one of the bloodiest episodes in Irish history. For anyone born in the 1940s, Northern Ireland would have been a hard place to grow up. In fact, Bernadette herself was all too aware of the unusual nature of her environment: ‘Should an anthropologist … be looking for a bizarre society to study, I suggest he comes to Ulster. It’s one of Europe’s oddest countries.’

The period between the Partition of Ireland in 1921 (at which point the majority of Ireland became independent from Britain, while the six northern counties remained part of the UK, becoming Northern Ireland) and the start of the Troubles in the late 1960s is often regarded as a relatively peaceful and uneventful period. In fact, tensions were brewing throughout these decades. As well as suffering through the Great Depression of the 1930s, Northern Ireland’s capital, Belfast, had been pulverised by Nazi bombings during the war. Protestants and Catholics did not live side by side – they were already divided by neighbourhoods and religious lines, and riots and violence between the two were not uncommon. In her book The Price of My Soul, Bernadette recalled how frequently the noise of sirens and the flare of search lights interrupted her sleep as a child in the 1950s. On top of this, Catholics faced legal discrimination. Government and police positions were filled almost entirely by Protestants, and many Catholics shared unsanitary and cramped housing conditions.

Modelling themselves on the American civil rights movement, Catholics began to fight back in the 1960s. In an interview with The Blindboy Podcast in 2018, Bernadette recalls how other movements around the world inspired her:

There was big things that happened: there was the anti-war movement around Vietnam because you could see the horror of that war. There was all the black civil rights movement … You know, you began to say there are people in Alabama looking for votes. We don’t have any! There are people in Alabama who aren’t allowed to walk in their own streets. Neither are we!

The main slogan of the civil rights movement was ‘One Man, One Vote’, which protested the fact that in Northern Ireland, you had to be a homeowner in order to vote. This meant that the majority of the Catholic population, who did not own their homes, could not vote. The system ensured that a Protestant majority was almost always in government and other powerful positions. In the 2018 interview, Bernadette explained the situation in Northern Ireland at the time:

Imagine if every landlord in Belfast had as many votes as he had housing units. That’s the way it was in ’68. So if you had a slum landlord who let old buildings out and tenements and rooms then he was paying the rates on the whole building and he got a vote for every housing unit … But the political impact was on the Catholic population because the Unionists didn’t want to build public housing, social housing, for Catholics because that would then give them votes because then they wouldn’t vote for the Unionists.

In 1965, Bernadette enrolled at Queen’s University Belfast, to study psychology. During her time at Queen’s, she became active in a number of socialist and republican groups, and took part in several demonstrations and protests against the government. Bernadette was not simply a republican for the sake of it; in fact, she was as dismissive of the Irish state as she was of Ulster. Bernadette felt that after Partition, not enough had been done in the Republic to restructure and improve Ireland. Instead, the Catholic Church had been allowed to fill the vacuum left by the British. Bernadette’s aim, primarily, was to unite the Irish working classes, Protestant and Catholic, against poverty, injustice and violence. Unfortunately, many people failed to understand the nuances of her cause.

Her first march was with the Civil Rights Association, in 1968, from Coalisland to Dungannon. Bernadette, always passionate about politics, realised during the march that for some, it was a complete revelation: ‘I do believe that for the first time it dawned on people that Northern Ireland was a series of Protestant and Catholic ghettos.’

Bernadette also faced personal violence for the first time on these marches. She recalls an incident in Derry where she was attacked by someone wielding a plank stuck with nails: ‘My hand reached my face before the wood did, and immediately two nails went into the back of my hand … through my fingers I could see legs standing round me: about six people were busily involved in trying to beat me into the ground.’

Unfortunately, the civil rights movement was subsumed by violence, fuelled by sectarian leaders such as the Reverend Ian Paisley, who preached that Catholics had only themselves to blame for their conditions. The unrest soon became known as ‘the Troubles’.

The majority of the fighting during the Troubles was carried out between various terrorist groups from either side, as well as the British army and the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary). Years of violence culminated in peace talks in the 1990s, but not before thousands had died and many more had been traumatised. For those of us for whom sectarianism is a nasty but very rare issue, it’s hard to imagine how it must have been to grow up in a war zone that lasted decades. Bombs were a constant threat, as were shootings. Profiling was constant, as were stop and searches by the army. Family members could be kidnapped or murdered. It was all too easy to fall out with anyone you disagreed with, and tensions ran high. The areas that belonged to the ‘other side’ were no-go zones, Catholics and Protestants didn’t mix, and it was rare for them to marry or strike up friendships. The British Army was often hostile, unpleasant, or simply a pain in the arse, what with the logistics of operating everyday tasks in a war zone. In short, every aspect of life was affected in some way by the Troubles, for everyone who lived through it. Bernadette’s determination to change her country’s fate was a brave choice.

Bernadette continued to march and campaign for civil rights, and in the late 1960s, she and other organisers saw an opportunity to take the fight to Parliament, where they could directly address the government. In 1969, Bernadette became the youngest woman ever elected to Parliament, when, shortly before her 22nd birthday, she won the Mid Ulster seat in a by-election. She held that record until 2015, when Mhairi Black was elected for the SNP. Unlike members of Sinn Féin, who do not sit in Westminster out of principle, Bernadette vowed to take up her seat. This was a big deal: Bernadette, a 22-year-old working-class woman, would be putting herself right in the firing line of those responsible for making policies about her community. In her maiden speech, she defiantly stated her belief that neither the British government nor the Unionists had ordinary people’s interests at heart:

A man who is alien to the ordinary working Irish people cannot understand them, and I therefore respectfully suggest that the honourable gentleman has no understanding of my people, because Catholics and Protestants are the ordinary people, the oppressed people from whom I come and whom I represent … It is impossible then for us to state quite fairly where we stand. The Unionist policy has always been to divide the people who are dependent upon them. The question of voting is tied up mainly with the question of housing, and this is something which the House has failed to understand.

Typically, the media’s reaction to her appointment was patronising and sexist. Being a young woman in the 1960s, they called her the ‘Swinging MP’ and asked lots of questions about ‘The real Bernadette’ as if she were a Strictly contestant in Hello! magazine. The novelty soon wore off, as she remarked in her book: ‘The press in general had decided I’m not the sort of well-mannered person the Victorians used to produce, and it would be better to say as little about me as possible.’

Bernadette found the world of Westminster baffling, unproductive and full of phoneys. Here, I can directly relate to her: I actually worked briefly as an aide for MP Chris Law in Westminster in 2015. Somehow, as a supporter of Scottish Independence and a comedian who needed a day job, I wound up doing two months of work speech-writing, researching and doing admin in Parliament, all while hoping that I’d be able to get time off to pursue my real passion: doing ten-minute open spots at the Camden Comedy Club.

I naively assumed that it would be similar to Holyrood, a modern European parliament with enough space and facilities for all its members (we’ll leave aside debates on how aesthetically pleasing it is). It was not. Westminster is a beautiful, crumbling mess: it’s not big enough, it’s literally falling down, and it continues to uphold mad systems and bureaucracies that waste time and money. For example, when I worked there, if an MP wanted to table a motion (i.e. submit a question to Parliament), you still had to physically take a piece of paper all the way through the building to the relevant office. You couldn’t simply email it. I spent more time getting lost than getting anything done. And it gets weirder. Many of the rules of parliament haven’t changed in hundreds of years. MPs are still legally allowed to bring a sword into the building (Chris brought a plastic axe). High points of my time there include how cheap all the food was, getting a free tour of Westminster hall, and once making Mhairi Black a coffee: she seemed to enjoy it.

Never one to twiddle her thumbs, Bernadette continued to campaign alongside her constituents, and in 1969 she was a participant in the famed Battle of the Bogside. She was re-elected in 1970, following time in prison for participating in the Battle, as an independent socialist. By this point Bernadette seemed, in the eyes of the government at least, to be attracting trouble. As she recalled in 2018, Lord Scarman, who chaired enquiries into Northern Irish riots, once said: ‘I appreciate, Ms Devlin, that you’re not the cause of the problems but you have a remarkable propensity for being there when they occur.’

The civil rights campaign decided that Bernadette should be packed off to the US to garner support (and, more importantly, money) from Irish Americans. Once in the US (where Bernadette, used to dressing in jeans and shirts, had to borrow more suitable clothing from a friend), she was shunted to various meetings, conferences and photo ops. She soon became disillusioned with the Irish Americans, many of whom were conservatives whose hypocrisy disgusted her. As she recalled in 2018:

[They] sounded like Orangemen sounded. They really did. The things they said about black people were things that the Loyalists said about Catholics – didn’t want to work, black people are poor because they don’t want to work, they’re poor because they’re stupid. They’re poor because they’re lazy. And I’d say: No, that’s – hang on a minute – that’s what people say about us, but we know that we’re not and you know that we’re not. So what makes you think that’s true about them?

During her trip, Bernadette was famously given the keys to New York City by its mayor. She wasn’t interested. When she returned to Ireland, she and fellow campaigner Eamonn McCann had an idea:

Eamonn said: Why don’t we send them back to the people who need them? … So we gave them back. We gave them to the Panthers … people passed no remarks but I never, ever got the keys to any more cities after that.

But Bernadette’s life as a civil rights campaigner was about to change. On 30 January 1972, Bernadette took part in what was meant to be a peaceful march in Derry, protesting the internment of suspected Irish nationalists. The British government, who had banned the march, then ordered troops to open fire on the unarmed crowd. Bernadette, who was supposed to be making a speech, was a witness to the chaos that followed:

I’m standing there, on a lorry looking down like I’m looking down on these people, and somewhere here, I only heard it in my left ear, but somewhere there was one single shot. And I heard it … And I get down under the lorry but I still have the mic in my hand, it all happens that quick. I’m holding a microphone and I’m saying: Don’t run. Do run. And then I’m under the lorry myself and I’m sitting underneath the wheel of it … I still have the mic and I see people who don’t seemed to have moved away down there and I’m saying: Don’t be afraid but crawl away! And then I realise: They can’t. They can’t.

That day, 30 January, would become known as Bloody Sunday, a black mark in history that saw the shooting of 26 unarmed civilians in Bogside, Derry, all of them Catholics. Some 14 of the victims would die. Five of those killed were shot in the back, indicating that they were fleeing at the time. After two investigations, the soldiers in question were cleared of any wrongdoing. It would take until 2010 for those involved to be named and formally accused of murder, although to date no one has been charged.

On 31 January, a day after Bloody Sunday, an emergency debate was called in Parliament. Sitting in the House of Commons, traumatised, fresh from a tragedy where she had witnessed her fellow citizens gunned down around her, Bernadette heard the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, say that the soldiers had been firing in self-defence against IRA gunmen – an out-and-out lie.

Again and again, Bernadette was refused a chance to refute this by the speaker. When she was finally allowed to speak, her role as the only eyewitness present was dismissed.

I was the only person in that Parliament who had been an eyewitness to what happened. So after the two people spoke I should have been called to speak … and I said: ‘Well, is it in order, since I am not allowed to speak, is it in order for the minister to get up in this House, unchallenged, and tell lies?’ Well, then that was a terrible thing to do. The Speaker said …‘The Honourable Lady for Mid-Ulster must not call a member of Parliament a liar. It’s not allowed. And you must withdraw that.’ So I said, because I didn’t want to get thrown out, I said: ‘I will withdraw the word but not the sentiment, but I assert my right as the only eyewitness, my right to speak.’ That’s what did it. The Speaker of the House said: ‘The Honourable Lady for Mid-Ulster has no rights other than those given to her by the Speaker.’

Realising that there was only one way to put any fear into a man deliberating and casually lying about the massacre of innocent civilians, Bernadette then crossed the floor of the House, grabbed Reginald Maudling by the scruff of the neck, and slapped him. In fact, as she recalled in 2018, her initial intention had been to pick up the mace, but she quickly realised it was too heavy.

I walked down the steps and what it was in my head to do was lift their mace and throw it on the floor but when I got that length I realised I couldn’t lift that … I said: I’ll tell you what – I can’t lift that but what I can do I can put the fear of God in you for about thirty seconds. And that’s when I hit him … [and then] the Tory, Biggs-Davison, who was sitting near the minister … he jumped up and he hit me – yeah – you didn’t read that bit.

Hilariously, Hansard, the public record keepers of Parliament, records the incident merely as ‘Miss Devlin rose—[Interruption.]’

The point of Parliament, obviously, is that it allows us to civilly debate issues without resorting to violence. However, as anyone who has tuned in to more than 15 seconds of Prime Minister’s Questions can attest, the House of Commons is more likely to incite violence than prevent it, so full is it of filibustering, smears, jeering and outright lies. Find me one person who hasn’t pictured giving a member of the cabinet a slap and I’ll give you a tenner.

The papers naturally spent much more time lambasting Bernadette than investigating Bloody Sunday. A working-class Catholic Irish woman had slapped an upper-class Englishman – it went against the very order of nature. Whereas Irish people were murdered every day. Bernadette was asked by the press exactly what she thought she’d achieved: ‘What I achieved was simply delivering to the Home Secretary a proletarian protest at the fact that he was responsible for the murder of 13 people.’ Later, she would add, ‘I’m just sorry I didn’t get him by the throat.’

As I watch the footage of her now, surrounded by male reporters, I am in awe of her composure. She speaks calmly and simply about what she did, in the face of accusations of being emotional, unladylike and more. She was committed to peaceful protest, but she had been pushed to the brink by the actions of her government.

There is something incredibly right wing about the idea of manners. The right are more likely to get very, very upset over, say, a slap from a traumatised woman, or a protester being rude to an MP’s child, or climate change activists holding up traffic, than over, for example, 14 murdered civilians, the poverty of millions of Britons, or the greed currently dooming our world to catastrophe.

Outrage is their weapon of choice – if you are impolite, you have invalidated your argument. Any display of emotion, invalidation. Any loss of temper, invalidation. This is also a tactic that’s been used to dismiss women for centuries – we are too emotional, too upset, too shrill for our opinions to count. But only the heartless can remain so cold in the face of injustice.

The reason the right makes such a fuss over these things is to maintain the status quo – they don’t want us to think we’re allowed to get too angry about anything. And they’re scared we will. Every year on Martin Luther King Day, the worst kind of right-wingers implore us to listen to King’s peaceful philosophy. Not because they agree with it, but rather because they’re scared of the alternative. King didn’t use peace because he was a lovely, polite man who just wanted everyone to have a hug. He used it with the full knowledge that his cause would and could turn violent very easily if it wanted. Peace had power because it was a choice. But make no mistake, he and every other peace leader in history was ready to use stronger tactics the second they were called for. Bernadette hadn’t been allowed to speak. She had been literally silenced. And when you silence people, you call upon them to take other actions. No one is to blame for her slap but the government themselves.

What little passion Bernadette had for parliament waned quickly after that, and she spent more and more time on the front lines instead. Bernadette has continued throughout her life to campaign for human rights, peace and justice in her home country. She was particularly prominent in the H-Block campaign, which supported hunger-striking political prisoners such as Bobby Sands. In 1981, probably as a response to this, she and her husband were shot at their home by Loyalist terrorists, proving that she was still getting under the skin of those who wanted her to keep quiet. I can’t imagine the terror of that night.

In the Blindboy interview, Bernadette recalls in terrifying detail what happened that night:

What really woke me up was the sound of the sledgehammer hitting the front door which bounced the door open and the first gunshots were fired then through the hall door at Michael who was trying to hold it shut and then they came – Smallwoods stood and held my two daughters, Róisín and Deirdre, in their bed at gunpoint. Róisín was the older of the two. She got the younger one into her bed with her and covered her head up so that she couldn’t see what was happening … they came on in and Michael tried to draw them into the kitchen and he was shot there. And then Watson came into the bedroom and I had just lifted Fintan, who was the youngest, and I realised when I lifted him: If I’m shot he’ll be shot, too. So then I had to throw him … and it was just as I threw the child away that Watson came in very close behind me … and I can still remember in slow-motion each place I was hit and how I fell back.

Luckily, despite horrific injuries, no one was killed. Despite this attempt on her life, Bernadette refused to be cowed by Loyalist Paramiltaries. She continued to campaign and fight for the rights of ordinary working people.

Today, Bernadette works with a non-profit that aids migrant workers and the other vulnerable communities in Northern Ireland. Bernadette shows us what all politicians should be. Somebody who is entrenched in their community, and who marches side by side with them, and continues to work with the people they represented, long after their parliamentary career has ended. Bernadette’s actions were those of a brave woman pushed to the limit by the unjust system she was forced to operate within. Bernadette’s attitudes to civil rights, her determination to achieve a better Ireland for both Catholics and Protestants, shows us that only by fighting for the rights of everyone can we free ourselves. As Bernadette said herself: ‘My function in life is not to be a politician in Parliament. It is to get something done.’

10 Quotes from Historical Women For Any Situation

1. When people need a reality check. Abolitionist and activist Sojourner Truth, allegedly, when asked if she could read: ‘Oh honey, I can’t read little things like letters. I read big things like men.’

2. When you’re being slut-shamed. Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II, on being mistaken for the Duchess of Portsmouth and called ‘A Catholic whore’: ‘Pray good people be civil, I am the Protestant whore.’

3. When you just want to say what everyone’s thinking. Writer Dorothy Parker, on being told that notoriously quiet and dull President Calvin Coolidge was dead ‘How could they tell?’

4. When people are too much. Jane Austen, on being nice: ‘I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.’

5. When you’re off the booze. Nancy Astor: ‘One reason I don’t drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time.’

6. When you’re cultivating confidence. Poet and critic Edith Sitwell: ‘I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty … But I am too busy thinking about myself.’

7. When you’re being mansplained. Queen Victoria, on being patronised by the prime minister: ‘He speaks to me as if I was a public meeting.’

8. When you’ve had enough of this shit. Eartha Kitt, on being asked if she would compromise for a man: ‘Ahahahahahahahahaha … stupid … ahahahah!’

9. When you’re trying to let him down gently. Christina of Denmark, on being asked to marry Henry VIII: ‘If I had two heads, one would be at the King of England’s disposal.’

10. When people are straight-up rude. Actress and novelist Ilka Chase, on being asked who really wrote her book: ‘I’m so glad you liked it, who read it to you?’

MARY SEACOLE

How to Be an Entrepreneur

The term ‘girlboss’ can be traced back roughly to Sophia Amoruso’s book of the same name, published in 2014. At the time, the concept of the girlboss was hailed as an empowering step forward, a fresh chapter in 21st-century feminism. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the phrase as ‘an ambitious and successful woman (especially a businesswoman or entrepreneur)’.

Women could now redefine themselves proudly as everything sexism hated: powerful, commanding, in charge. Soon it was everywhere. All we had to do, the girlboss ethos insisted, was everything that men did – but in a pastel suit and eyeliner. Tulisa of N-Dubz fame even released an album and fragrance called ‘The Female Boss’, which to me sounds more like a phrase you might overhear in a video game nerd conversation:

‘Did you defeat the final level boss?’

‘The Elden Beast?’

‘No, the Female Boss.’

‘Ah, yes, Tulisa.’

But in the years that followed, it became clear that ‘girlbossing’ was no more than a new way to repackage the patriarchy and sell it back to us. It wasn’t about empowering us at all – it meant playing the toxic male CEO game and pretending that it was for the good of other women. The word began to attract disdain and mockery: ‘Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss’. The Anti-Capitalist movement, Black Lives Matter and world events made us question whether being a corporation mogul was something we actually wanted to aspire to. Figures like Elizabeth Holmes, the fraudulent CEO of Theranos who used a deep voice and a black turtleneck to convince everyone she had created a wonder machine that could test for hundreds of illnesses with a single drop of blood, was, arguably, a dictionary definition girlboss. The backlash was so bad that, on Twitter, Amoruso asked people to desist: ‘Please stop using the word girlboss. Thank you.’ Even the definition was changing. On the Urban Dictionary website, the top girlboss entry currently reads: ‘Girlboss (verb) to make something or someone appear as a feminist idol or inspiration for profit, despite the numerous flaws of the person.’

According to this definition, I suppose the ultimate girlboss is probably Margaret Thatcher. Make of that what you will.

What’s more, it was all too easy for women to see that for the vast majority of us, being a girlboss was not a reality. According to CEO Magazine, in 2023 just 5.4 per cent of all CEOs globally were women. It just feels silly to pretend. Beyoncé’s ‘Run the World’ is an absolute tune, but every woman singing it knows it’s not true. We do not run the world. We’re not even close. More appropriate lyrics might be:

‘Who run the world?’

‘Billionaires!’

‘Who run the world?’

‘Mostly white billionaires!’

‘Who run the world?’

‘Mostly white, mostly male, mostly over 60 billionaires!’

Not as catchy though, I suppose.

What might a woman who really has taken control of her own business and narrative look like? I think it might look a bit like 19th-century ‘doctress’ Mary Seacole, who nursed soldiers during the Crimean War. Mary, in my opinion, was an early master of self-promotion and canny business strategy. She knew how to create a brand. How do I know that? Because she wrote an autobiography, of course! And she did so back in the days when the people writing non-fiction were heroic national figures, and not just reality TV stars or semi-popular Twitter comedians.

Mary Seacole has become more and more of a recognisable name in the last few years, as the UK opens the history books and asks itself the question: ‘Are we the baddies?’ When I came across Mary’s story, I felt that we, as a society, were really starting to open up to exploring the history of non-white Britons. The Little Englander mindset would have us believe that until the Empire Windrush docked in Essex in 1948, not a single person of colour lived in Britain. This is so laughably wrong that I don’t even know where to start – suffice to say, what IS true is that the story of these Britons has long been swept under the rug. The truth is, you could have met a non-white Briton in medieval Britain, Tudor England, Georgian Britain and Victorian Britain and it would not have been a particularly remarkable sight. Certainly not in London, one of the world’s busiest port cities, and for the past few hundred years one of the centres of an empire that, at one time, covered a quarter of the globe.

Mary Seacole was born in Jamaica in 1805, as Mary Jane Grant, to a Scottish father and a Black Jamaican mother who was skilled with medicine and had thus earned the title of ‘doctress’’. As a ‘comedienne’ I can attest that people giving your job title a girly suffix feels neither powerful nor complimentary, but there we go. ‘Doctress’ was as good as it got. It’s probably worth pointing out now that Mary never called herself a ‘nurse’, nor did she claim to be as skilled or educated as Florence Nightingale, something that would crop up in later discourse about Mary.

Mary inherited her mother’s interest in medicine and began to practise from an early age. She travelled all over the Caribbean and South America, and then eventually made her way to the UK where she could learn more about European medicine.

In 1853, the Crimean War broke out. Without going full Wikipedia on you, in essence the Crimean War was a conflict between Russia and a European alliance of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia. Basically, the Russian tsar wanted to get hold of land closer to the Mediterranean, and the UK and its pals were worried it might ruin their lovely trade routes to the Middle East. In essence, a mix of religion, imperialism and revenge all played into why this whole thing happened, but luckily none of this is crucial to telling Mary’s story. What’s important for us is to understand the daily lives of the soldiers.

In a sense, the Crimean War could be seen as the first really modern war – it featured factory-produced weapons, telegraph communications and armoured ships. And with greater technology comes greater loss of life. An estimated half a million people died, with the UK losing about 21,000 men. Most crucially, 16,000 of them did not die on the battlefield but died of disease. That’s three-quarters of all casualties, an astounding number. Disease has long been a big player in war, and the Crimean conflict proved just how deadly catching an illness could be. Typhus, cholera and malaria were the big killers, but it would have been all too easy to catch any number of diseases while awaiting treatment. Dysentery, fever, gangrene, diarrhoea, flu, and sepsis were just some of the runners-up.

I have never been to hospital. I mean, OK, I’ve been to hospital – apparently I was born in one – but (fingers triple-crossed) I’ve never actually been in a life-threatening situation. So far, my brushes with death have been incredibly minor and middle class. I went to the doctor recently for a check because I cut myself on the metal mesh of my Le Creuset cafetière. That’s as dangerous as it’s got. Instead of life-threatening injuries I’m mostly plagued by chronic irritations like asthma, eczema, IBS and mental health problems. So I’m not sure I can even begin to imagine what the Crimean hospitals were like.

It’s hard to overestimate how gross these Crimean ‘wards’ were. Modern understandings of how germs and bacteria spread had not yet been introduced to the mid-Victorian battle hospital. Dirty sheets wouldn’t be changed for weeks on end. The floor would be littered with rubbish, straw, bodily fluids and blood. If you were an injured soldier, you would lie there, dirty and miserable, your wounds uncleaned, while the dead and the dying lay around you, and the stench of them filled your nostrils. And the surroundings weren’t much better. Take this sassily acerbic eyewitness account of Balaklava during the war:

If anybody should ever wish to erect a ‘Model Balaklava’ in England, I will tell him the ingredients necessary. Take a village of ruined houses and hovels in the extremest state of all imaginable dirt; allow the rain to pour into and outside them, until the whole place is a swamp of filth ancle-deep[sic]; catch about, on an average, 1000 sick Turks with the plague, and cram them into the houses indiscriminately; kill about 100 a day and bury them so as to be scarcely covered with earth, leaving them to rot at leisure – taking care to keep up the supply. On to one part of the beach drive all the exhausted bât ponies, dying bullocks, and worn-out camels, and leave them to die of starvation. They will generally do so in about 3 days, when they will begin to rot, and smell accordingly. Collect together for the water of the harbour all the offal of the animals slaughtered for the use of the occupants of above 100 ships, to say nothing of the inhabitants of the town—which, together with the occasional floating human body, whole or in parts, and the driftwood of the wrecks, pretty well covers the water—and stew them all up together in a narrow harbour, and you will have a tolerable imitation of the real essence of Balaklava.

In short, it was bad. Florence Nightingale’s arrival in 1854 heralded some much needed change. Her revolutionary nursing techniques made hygiene and cleanliness the number-one priority, and the death toll began to drop. Also, little bit of trivia for you: Florence’s lantern wasn’t actually the open-flame glass one that’s often pictured, it was more like a paper Chinese lantern. Isn’t learning fun!?

Mary wasn’t immediately drawn to the Crimea. In fact she was too busy speculating in the gold market at the time, which is a pretty cool way to spend your time, in my opinion. Eventually, after hearing more about it, Mary decided to approach the British government to offer her services. Incredibly, however, the British government refused her request to go to Crimea as a nurse. Although she had invaluable experiences in the field (especially with the specific diseases running rampant), she was not officially trained, and moreover she was considered too old (as we all know, any good nurse needs a youthful complexion). On top of that, of course, was her race. While never identifying herself specifically as Black (in any case the language used for mixed-race people in those days wouldn’t necessarily have aligned with how those groups identify today) it’s unlikely that it wasn’t taken into account. Time and again she was told that all positions had been filled. Yet somehow, they were still desperate for staff. Similarly, today’s NHS is staffed by huge numbers of immigrants who are often discriminated against despite the vital work they do. In 2023, nearly 20 per cent were from overseas. In 2021, 22.4 per cent of all NHS England staff were from a BME background.

Mary’s book, fabulously titled, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, gives us a fascinating insight into her life and the challenges she faced. It is also the first ever autobiography written by a Black British woman. In her book she laments her lack of initial success:

My funds, although they might, carefully husbanded, carry me over the three thousand miles, and land me at Balaclava, would not support me there long; while to persuade the public that an unknown Creole woman would be useful to their army before Sebastopol was too improbable an achievement to be thought of for an instant … Doubts and suspicions arose in my heart for the first and last time, thank Heaven. Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs? Tears streamed down my foolish cheeks, as I stood in the fast thinning streets.

But Mary’s strong-mindedness, as she herself called it, would not be beaten. Like any good entrepreneur, she instead funded her own trip with help from a business partner, Thomas Day; they would set up and run a supply store and hotel. She printed up her own business cards, and, knowing her help would be invaluable, set off for Crimea in January 1854.

Arriving in Crimea, Mary finally met the famed Florence Nightingale, who found her a bed for the night after a hard journey. The two women seemed to get on well enough, but Nightingale doesn’t seem to have respected Mary’s position, writing to her brother-in-law that she did not want her nurses associated with her: ‘I had the greatest difficulty in repelling Mrs Seacole’s advances, and in preventing association between her and my nurses (absolutely out of the question!) … Anyone who employs Mrs Seacole will introduce much kindness – also much drunkenness and improper conduct.’

Mary, it seemed, with her lack of formal training and her brown complexion, was the antithesis of what Florence Nightingale wanted nursing to represent.

Again and again Mary encounters similar instances of racism, only to shrug them off with the sort of ‘Oh well’ that many non-white people have had to employ throughout their lives in order to spare themselves from further hassle. She seems to be forgiving of British attitudes, implying that she knew she would have been much better treated in Jamaica and South America:

Now, I am not for a single instant going to blame the authorities who would not listen to the offer of a motherly yellow woman to go to the Crimea and nurse her ‘sons’ there, suffering from cholera, diarrhoea, and a host of lesser ills. In my country, where people know our use, it would have been different; but here it was natural enough – although I had references, and other voices spoke for me – that they should laugh, good-naturedly enough, at my offer.

We can only speculate that Mary knew it would be a better use of her time and energy to ignore these instances and plough on with her work.

Mary established the British Hotel on the battlefront near Kadikoi, treating many wounded and sick soldiers and nursing them back to health. The word ‘hotel’ conjures pictures of room service and feather pillows. In reality, Mary’s hotel was built partly from driftwood, corrugated iron and other scrap. It was a bare-bones operation, but badly needed, and she was forced to charge her guests in order to keep the hotel running. Her hotel was much closer to the fighting than Nightingale’s, and more than once she attended to soldiers on the battlefield, under gunfire. She provided food for officers and soldiers, comforted the dying, and even provided refreshments to battlefield spectators. (Yes, that was a thing. Apparently, during the American Civil War people used to have picnics while watching the fighting which … did not go well.) Mary was more than a nurse, she was a sort of Swiss army knife of battlefield care, providing food, drink, medicine and supplies to those who needed them. Perhaps most crucially of all, she was well liked by the soldiers, who saw her as a motherly figure. The comfort she clearly brought to the young men, thousands of miles from home and in need of a reassuring presence like hers, was just as invaluable as any medicinal skills she possessed. She spoke fondly of the care she administered to the dying:

I think the fancy happily caused by the touch of a woman’s hand soothed his dying hour; for I do not fancy he could have lived to reach Scutari. I never knew it for certain, but I always felt sure that he would never wake from that dream of home in this world.

Mary returned to Britain a hero lauded in the popular press of the day. Florence was the bigger name, but articles and notices about Mary’s exploits also appeared. Where Florence Nightingale was the ‘Lady with the Lamp’, she was ‘The Creole with the Tea Mug’, which is … I guess, thanks? I mean, that’s them trying NOT to be racist, so imagine the alternatives. It’s clearly meant with affection though – for the British, there is perhaps no one more welcome than a tea bringer. Unfortunately, Mary had little money left to support herself. Can you imagine a NURSE being applauded for their efforts but not paid properly? Unimaginable today …

Mary was forced to write begging letters and make public pleas for money. Luckily, the men she had nursed started a letter-writing campaign, as well as a fundraising gala. This included the ‘Seacole Fund Grand Military Festival’, at the Royal Surrey Gardens, in July 1857. Florence Nightingale is recorded as having made a donation to the funding.

As well as facing dire financial straits on her return, Mary was met with criticism for her work. Why, for example, did she charge for her establishment, instead of giving her care for free? Was she out to make money from these poor, dying men? This is a fairly typical and still prevalent example of the ways in which poorer women, and especially women of colour, are made to feel bad simply for asking to be paid the money they are owed. Mary’s circumstances were such that she did not have endless funds (or the British government’s support) for such ventures, and yet, somehow, that’s her fault. Or perhaps she should have done her work for free, and died of starvation in the process? In Victorian Britain, the Christian virtues of meekness, charity and selflessness were lauded as the ideal traits in a woman, and anyone going against the grain faced consequences. Even today we consider money dirty, and we also consider women to have a natural duty of care. Women should want to look after people purely because it’s what they are built to do. It’s the reason the government can avoid paying nurses, firefighters, ambulance workers or anyone with a duty of care a proper wage – aren’t they just doing it to be nice? Personally, I can’t think of anything more terrifying than being treated by a nurse who has no financial incentive to keep you alive. The types of people who are uncomfortable talking about money are the same ones who generally don’t need to worry about it, and also seem to be the people in charge of paying all my invoices on time. As a freelancer, you learn pretty quickly that if you want to be paid, you have to talk about money. Mary understood this too, which is not to say that she didn’t also love her job. It was her passion:

I am not ashamed to confess for the gratification is, after all, a selfish one that I love to be of service to those who need a woman’s help. And wherever the need arises on whatever distant shore I ask no greater or higher privilege than to minister to it.

Mary continued to work as a nurse for the rest of her life. When she died in 1881, aged 75, her estate was valued at several thousand pounds, a respectable amount for a supposedly lowly Caribbean doctress.

One of the fallouts from Mary’s new-found recognition, and the recent efforts being made to rediscover non-white history, is that it has been used as a way to pit her against Florence Nightingale, as if Florence had somehow been a villain this whole time, and Mary the hero of the story. From everything I have read, it seems that those most determined to establish a rivalry between the two women are the supporters of Nightingale, whom nurse and academic Natalie Stake-Doucet describes as having been the subject of dozens of hagiographies. For example, historian and Nightingale Society founder Lynn McDonald’s History Today essay ‘Nursing’s Bitter Rivalry’ claims that Mary is ‘Slated to replace Florence Nightingale as the true “heroine” of the Crimean War’, as if this is an official position you are elected to. There is no evidence that Florence or Mary considered themselves ‘rivals’ during their lifetimes, or that the statue of Mary outside St Thomas’ Hospital, which is more associated with Florence, would somehow erase Florence’s work there. Is it so bad if a black nurse working at St Thomas’ sees the statue of Mary and is in some way inspired or motivated by history? Florence already has a statue in the much more prominent location of Waterloo Place in Westminster. She also has several more statues, a bust, a stained-glass window, three museums, a pub, a play, several films and a nursing pledge named after her.

What is perhaps more insidious is the way in which McDonald suggests that Mary, being only one-quarter black, has been somehow misremembered as a Black woman. McDonald points out that Mary ‘made a point of distancing herself from the “lazy Creole” image’ but never questions why she might have felt the need to do so. Denying mixed-race people their dual heritage is a rather unfair way (in my opinion) to imply that ‘you are not Black enough or white enough to claim to be a part of either community’.

So much of the discussion also fails to recognise Florence’s role in the racist and colonial empire, in which she saw Indigenous households and cultures as breeding grounds for barbarianism and unhygienic conditions. Writing for Nursing blog Nursing Clio, Stake-Doucet says:

She believed Indigenous lives were a small price to pay for the expansion of the British Empire. Although some of her contemporaries recognized the brutality of the colonial system, Nightingale believed imposing British culture to be necessary. Anything else, she believed, ‘would be simply preserving their barbarism for the sake of preserving their lives.’

I’m not looking for any beef here. I do not wish to sanctify Mary any more than I wish to make Florence a villain. I am looking to examine real historical women, trying to do jobs and lead lives in a time when both of those things were difficult. In the same way that we’ve seen the press try to take down Meghan Markle by comparing her to Kate Middleton, we are constantly asked to choose between the two. I just want to highlight how ridiculous the argument is that Seacole does not deserve the same recognition as Nightingale because she was not a trained nurse, since the reason she wasn’t a trained nurse was that NO ONE WOULD LET HER.

Perhaps one of the most surprising things about Mary is that, while she was alive, she was just as famous and popular as Florence Nightingale. Both women were much more business-savvy than history gives them credit for. But we’ve been taught to need women’s stories to be simpler than this. We always need a tidy narrative. The truth is that when real women actually do ‘girlboss’, society doesn’t want to know. Women like Mary Seacole who were able to run their own businesses, make their own money and control their own lives didn’t and still don’t fit into our patriarchal narrative. What I found interesting in reading Mary’s autobiography was the number of times that, despite her achievements, she felt the need to apologise for them, or provide corroborating statements. Confidence in a woman was one of the deadliest sins, and we re-enforce that attitude today every time we start an email with ‘Just wanted to check in, hope that’s OK’.

Mary and Florence were similar in many more ways than they were different. Oh, except that Florence had a pet owl, which, let’s face it, is fucking cool. The problem with being a woman in history is that historians (mostly male and mostly white for the majority of the discipline’s existence) choose who we do or don’t remember. For them, there was no need to highlight more than one nurse, especially if she wasn’t white, wealthy or establishment-backed. It’s only now, in the light of deeper and better research, that more people from more diverse backgrounds are finally being given access to information about their own history, and we get to discover incredible people such as Mary. Mary understood the need for self-promotion and self-publicity, but she also managed to combine these canny business skills with a genuine passion for the people she treated. I think if she were alive today, Mary would still be a nurse, probably in charge of a big, noisy ward, right in the middle of the action. But I like to think that she might also have her own line of branded teabags.

10 Women I Would Not Want to Pick a Fight With

1. The Soviet Night Witches The Second World War’s only female combat unit, the Night Witches were an aviation regiment and included Irina Sebrova, who flew over 1,000 missions, destroying Nazi bridges, factories and weapons stores.

2. Boudica, Queen of the Iceni An ancient British queen who fought and defeated the Romans at Colchester, St Albans and London. According to Tacitus, she killed up to 70,000 Romans and other enemies before taking her own life to avoid capture.

3. General Nzinga Mbande Queen of what would become 17th-century Angola, Nzinga fought the Portuguese over a 30-year period and personally led her troops into battle.

4. Bonnie Parker A 1930s American outlaw famous for her partnership with Clyde Barrow, Bonnie’s devil-may-care attitude was perhaps more dangerous than her aim – she only shot one person, herself, in the foot.

5. Gallus Mag A 19th-century New York bar bouncer, allegedly over 6 foot tall, who has become part of New York’s crime folklore. According to legend she enjoyed chewing off offending customers ears and pickling them in jars.

6. Zheng Yi Sao A 19th-century Chinese pirate leader, she commanded up to 60,000 pirates at the height of her power, and had a fleet of over 400 junks.

7. Hannie Schaft and Freddie and Truus OverSteegen Dutch resistance fighters who, as teenage girls, assassinated Nazis and collaborators.

8. Belawadi Mallamma A 17th-century Indian queen, she was the first recorded woman in history to train a female army that numbered about 5,000. She was proficient in javelin, archery and fencing.

9. Charlotte Corday French Revolutionary who stabbed revolutionary writer Jean-Paul Marat to death while he was taking a bath.

10. Violet Gibson An Anglo-Irish socialite who attempted to assassinate Mussolini in 1926. Luckily for him, she only managed to graze his nose and was deported to the UK without charge.

ADA LOVELACE

How to See Beauty in Everything

Look, can I be honest? I’m SCARED to write this chapter. I do not know anything about computer programming. I’m not a techy person, per se. I have an instinctive fear that if I touch something, I will immediately break it. Perhaps because that happens to me, a lot. When I started doing comedy I didn’t even like touching the mic stand in case it somehow exploded in my hands. I once tried to turn on a light and the switch simply fell off the wall. I still don’t like using Mac computers because I’m pretty confident they’re harvesting my soul for something. And I’m still using a 2007 edition of Word.

I was not born to be a tech whizz, but Ada Lovelace was. Ada Lovelace is often called the ‘world’s first computer programmer’, despite the fact that she lived long before computers in their modern incarnation had even been conceived of. So what exactly did Ada do that warranted so much attention?

I’m not entirely confident that I’ll understand everything that’s happening in this chapter. But I also know that female scientists have made vital contributions to history. So here we go.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was born on 10 December 1815, in London. Ada Lovelace was a classic nepo baby of the time – as well as being born into the aristocracy, her dad was George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron. You might know Byron as a Romantic poet, but his status in Regency Britain was more akin to that of a 1970s rock star. It was a bit like if your dad was Steven Tyler. Which, for Liv Tyler, he is. Nowadays we remember Byron as a bit of a cad and a party boi, but his life was a bit more scandalous than that. As well as having a laudanum addiction and gambling problems, Byron was a melancholic binge eater who owned a pet bear. His favourite pastime was seducing anything that moved, and he also allegedly had an affair with his own half-sister. Yikes. In fact, Ada was named Augusta after her aunt. Double yikes. After an acrimonious split with her mother (over the sister thing, which, let’s face it, is totally fair), Byron left England to travel Europe and pursue poetry, anarchy, and to make sure he was in the room when Mary Shelley thought up Frankenstein. He died when Ada was only eight years old, and so she never knew him. For the rest of her life, however, she would be ‘Byron’s daughter’, a label she had to live with whether she liked it or not.

Lady Byron provided a more promising environment for Ada’s development than her father probably would have done. Despite her terrible taste in men, Lady Byron was very intelligent, and her own parents had encouraged her learning by hiring a Cambridge tutor. She was especially gifted in maths and sciences, but had an equal passion for philosophy, which would serve her well in later years when she became active in the abolitionist movement. For women of the time, such an academic upbringing was unusual, even for the very wealthiest. In fact, it was thought that the richer you were, the less you’d need to know, since your job would consist mostly of sitting round the house and occasionally pushing out an heir.

Ada was raised in the comfort and luxury of the upper classes, and her mother was determined that her daughter would become a scholar like herself, and not an incest-poet, like her father. Lady Byron seemed convinced that maths was the answer to saving her daughter from the Byron family’s lunatic reputation. Luckily, Ada thrived in an academic environment. For reasons I can’t really fathom, Ada was really into maths and science, and insisted on being tutored in them from an early age. This sounds horrible, in my opinion, and just writing about it is giving me flashbacks to Mrs Stewart’s classroom in 2005 and being caught on the spot not knowing what a decimal fraction is. Well, I still don’t know AND I have to write about maths now, so thanks a lot, Mrs Stewart. (No but seriously, thanks. I did get a 1 in Standard Grade and it was entirely down to you.)

In 1833, aged 18, Ada met polymath and inventor Charles Babbage at a party. She was instantly fascinated by his ideas and work, and they struck up a friendly correspondence. As well as being a man with a name like that of a fairy-tale character, Charles Babbage, born in 1791, was a brilliant mathematician, and he soon realised that Ada was equally brilliant. As Ada got older, her mother, sensing her interest in maths, hired more advanced tutors. In 1838, when Ada was 23, mathematician Augustus de Morgan began tutoring her every fortnight, explaining ever more complex ideas to his young student. As well as being a talented mathematician and logician, Augustus was also into spiritualism, which I was devastated to discover, as I could have written a whole SAGA on that.

De Morgan was instantly impressed with the young Ada’s abilities. He later wrote to her mother:

I feel bound to tell you that the power of thinking on these matters which Lady L[ovelace] has always shewn from the beginning of my correspondence with her, has been something so utterly out of the common way for any beginner, man or woman, that this power must be duly considered by her friends, with reference to the question whether they should urge or check her obvious determination to try not only to reach but to get beyond, the present bounds of knowledge.

He went on to say that, had she been a male university student, he would have predicted a very impressive career ahead of her. Obviously, since she was a girl, he didn’t predict shit. He also went to lengths to add that he had NOT told Ada any of this. Clearly, he thought ladies should be modest.

De Morgan’s advanced teaching gave Ada the confidence to write to Babbage to offer her help with his current project, the Analytical Engine.

The Analytical Engine didn’t actually exist. To build it would require a lot of time and money. It was actually the second machine Babbage had designed – the first being the Difference Engine. The Difference Engine was not a computer, because it didn’t compute – it could only add and subtract. Basically, Babbage wanted to create something that would help people who only had their fingers to count on do bigger sums – using a system called logarithms. Babbage did manage to build a bit of the machine, which he would cart round to social events to demonstrate, a bit like the guy who always just happens to have his guitar with him. ‘Oh, the Difference Engine? Well, I was gonna drop it home on the way back from work, but I didn’t have time, OK, since you’re here, I’ll give you a little demo. Do you know “Wonderwall”?’

But Charles just didn’t have the time, money or craftsmen he needed to create the Difference Engine in full, and so it remained merely an idea until the 1990s, when someone finally got the funding to build it. You can see a working Difference Engine on YouTube, or even visit one at the London Science Museum. Working the machine involves someone cranking a handle and turning various columns of gears. I watched three separate videos on it and that’s as much as I can tell you. But it looks cool.

Charles’s second idea was for something bigger, better and even harder to make a reality. The Analytical Engine would have hundreds more columns than the Difference Engine, and was capable of multiplying and dividing as well. According to twobithistory.org: ‘The Difference Engine could tabulate a polynomial, but the Analytical Engine would be able to calculate, for example, the coefficients of the polynomial expansion of another expression.’ So there you go. Now you know. Polythingys and that. Yeah.

Unsurprisingly, no one in the UK wanted to fund Babbage and his incredibly expensive calculator. And that’s where the story would have ended, had it not been for Ada’s growing enthusiasm for the project.

In 1842, Ada was asked to translate a paper about the Analytical Engine from French into English. Ada was, like many young ladies of the day, fluent in French. But she didn’t simply translate what was already there – she added to it. She made her own notes and explained parts that the original paper had left out. And so, in the literal footnotes of history, Ada Lovelace wrote what many consider to be the first ever computer program. In ‘Note A’, she demonstrates how, in the future, machines like this one might not just make calculations, but produce music, a far greater foresight than anyone else of the period had had. In ‘Note G’ Ada begins a discourse that is still running today – are these machines really capable of ‘thought’? Ada didn’t think so, though computer pioneer Alan Turing would later disagree. It’s a shame that these two brilliant minds never had the chance to interact. I’d watch that sitcom. Ada and Alan, BBC2, Fridays at 8.

Ada’s program was designed as a way of calculating Bernoulli numbers. Bernoulli numbers are – and I’m really doing my best here – named after Jacob Bernoulli, a Swiss mathematician who discovered a way to calculate, oh God … look, you enter some numbers to find out the calculation of some other numbers, OK? It was very clever and I don’t understand it. Writing this chapter has made me feel like I’m in the Numberwang sketch. I don’t understand anything that’s happening but I’m smiling bravely. What you do need to know is that it was a complex program and the first of its kind.

Whether or not Ada really was the world’s first computer programmer is hotly debated, and you won’t find a laywoman like me trying to make an argument either way. Babbage did write, but never publish, his own programs. What is definitely true is that Ada had an advanced understanding of computer programming far beyond most people of her day. What’s more, she seems to have thought about the future application of her program, which considered other uses, like composing, in a way that Babbage and other mathematicians hadn’t. And what gave Ada the ability to dream in this way, we might argue, was her natural inherited talent for poetry and imagination. One of the most interesting aspects of Ada’s work is how she combines art and science, and Babbage himself referred to her as the ‘Enchantress of Numbers’. Ada wasn’t just clever; she thought outside the box in a way that made her truly unique. Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, a champion of Ada in the modern science community, is excited by the possibility of what Ada could have achieved with her almost precognitive powers:

We will never know what Ada could have become. Another Mary Somerville, famous Victorian expositor of science? A Steve-Jobs-like figure who would lead the vision of the Analytical Engine? Or an Alan Turing, understanding the abstract idea of universal computation? That Ada touched what would become a defining intellectual idea of our time was good fortune. Babbage did not know what he had; Ada started to see glimpses and successfully described them.

By 1842, when she wrote this program, she had already been married for seven years, to the Earl of Lovelace, and had three children, two of whom, Byron and Ralph Gordon, she named after her father. Her health had never been good, and it’s likely that bearing three children wouldn’t have helped. She was twice seriously ill – once with measles, and then after the birth of her daughter, with cholera. She spent a lot of her time in pain, and the surviving daguerreotype of her shows a thin-lipped, frail woman very unlike the colourful pastel portrait that became famous. As well as poor health, her life was starting to play out like a particularly silly episode of Dallas. In 1841 she found out she had a sister, Medora, from Byron’s incestuous relationship. She attempted to befriend Medora, but it seems that she was rather a drain on Ada’s energy and resources. Ada died, of uterine cancer, on 27 November 1852, aged 36. She was the same age her father had been at his death, and she was buried beside him. Despite her mother’s best intentions, Ada had inherited her father’s creative spirit along with her mother’s intellectual skill.

Ada’s early death was a tragic blow to the science community. Writer Jane Perrella, in her blog post ‘Ada Lovelace: Not a Feminist, but a Rallying Cry’, is quick to remind us that Ada’s poor health and gender were barriers that never allowed her to realise her greatest ambitions: ‘Ada’s own time did not allow her to fulfill her potential as a programmer and mathematician; even Charles Babbage, her mentor and collaborator, implied in his publication of her Notes that it was not in fact Ada’s work, but rather his.’

For many years, Ada’s contributions to programming lay forgotten, and her role as Byron’s daughter was the only thing that marked her out in history books. As the role of women in STEM continues to grow, however, more and more attention has been paid to Ada and her life. As early as the mid 1970s, a computing language (don’t ask me, I don’t know) was named after her, and in 2022 a new statue of Ada was unveiled at Ergon House in Westminster. There is even an ultra-realistic (and female) robot, Ai-Da, named in her honour, although I’m not sure this is such an honour. It might be nice if men spent less time designing sexy Ada robots and more time helping women thrive in tech.

Today, women are still in the minority in STEM (Stinky Terminally Evil Maths). In a 2013 Guardian article, writer Laura Bates notes that Ada is still held up today as a pioneer of female mathematicians who defied the odds and gender norms of her time. But not enough has changed in the past 200 years:

According to e-skills UK, women make up just 17% of the UK IT and telecoms workforce. And the number of women in the most senior research positions in Stem in the UK also stands at the paltry figure of 17%, according to a 2012 European Commission study. Even worse, according to a 2012 Wise campaign report only 13% of Stem jobs in the UK are occupied by women.

I would be surprised if the figures have improved much in the past decade.

It’s true that Ada’s gender and position as a society lady made it difficult for her ideas to be taken very seriously during her lifetime. But I think, if anything, her stereotypically feminine attributes, poetic imagination and creative ability, helped make her the unique ‘enchantress’ she was; someone who conceived of ideas that nobody else had had, not even in their wildest dreams. Ada teaches us that we do not have to choose between the beauty of art and the beauty of science; we can find reason and meaning in both.

10 Roman Women I Wouldn’t Want to Bump Into in a Dark Alley

1.&2. Cornelia, and Sergia (active 331 BC) According to historian Livy, these two matriarchs were the ringleaders of a Roman poisoning gang responsible for the deaths of many Roman officials. Or it might have been a plague outbreak … either way, I’m not inviting them to tea.

3. Livia (59 BC – AD 29) Livia was the wife of Emperor Augustus and had a penchant for poisoning. She wanted her son on the throne so allegedly killed his stepbrothers and her own husband. He might have had it coming though – he forced her to divorce her first husband days after she’d given birth so Augustus could marry her himself.

4. Livilla (13 BC – 31 AD) Livilla was the sister of Emperor Claudius. She had a messy affair with a man named Sejanus, who helped her kill her husband, Drusus, so they could marry. When things didn’t quite work out as planned, Livilla was either murdered, took her own life, or deliberately starved to death. Either way, it wasn’t a happy ending.

5. Agrippina (AD 15 – AD 59) Agrippina, famously, was the mother of Nero, and came from the same family as Livilla – it’s a bit of a weird family. Her brother was Caligula of horse-loving fame, and her second husband was … her own uncle, Claudius. Gross. Then she had him murdered so that Nero could have the throne.

6. Poppaea Sabina (30 AD – 65 AD) Keeping it in the family, Poppaea was Nero’s girlfriend and she hated Agrippina. She persuaded Nero to have his mum assassinated, but she survived and Nero had to have her murdered in a less subtle way. This family doesn’t scream healthy, does it?

7. Locusta (died AD 69) Locusta (originally from Gaul, according to historian Tacitus) was a poisoner who supplied many prominent Romans looking to bump each other off, including Agrippina and Nero. Met a grisly end after Nero was overthrown.

8. Faustina (c. 130 AD – 175 AD) Faustina was the wife of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was her cousin (better than uncle, I guess??). Faustina seemed to have a bit of a Nero vibe: she enjoyed ordering executions and supposedly had an affair with her own son-in-law, Verus. Some say she had Verus poisoned, although it’s not entirely clear how he died.

9. Marcia (died AD 193) Mistress of Emperor Commodus, Marcia was responsible for his death, along with some other plotters. Actually, Marcia tried to murder him twice, but he forgave her the first time and took her as his mistress. Eventually, Marcia found out that Commodus, who wasn’t a very nice guy, was going to have her executed, so she got in first and poisoned him.

10. Eusebia (died AD 360) Wife of Constantius II, Eusebia was intelligent, educated, beautiful and kind … but she also poisoned a love rival to make her miscarry, and then had the baby murdered. Yikes.

STORMÉ DELARVERIE

How to Be Yourself

Drag has been in the news a lot over the last few years, for some pretty weird reasons. Like many British children, I grew up being entertained by drag over the years, an art form we put to good use every Christmas with our pantomimes. For those who are not familiar, a pantomime is a traditional play with its roots in music hall, always performed at Christmas, and usually based on a popular folk tale or fairy story like Cinderella, Mother Goose, or, if you’re English, Dick Whittington. Most towns in the UK will have one, with the bigger productions like the Hammersmith Apollo or London Palladium featuring actual proper thespians such as Simon Callow. Local ones will include local celebs such as radio DJs, reality TV stars, dance groups and soap actors. The Dame is a comical motherly figure, always played by a man and usually in incredibly sparkly, elaborately designed and silly outfits. Not only is Damehood considered a traditional part of panto, most comic actors in UK history cemented their status by taking on the mantle, including Rikki Fulton, Paul O’Grady and even Sir Ian McKellen. Traditionally, the Principal Boy (main character) would have been played by a young woman in tights and boots (which would have been sexy and subversive), but today it’s normally a young man (again, usually the local heartthrob footballer or Love Island star). You should also expect a villain so camp that they’re basically a tent, lots of innuendo, an exhausting amount of audience interaction and sweet-throwing, and plenty of jokes slagging off the local rival town.

I love the panto. It’s bright, silly fun and most importantly it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Now, I’m not suggesting that the UK is a bastion of human rights because once a year Christopher Biggins puts on lipstick. The panto has its own problems, including historically racist and ableist themes, but you can’t deny that, for Brits, seeing a man dress up as a woman (and vice versa) isn’t as subversive as it might be in other places. In fact, it’s downright traditional, and it’s fair to say that a lot of British people have fond and nostalgic memories of panto and of their local Dame.

Drag and drag performances are very much staples of British theatre, and have been for hundreds of years. It’s a fun way of holding up a mirror to gender roles and asking exactly why they exist, and doing so in a setting that children and adults alike can enjoy. It’s hard to imagine what Tennessee lawmakers would say if they sat down to watch Jack and the Beanstalk at the New Wimbledon Theatre.

In Tennessee in the USA, a bill making it illegal for drag artists to perform in the presence of minors is currently being challenged. Laws like this explicitly push the idea that drag is an implicitly sexual type of performance. It is placed in the same legal category as lap dancing and stripping. Which is ironic when you remember that, in order to be a drag queen, you actually have to put a lot of clothes ON. And I defy anyone, even his partner, to look at Biggins as Widow Twankey and say ‘Phwoar, yeah. I would.’

It’s frightening to see how quickly the southern US has become gripped by a moral panic about trans people, queer culture and drag. But this, of course, is nothing new. How did we get here? Drag today was pioneered by brave performers in the 20th century who began to push back at the gender barriers put up by mainstream culture. And one of the leading lights in that pushback was drag king, activist and LGBT icon Stormé DeLarverie. If you know anything at all about Stonewall, you may know the legend that a black butch lesbian threw the first brick. While there’s no way to verify it, many people think that that lesbian was Stormé. This is her story.

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Stormé DeLarverie was born in 1920, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Stormé’s birth was the result of a relationship between her rich white father and his Black servant, something that was not uncommon at the time. Due to these circumstances, she did not have a birth certificate, but chose to celebrate her birthday on Christmas Eve, 24 December. She was fostered by Harvey and Rose Hublitz, who moved to Nebraska while she was still a young child. Nebraska at the time had many challenges for non-white people – many Black southerners had migrated to such places looking for better lives. Lynching, riots and other hate crimes were not uncommon. This is at a point in history where even other white people upset white people – Germans, Italians and Greeks also faced discrimination in Nebraska in the early 20th century. Stormé was subjected to discrimination from both the Black and white communities. In a sign of how she had been denied acceptance on both sides, she referred to herself as a ‘Negro with a white face’. As well as this, she grew up to be a tall, androgynous figure. Not only could she pass as both Black and white, she was often also mistaken for male. From her early childhood, Stormé was well versed in the performing of a flowing, changing identity.

She was also born at a pivotal moment in queer history – the 1920s saw, for the first time, the roles of women begin to change in terms of femininity. While being femme was still the norm, more and more women began to play with ideas around gender – cutting their hair, wearing trousers, smoking, playing sports. In short, doing all the things that men had been allowed to do for centuries. Queer people, although still not fully accepted in the mainstream, were tentatively beginning to live their lives more openly.

As a teen, Stormé began to perform at school concerts as a singer. It was also at this time that she realised she was attracted to women, something which must have been daunting in 1940s America. She left school in 1942, the same year that her father died, and began to perform as ‘Stormy Dale’, a cabaret and jazz singer. Professional shots from the time show Stormé (who always pronounced her name as ‘Stormy’) as a tall, elegant, feminine person with a classic 1940s ‘do and flowing chiffon dress. She spent the next few years travelling and performing in bands and on radio.

Being queer in mid-20th-century America was difficult. Very few clubs or bars catered to a gay clientele, and those that did were subjected to constant raids. Being publicly affectionate with a partner could put you at risk of assault, or even arrest. Despite the progress made in the 1920s, after the Second World War the traditional gender roles were once again firmly re-established. Everyone was keen to forget the war (and any progress towards gender equality that had been made during it) and to revert to an idealised version of Western living. Women who had worked in factories and on the home front were to go home, put on a dress and curlers, and embody the perfect housewife. Men returning from war had to man up, not talk about their experiences or show any emotions, put on a suit and go to the office. It was illegal to dress in gender non-conforming clothes (the informal rule was that you should have at least three pieces of gender-conforming clothing to avoid arrest) and there were even tabs kept on gay people and their activities by the FBI. Being identified as gay could see you thrown out of bars, clubs and restaurants. Homosexuality was categorised as a mental illness in the early 1950s, and there was even a fear that this ‘illness’ could somehow spread. In 1953, an executive order banning gay people from federal jobs was signed by President Eisenhower. Being homosexual was not fully legalised throughout the States until 2003, and, consequently, attitudes towards gay people were very slow to change.

But change was happening. The 1960s counterculture, the civil rights movement and anti-war protests all helped to bolster protests for gay rights as well. In 1966, for example, a ‘sip in’ was organised in New York (inspired by civil rights sit-ins) as a way for gay patrons to protest their treatment by bars and clubs. Activists like Black lesbian Ernestine Eckstein, who had also worked in the civil rights movement, were able to use their knowledge and experience to strengthen the movement further. Consequently, the US authorities became more than a little paranoid that these movements were communist-driven, anarchist coups, designed to overturn the government. I swear, the Americans are more scared of communists than I am of creepy crawlies. I would MUCH rather find Karl Marx in my bath than a daddy-long-legs.

Stormé appears to have married and divorced in the 1950s, although this period of her life is less well documented. Like many of the women in this book, she seemed to have chopped and changed her history when it suited her, either to protect herself or to craft the image that she wanted to present to the world. She may have lived in several different states. She may have worked riding horses in the circus, as a female bouncer at nightclubs, and as a bodyguard. She had a partner, Diana, who died in 1969, and so we can say at least that it was during the 1950s that she seems to have started to live on her own terms. She began dressing in more masculine clothes, claiming that she was twice stopped by the police for being in drag when wearing a dress. By 1955 she had also begun to perform as a male impersonator (her preferred term) at the Jewel Box, an integrated drag and cabaret show.

When I began learning Stormé’s story, I was much less familiar with the history of drag kings than that of drag queens. Today, drag queens are mainstream entertainment, appearing on huge shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and racking up millions of followers on social media. Drag kings are also becoming more visible to non-queer audiences, but they remain less well known in mainstream culture. I spoke to Chesca Forristal, a non-binary writer and performer whose alter ego is Christian Adore, a dandyish drag king, about what drew them to drag, in order to help me understand what might have appealed to Stormé about the art form. Chesca tells me that they first encountered drag during university, at a time when they were questioning their gender identity as a non-binary person. They attended a drag king show at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, where, ‘I saw these people inhabiting their bodies in ways I hadn’t seen before, and inhabiting masculinity and femininity in ways that … didn’t match up to what they had to be … what society said they had to be.’

As well as working as a screenwriter, Chesca now performs improv (or ‘dragprov’ as they call it) alongside drag queen Eaton Messe, often accompanied by a live pianist. I asked Chesca to describe Christian Adore to me:

Christian Adore, he’s a little bit like a sparkly Disney prince, he feels on the level of emotion that a Disney main protagonist feels. He’s got that main character ‘I want’ energy … I think he’s the most optimistic part of me. He sees beauty in everything, he’s very excitable about everything, he falls in love at the drop of a hat. He feels like a friend at this point.

Like me, Chesca is a big history nerd, with a particular fascination with 1600s masculinity and figures like Charles II, the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Rochester. You might call them ‘rakes’; flamboyant men who exuded masculine energy while playing with more ‘feminine’, romantic styles; high heels, make-up, long flowing curls, glittering clothes. Chesca realised that they too could play with gender through performance and costume: ‘The reason I love being a man on stage and playing with drag, even though I’m non-binary, I’m interested in drag as a tool of optimism. Let’s not look at what masculinity is … let’s look at what masculinity could be and explode it.’

Stormé must also have realised that performance could help her discover who she really was, and the Jewel Box provided her with the opportunity to find out.

The Jewel Box, established in 1939, toured America primarily as a drag (or female impersonator) revue. The acts who worked with Stormé remember her as a kind and warm presence. A programme dating from roughly the late 1950s shows an array of very glamorous acts, all with surprisingly unexotic names; ‘Mr Lynn Carter’, ‘Mr Dale Roberts’; none of them seem to have drag names as we would know them yet. There’s a reason for this. By using their real names, the acts were protected from any police accusation that they were deliberately hiding their male identities. (Also, I’ve been thinking about it, and my drag king name would definitely be Hieronymus Gosh.)

Stormé was the only female act on the bill, and her statuesque physique, smartly turned out in a tux, made her a perfect fit for the club MC. Photos from this programme show a smiling Stormé with a drawn-on moustache, adjusting the cuffs of her tux or posing in a Zoot suit. A page from the Jewel Box programme describes Stormé thus:

[She] has appeared as a female vocalist with many name bands. Audiences would not believe she was a girl due to her deep baritone voice. It took the producers of the Jewel Box Revue to convince her that she should work as a male impersonator. Now Stormé says ‘I did it and I’m glad.’

I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be the only woman in an all-male drag queen line-up. I can only say that having shared a dressing room with a drag queen, the mess is HORRIFIC. Being the only woman must have been difficult at times. Despite Stormé having largely fond memories of the Jewel Box and her fellow performers, Chesca tells me that, sadly, sexism and misogyny still carry across the barriers of gender even in drag shows. As the only drag king on many bills, Chesca feels that all too often kings are not ‘being read’, as they put it, or included in the playful ribbing that comes with drag. Inherently, as female-bodied, they are still viewed as somehow weaker, someone who can’t take a joke. ‘We’ve got to be nice to the woman because she can’t take it’ is how Chesca feels they are sometimes perceived by queens. Even my own experiences of stand-up comedy contain elements of ‘dragging up’; I know plenty of female performers, myself included, who prefer wearing trousers on stage in order to be taken seriously, and many’s the time I’ve been introduced as the ‘lovely’ Eleanor Morton, as opposed to ‘the hilarious’. (I am lovely though). On top of this, as Chesca explains, the pay gap has followed women across the gender binary. Drag queens are paid significantly more because of their elevated status due to shows like Drag Race. RuPaul has, controversially, not yet allowed drag kings to grace the Drag Race stage.

In 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a gay club in Greenwich Village, New York City, became the poster child of the modern LGBT rights movement when the so-called Stonewall ‘Riots’ erupted on 28 June that year. Like other LGBT clubs, it was regularly raided, and its clientele arrested. If you were dressed in non-gender-conforming clothes, you would be taken to the toilets to have your gender confirmed – a humiliating process in itself – and detained if you were found to be ‘lying’. What’s more, like many gay clubs at the time, it was run by the mafia, who would regularly blackmail its richer customers or the police.

Early on 28 June, undercover police officers conducted a raid on the bar, locking the doors, and demanding patron IDs. Perhaps these patrons had had enough of being abused by the police, perhaps confusion led to commotion. For whatever reason, customers that morning decided they would not be subjected to police abuse. They refused to comply. Those not arrested began to gather outside, watching and waiting, shouting and throwing things at the police wagon.

Today, it’s impossible to say for certain if the butch lesbian who threw the first punch was indeed Stormé. Some people have determined that it wasn’t. But the common description of the woman – butch, tall, deep-voiced and white-passing – would certainly have fit her. Stormé claims to have hit a police officer after he had hit her first, resulting in a bleeding eye, as she was being handcuffed and escorted away. After she hit back, more fighting broke out, and soon the violence spread through the crowd. By now hundreds of people had gathered, as had the riot police. Some had barricaded themselves inside the building, which was soon set on fire. Over the next 48 or so hours, thousands more people arrived to participate, driven by a sense of anger and injustice. The protests would continue for another week or so. Journalist and eyewitness Howard Smith described the moment (using the language of the time) when he realised that the scuffle had turned into something bigger:

By now the mind’s eye has forgotten the character of the mob; the sound filtering in doesn’t suggest dancing faggots any more. It sounds like a powerful rage bent on vendetta. That way why Pine’s singling out the guy I knew later to be Dan Van Ronk was important. The little force of detectives was beginning to feel fear, and Pine’s action clinched their morale again.

Often referred to as a ‘riot’, many who participated in Stonewall feel that that label undermines the power and necessity of the action taken that day: it was a rebellion, a revolution, a protest, not simply a drunken fist fight. In Stormé’s own words: ‘It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience – it wasn’t no damn riot.’

In the decades following, the events at Stonewall became somewhat whitewashed – gay, cis white men took the lead in representing what had happened that day. In fact, Stonewall, while having a largely white, male customer base, was nonetheless composed of queer people from every walk of life: gay, lesbian, bisexual, Black, white, biracial, trans and non-binary, asexual and gender-non-conforming, as well as the homeless queer youth who congregated around the area.

Whether or not Stormé did throw the first punch at Stonewall is perhaps less important than her ongoing presence in New York’s LGBT community at the time and in the following decades. She worked primarily as a security guard and bouncer up until 2005, and also took the time to look out for younger queer people, especially women, who were vulnerable to attack. According to an article by Rebecca Batley for the online news magazine LGBTQ Nation, Greenwich lesbians still ask themselves ‘What would Stormé do?’ when confronted with adversity. She died, aged 93, on 24 May 2014. Stormé’s life is still shrouded in mystery in many ways, much of it only verified by Stormé herself. But what can be said is that, regardless of her role in Stonewall, Stormé was a pioneer of the LGBT movement, of drag performing and of living proudly.

I wonder what Stormé would make of today’s changing attitudes to drag, the threat it faces in the US, and the way it’s evolved over the years. As Christian Adore demonstrates, drag kings are stepping out of Storme’s traditionally masculine mould and starting to experiment with what masculinity itself means. For decades, drag kings inhabited a domineering, alpha persona, but as Chesca says: ‘Drag kings are questioning what other kinds of masculinity you can put on a stage, and whether it just needs to be toxic masculinity.’

Stormé could have chosen a safer route and stayed as cabaret singer Stormy Dale. But she knew that this femme presentation was not her whole identity. Becoming drag king Stormé allowed her to finally explore who she really was. I asked Chesca why drag is so important to them as a performer. They said: ‘For me drag isn’t a parody of gender, it’s a hammer to gender, it smashes everything into a billion glittery pieces and you look at what’s there and you play with it.’

Stormé’s life not only teaches us to embrace our true identities, it highlights the value of nurturing a community that does the same. She recognised the importance of protecting younger members of her community, of showing up for them, and of being a strong presence in their lives. Stormé was many things: an activist, a singer, a comedian, a drag king, a friend, a daughter, a partner and a guardian angel. But perhaps only Stormé herself can truly express who she was. In a documentary interview, when asked to introduce herself, she says:

Who’s Stormé? I’m a human being that’s survived. I’ve helped other people survive … what you see is what you get.’

10 Famous Muses Who Were Also Artists

1. Lizzie Siddal (1829–1862) Lizzie was famously a pre-Raphaelite model who appeared in many of the group’s most famous paintings, including Millais’ Ophelia, where she nearly died after catching pneumonia from posing in a cold bath. Lizzie’s working-class background meant that she didn’t have access to the training of other artists of the time, but she produced many paintings before her young death, and was also a poet.

2. Camille Claudel (1864–1943) Camille was a French sculptor who worked alongside Auguste Rodin. Her work was often considered too sensuous for its time, but sells for millions today. She died after a long struggle with mental illness.

3. Dora Maar (1907–1997) Dora was a photographer, painter and poet who is usually associated with Pablo Picasso (boo, hiss). Dora’s photography often focused on everyday sights and people, cataloguing 20th-century life. She was also a Surrealist who played with form.

4. Françoise Gilot (1921–2023) Another muse of Picasso (BOO, HISS!), Françoise had an eight-decade career in which she worked as a painter, writer and ceramicist. Works like Adam Forcing Eve to Eat an Apple (1946) examined the complex relationships between men and women.

5. Emilie Louise Flöge (1874–1952) Emilie was an Austrian fashion designer and a model for many of Gustav Klimt’s most iconic works. Her modern designs included monochrome patterns and billowing sleeves. Much of her work was destroyed during the Second World War.

6. Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) Berthe was a French Impressionist painter who was married to Eugène Manet, brother of Édouard. She often depicted people in the midst of everyday routines, such as in La Coiffure (1894), and suffered, as many female artists do, from reviews that focused heavily on the ‘femininity’ of her work.

7. Victorine Meurent (1884–1927) Victorine was a favourite model of Édouard Manet, and famously appeared nude in several of his most famous works. As an artist, Victorine preferred to focus on the smaller details of the face and hands, although many of her paintings have now been lost.

8. Alice Ernestine Prin (1901–1953) A true child of the jazz age, Alice was also known as Kiki de Montparnasse and modelled for paintings, sculptures and photographs, including for Man Ray, the Surrealist. Much of her work consisted of sketches and cartoons of those she saw around her.

9. Patti Smith (b. 1946) Possibly one of history’s most famous muses, Patti is an American poet, artist and musician who was both muse and artist in many of the professional and personal relationships in her life, especially with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

10. Lee Miller (1907–1977) An American photographer and fashion model, Lee’s photojournalism captured some of the most crucial points of the Second World War, including the Blitz, the liberation of Paris and the Nazi concentration camps. She was a muse of Man Ray (him again!) and was famously photographed (while exploring defeated Munich) in Hitler’s bath.

EMILY DAVISON

How to Fight For Your Rights

We love protests in the UK. Absolutely love them. Can’t get enough. Mmm, delicious protest, love it. Oh, wait, sorry. I should have added a bit. We love protest in the UK … as long as it happened 100 years ago.

Do you remember when those Just Stop Oil protesters threw some soup over a glass pane that covered one of Van Gogh’s (many) sunflowers paintings? Do you remember how mad everyone got? They got really mad. I mean, REALLY mad. Raging. Hopping. Boiling. The collective rage was so red-hot it could have warmed that soup to the perfect, tongue-scalding temperature.

Protesting is currently a hot-button issue because recent Home Secretaries seem to love cracking down on our right to do it. Over the last few years Just Stop Oil, a climate protest group, have successfully disrupted everything from traffic to West End musicals, and everyone seems furious about it. Nobody watching Les Mis seemed to appreciate how appropriate it was for a protest, but that’s theatre crowds for you. I mean, I guess they could have disrupted Starlight Express, except neither audience member would have cared.

Along with the rage about modern protest comes the collective notion that somehow protests have got more protest-y, in a bad way. According to Gary from Lewisham, a man I just made up but who definitely exists, protests used to be really nice, everyone had a great time and no one got hurt or upset. And anyway, they were fine because they were about important stuff like voting and the 40-hour work week.

Nowadays, protesters are all grubby oiks/crusty trust-fund kids/hippie pensioners or whatever other demographic personally disgusts you, and they’re rude, uncouth and addicted to Gorilla Glue. They protest only to deliberately annoy hard-working citizens, something which never used to happen.

Well, this might shock you (though if you’ve got this far in the book, I suspect it won’t) but protest has always been violent, ugly and completely necessary.

The suffragist movement began in the 19th century, as workers in the UK gained more rights and laws were changed to protect them. Despite decades of debate and a rise in male voters, starting with the Reform Act of 1832, women were still being denied the franchise. The early suffragists, such as Millicent Fawcett, were pacifists, and engaged in public speaking, handing out leaflets and lobbying. The Illustrated London News, reporting on a Hyde Park demonstration in 1913, captured their philosophy with the quote ‘Better is Wisdom than Weapons of War’. They concentrated a great deal of effort on attracting the attention of Parliament, but although the movement was growing, there was no mass mobilisation of women eager to champion the cause.

By the dawn of the 20th century, dissatisfaction was growing in the suffragist movement. Many women felt that it simply wasn’t working. Harsher tactics were needed. In 1903, the suffragette movement was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst, as the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union). Their motto was ‘deeds, not words’ emphasising the fact that they felt that talking was getting them nowhere. They had a point – more men had been granted the vote in the Third Franchise Reform Act of 1884, but still no women. By 1900, nearly 60 per cent of the male population could vote, which is still too few, but certainly much better than the 0 per cent of the female population. In this way alone, all women were equal: countess or cook, no woman in the UK, regardless of how much tax she paid, could have a say in Parliament.

Emmeline Pankhurst knew that if women ever wanted change, they would have to take direct action. She knew she would have to attract brave and passionate people. People like Emily Davison. Emily Davison is perhaps one of the most famous suffragettes – though most people know little more than how she met her violent death. While Davison’s legacy will forever be tied to her death under the king’s horse, her contribution to suffrage was much greater and more significant than that single action. She was determined, no matter the cost, to champion her cause. She did not care that she was unpopular with the public, the government, or even the other suffragettes. Devoutly Christian, her motto was ‘Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God’.

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Emily Davison was born on 11 October 1872, to middle-class parents in Greenwich, London, and lived in Hertfordshire until she was 11. She had a passion for learning, and was one of the first women to go to university, graduating from the University of London in 1908. She had previously achieved first-class honours at Oxford, but women weren’t allowed to graduate then. Imagine, all of the work, none of the reward, or that tepid glass of bucks fizz they give you at the ceremony. According to some accounts, on hearing of the success of this first degree, Emily joyously threw a jar of sweets onto the village green for the local children to enjoy. But she felt stuck. Despite being highly educated, little was available to Emily as a woman in Edwardian Britain: the best she could hope for was a teaching position.

The year 1908 was also when she joined the WSPU. At first, her activism was low-key, as she had a job as a governess that she didn’t want to lose. But she soon realised that direct action was the only way to achieve the WSPU’s aims. Anyway, Emily reasoned that she would never obtain a better employment position if women were always considered second-class citizens.

The suffragettes are famous today not just for their campaign, but for their tactics, many of which remain controversial. They began in 1905 by disrupting meetings and heckling speakers such as Winston Churchill. In 1912 they moved on to more radical actions, including breaking windows, slashing paintings (yes, back then protesters actually caused permanent damage to paintings), handcuffing themselves to railings and other public places, and even planting bombs, committing arson and making attempts at assassination. The first suffragette bomb was detonated in 1912 when Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was visiting a Dublin theatre, and dozens more attacks took place in the next two years. The suffragettes had little or no regard for their own safety, although they did emphasise that their aim was not to harm others – simply to get their attention. The press reaction was negative – many papers displayed unflattering caricatures of the protesters as man-hating spinsters with masculine features, shouting red-faced as they were dragged away by honest policemen. In response, the suffragettes always made sure to dress impeccably and to appear as ladylike as possible, no matter how many post boxes they were setting on fire.

Emily Davison first landed in prison in 1909 after a fight broke out outside Parliament. The suffragettes were not unhappy to be sent to prison – it provided maximum publicity when seemingly modest, well-behaved middle-class women were carted off to jail. Suffragette tactics continued inside. During her first stay, Emily broke several windows, ostensibly to let some air in, cutting her hands in the process. One fellow prisoner, artist Marion Wallace Dunlop, was credited with starting the first recorded suffragette hunger strike at this point.

Hunger strikes have long been a tactic of political prisoners. While it might be difficult to understand why anyone would subject themselves to one, it’s important to remember that these women had no control over anything except their own bodies – sometimes not even that. Women could not vote, they could not have abortions, they could not divorce without sufficient evidence of cruelty, and, perhaps most importantly of all, they could not refuse a husband’s advances. There was no such thing as consent in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. For the suffragettes, a hunger strike was a way to say ‘I choose to control the only thing I can’.

The authorities’ response to the hunger strikes was to force-feed the prisoners, which featured having a rubber tube forced down the throat and food poured down a funnel. Sometimes, the tube was forced down the nose instead; on more than one occasion, food was administered rectally. One has to wonder how much of this was science and how much of it was the deliberate humiliation of women.

Emily was one of many hunger strikers who was force-fed during this time. Some suffragettes, desperate to raise awareness about their treatment, began to document their experiences. Upper-class suffragettes, who had the best access to the press and to influential people, were treated with much more care. After being released early without force-feeding, and suspecting she had been shown favour because of her class, suffragette Lady Constance Lytton got herself rearrested under the working-class pseudonym of Jane Warton. This time, she was force-fed on at least eight occasions, which she describes in horrifying detail:

The pain of it was intense … my jaws were fastened wide apart, far more than they could go naturally. Then he put down my throat a tube which seemed to me much too wide and was something like four feet in length … I choked the moment it touched my throat until it had got down. Then the food was poured in quickly; it made me sick a few seconds after it was down and the action of the sickness made my body and legs double up, but the wardresses instantly pressed back my head and the doctor leant on my knees.

Emily’s suffragette work continued after she was released. In October 1909 she was arrested for throwing a stone at a politician’s car. In April 1910 she managed to hide overnight in Westminster where she wanted to confront the prime minister – she was arrested again. In November that same year, after the failure of a women’s franchise bill, in a riot that followed, Emily broke several windows in protest at the assaults carried out on suffragettes, and was again sent to prison.

In April 1911, on the night of the official census taking place, Emily again broke into Westminster (clearly a lot easier back then) and hid in a cupboard so as to avoid being recorded – part of suffragette resistance included refusing to be recorded in official documents. I love this moment in history, this truly British and bureaucratic act of rebellion. That’s why you won’t find me on the 2021 census either (although it’s also because I was in England when they did the Scottish one and Scotland when they did the English one).

At the end of 1911, Emily started to set fire to post boxes, and after one such act of arson she was promptly arrested and sentenced to six months in prison.

Emily’s six-month stay in Holloway in 1912 provides some of the starkest examples of both the treatment of suffragettes and their own resistance.

In response to her force-feeding, Emily variously barricaded herself in her cell, threw herself down some stairs, and jumped over a prison balcony, resulting in severe injuries. Her health was badly affected by her ordeal and when she was finally released, she had lost 21lbs.

She was arrested for the last time in November 1912, after attacking a man in Aberdeen who she had mistaken for the prime minister. Again she was force-fed, bringing the total number of such treatments to 49. Emily never fully recovered from the effects of starvation and force-feeding, and would remain frail for the rest of her short life.

On 4 June 1913, Emily attended the Epsom Derby. She carried with her some small flags in the suffragette colours, her diary, a return train ticket and a ticket to a dance later that evening. What happened next is still not entirely clear, although it was caught in its entirety on a Pathé newsreel. It shows the horses, towering over the spectators, tearing round the track at around 35mph, as crowds wave flags and banners. In barely a few seconds Emily Davison, standing on a corner of the racetrack, ducks underneath the barrier and into the path of the oncoming horses, just in time to collide with the king’s horse Anmer, and its rider, Herbert Jones. The impact sent all three flying, and Emily and Jones were both knocked out. She died four days later, having never regained consciousness. She was 40 years old.

Nobody is quite sure what Emily’s intentions were that day, as she hadn’t discussed them with anyone. Some people think (as evidenced by her possessions) that she simply meant to pin the flags to the horses and return home afterwards. It’s hard to believe that Emily could have expected to be able to accomplish such an action as the horses thundered past at top speed. She would have had mere seconds to act. Others speculate that it was suicide; a deliberate and instantaneous martyrdom, although Emily’s religious convictions, as Professor June Purvis points out, are unlikely to have let her commit such a sin. She had already deliberately injured herself on several occasions. Perhaps she meant simply to harm herself in a public way? She may not have realised just how fast, and therefore deadly, the horses would be. Jones later commented that she had an expression of surprise when he hit her, suggesting that she had indeed misjudged it. The inquest returned a verdict of accidental death.

The media reaction was almost entirely negative. The press speculated that she must surely have been mad or suffering from dementia. Queen Mary, wife of George V, referred to Emily as a ‘brutal lunatic woman’ in one letter. Despite the WSPU’s recent dissatisfaction with Emily’s conduct (they did not approve the letterbox arson), the suffragettes wasted no time in ensuring that her funeral was highly publicised and attended – roughly 50,000 people lined the streets in London to watch Emily’s coffin and hundreds of supporters file past. The coffin was then taken by train to her family’s home town of Morpeth, where more crowds gathered. It seemed almost as if the entire movement had been leading to this one key moment – solid proof of the lengths the suffragettes would go to, and the sacrifice they were making.

In the immediate aftermath of Emily’s death, a larger danger was looming: war. In 1914, the suffragettes agreed to a truce as the outbreak of the First World War dominated the political landscape. Many of them instead chose to commit fully to supporting the war effort. In 1918, the first act was passed that gave some of Britain’s women the franchise.

Did Emily’s actions hinder the cause? Did her recklessness and disregard for coordinating with other suffragettes do the movement damage? Or did her brave act cement the suffragettes in the minds of the public as truly dedicated to their important cause? I can only imagine that Emily must have been difficult to negotiate with, determined as she was, yet in her article for Women’s History Review, Professor June Purvis argues that the view of Emily as an ‘unbalanced, suicidal fanatic’ was not accurate. How, after all, could someone deranged attain such a level of education, or organise herself sufficiently as an activist? Despite their apparently uninhibited nature, most protests are meticulously planned, down to the last detail. For all we know, Emily’s day could have gone exactly as she wanted.

You, personally, may think that this was not a worthwhile sacrifice. You may think it was stupid, pointless, and dangerous to others. But the truth is this. Today, we have the vote and, at the point when Emily jumped in front of that horse, we did not. Which is not to create a direct correlation between the two, but to remind us that we just don’t know where women’s rights would stand today without the actions, violent and non-violent, of the suffragists and suffragettes. There’s a good chance they would be much worse, and very little that they would be any better. The line often trotted out about the 1918 voting act is that it was a ‘reward’ for the hard work of women munitions workers during the war. And yes, this would make sense, except that the vote was NOT extended to the vast majority of those women. You could only vote if you were over 30, and, more crucially, if you owned property or were married to a property owner. That extended to only 40 per cent of the UK’s female population. Some reward. We might think of Emily’s actions as extreme, but that’s because we can vote. When my grandfather was born in 1919, his own mother couldn’t vote. As I write this, it is still less than a 100 years since universal suffrage was implemented in the UK (in 1928), and marital rape was only outlawed in 1992, less than a year after I was born. We are much closer than we like to think to a world without women’s rights.

As much as some people like to complain about protests today, while romanticising protests of the past, the actions of Emily Davison make soup-throwing look very tame by comparison. Emily recognised that without struggle our rights are not guaranteed. As she herself put it, ‘To lay down life for friends, that is glorious, selfless, inspiring! But to re-enact the tragedy of Calvary for generations yet unborn, that is the last consummate sacrifice of the Militant.’

We are those generations of unborn. We would do well to remember it.

10 Goddesses We All Wish We Were

1. Asase Ya West African goddess of earth, fertility, love, peace and truth.

2. Athena Ancient Greek goddess of wisdom and war, and keeper of a pet owl.

3. Beira Scottish Celtic goddess of winter, who controls the weather.

4. Pele Polynesian goddess of volcanoes and fire.

5. Scáthach Scottish Celtic goddess, warrior, and martial arts expert.

6. Mami Wata African goddess of water, who often appears as a mermaid.

7. Durga Hindu goddess of power and feminine energy. Symbolises strength and courage.

8. Sedna Inuit sea goddess, ruler of the underworld and creator of sea animals.

9. Ishtar Mesopotamia goddess of fertility and war.

10. Benten Japanese goddess of luck and art, usually seen riding a dragon.

NOOR INAYAT KHAN

How to Be Kind

My grandpa fought the Nazis with Christopher Lee.

OK, now, listen. Before you ask, no, I technically have no proof that this happened. But I also have no proof that it DIDN’T. Very hard to prove a negative, see. Because if it DID happen, he was sworn to secrecy for the rest of his life as a member of the SOE.

The SOE (Special Operations Executive) was formed in 1940 by the British government as a direct response to the Second World War and the Nazi invasions across Europe. Essentially, it was an extra-secret version of MI5, a sort of MI5 squared, and hardly anyone knew about its existence. Secret nicknames inside Whitehall included ‘The Baker Street Irregulars’ (they had an office on Baker Street), ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’, and ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’. I mean come on. Is that cool or what?? You can easily see them making that into a film starring Henry Cavill.

My grandpa was not (as far as I know) an actual SOE operative, but he was an engineer for the SOE. Since he signed the Official Secrets Act, he never told us what that actually entailed. Even decades after the war, it’s surprising how seriously former combatants took their oath, many dying without ever divulging what they got up to during that period of their lives. So. My grandpa worked for the SOE. Christopher Lee worked with the SOE as a liaison officer. QED: it’s almost 100 per cent definite that they beat up Nazis together, and you can’t disprove it! They didn’t call Tom the Durham Danger for nothing! (No one ever called him that.)

The aims of the SOE were not simply to collect intelligence on the Nazis, but to actively sabotage them (hence the ‘ungentlemanly’
label: yes, this is at a point in time when the British thought that underhanded warfare was bad manners), and its operatives were sent all over the world, often on incredibly dangerous missions. The SOE had a very hands-on approach to subterfuge. Not only did they pass information and aid resistance fighters, they were also involved in the obstruction of enemy missions and direct action. They blew up bridges and water towers, sabotaged trains and factories, and even assassinated Hitler’s pal Reinhard Heydrich (who’s name sounds like an anagram of itself) in 1942. They weren’t just the secret service, they were the secret-secret service – even MI6 didn’t know what they were up to, and in fact were actively suspicious of them, with their director Sir Stewart Menzies calling the SOE ‘amateur, dangerous and bogus’. Essentially, they were what Wile E Coyote would be like if he was in Antifa, and much more competent.

Being in the SOE was not only very dangerous, but could have tragic repercussions too, as the Nazis often took out their frustration with the SOE’s operations on any local civilians who had aided them. After Heydrich’s assassination, the Nazis massacred the populations of two nearby villages, as well as the families of the assassins in revenge. Joining the SOE meant that you were actively putting yourself and sometimes your loved ones in harm’s way, and you knew it. You also knew that it was highly likely that no one would ever find out what you did. It was basically full of some of the bravest people who ever lived. If they were caught, they would have no protection as soldiers, and were usually executed. Many of the SOE agents were never recognised for their actions, for the simple fact that they did most of their deeds in secret, and most died without their war record ever being made public. It’s only in the last few decades that we’ve begun to take a proper look at the SOE and its operatives.

While it’s unlikely that I’ll ever find out what my grandpa got up to, one person whose life in the SOE actually has been properly documented is Noor Inayat Khan: writer, musician, poet and spy, with an incredible life story.

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Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan was born in Russia in 1914, and moved to London as a young child. She came from a noble Indian family, and her father had come to Europe to teach music and religion. Hazrat Inayat Khan was a Muslim but also a practitioner of Sufism, a mystic practice that emphasised spirituality and pacifism. Her mother, Ora, was American, and her parents had four children all together, all of whom were very close. Noor is sometimes referred to as a princess (she was a descendant of a sultan), although she doesn’t appear to have used a title in everyday life, just as I never talk about the fact that I have a master’s. (Yes, I have a master’s, did you know? Technically two if you count my undergrad, which is called a master’s at the ancient Scottish universities. It’s not a big deal, I won’t go on about it. My master’s, that is. Do you want to know more? Please email for details.).

There is something extremely romantic about the idea of a princess spy. When we talk about princesses as inspirations for little girls, we don’t tend to think of real princesses, who spend most of their time shaking people’s hands and attending charity galas. We add prefixes to create a new, powerful role model: a warrior princess, a magical princess, a princess who does something to change the world. So it’s no wonder that Noor’s story is inspiring today. She was a Nazi-hunting spy princess, and honestly, it doesn’t get much cooler than that.

As a teen, Noor moved to Paris with her family and spent most of her young adult life there. She was a prolific writer who contributed to radio and magazines and who released a book of children’s fables based on fairy tales and inspired by the Buddha. From an early age, Noor felt most herself when living in the fantasy worlds she created. The stories she chose to reproduce in Twenty Jataka Tales feature many beautiful depictions of Asian places and animals, and almost all of them involve a moral resolution, often featuring a ruler learning an important lesson about power and responsibility. There are two themes that come up consistently throughout the stories: self-sacrifice for the greater good; and peaceful resistance to violence. In The Monkey Bridge, a monkey explains to a king: ‘Oh king … it is not your sword which makes you a king; it is love alone. Forget not that your life is but little to give if in giving you secure the happiness of your people.’

Self-sacrifice was obviously incredibly important for Noor, and something she was about to experience first-hand.

After the Nazi occupation of France, she and her family fled back to Britain. It soon became clear that the Nazis weren’t messing around. Noor, who at one time was romantically involved with a Jewish man, was compelled to act, and she was determined to contribute to the fight against them. Noor wouldn’t have thought of herself as a fighter, though. She passionately believed in pacifism, specifically in the way of the Buddha. Buddhism, soon to become something akin to a trend in the West, was still a relatively new concept to most Europeans, but Noor’s Sufi upbringing and interest in Buddhism gave her a strong moral compass. She was also a devout follower of the pacifist Gandhi and his peaceful resistance movement. But she didn’t see abstaining from action (i.e. becoming a conscientious objector) as the peaceful route during war. She knew that where fascism was concerned, she needed to take a stand. As her brother later explained, the siblings felt strongly that they needed to help the war effort, but, as pacifists, they didn’t want to kill anyone, and Noor saw joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, and then the SOE, as the ideal way to contribute without violence. She was determined to help the cause at whatever cost. Despite being a strong supporter of Indian independence, Noor hoped that fighting for Britain would prove that India could be a trustworthy independent ally rather than a colony.

In today’s culture there persists the idea that an aggressive stance against hate is somehow intolerant in itself. The right insists that punching a Nazi is just as bad as being one, but as we seem to be forgetting, the Second World War showed us that not taking a stance against evil is in itself a stance. The truth is, there is room for intolerance in our society, perhaps even a responsibility – intolerance of intolerance. Noor was not going to tolerate an attack on her freedoms.

Noor joined the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) under the anglicised name of Nora, on 19 November 1940. Signing up had initially been difficult, as Noor’s birthplace of Moscow looked deeply suspicious to the British (the Soviet Union were still pals with Hitler at this point). She spent her first seven months as a wireless telegraphist, training initially in Edinburgh (hi!). From her fellow WAAFs’ memories, Noor comes across as an incredibly kind, warm girl, with several quirky habits – she had to wear oversized shoes, suffered from chilblains, and was nicknamed ‘Bang Away Lulu’ because her machine made such a noise. Even here, Noor’s attitude to peace is evident. Despite well-meaning teasing, she was always gracious and smiling, missing her family greatly while working hard on intensive wireless courses. On her mother’s birthday in 1942, she wrote her a birthday poem, something she traditionally did for every family member:

So dearest, chin up, it’s your birthday,

And all that we wished shall come true,

We’re on duty but it’s play day

And life is just all pink and blue!

Unbeknown to Noor, Military Intelligence had been following her career with great interest, and in November 1942, aged 30, she was invited to an interview. The SOE had became interested in her when they realised that she had flawless French and skills as a telegraphist. Their recruitment officer Selwyn Jepson felt that Noor had many qualities needed for spy work: she was patient and cautious, yet also had ‘A great gentleness of manner’.

As an organisation, the SOE was very much a ragtag group of individuals. Among others, it was made up of exiled French people, Germans and Jews, Brits who had decided that normal combat wasn’t deadly enough for them, and the occasional mad aristocrat looking for a fun way to pass the time. There were roughly 40 female agents operating in France during the Second World War, 25 of whom survived. Female spies would have been vital to the war effort for several reasons. First, they would be less likely to be suspected – sometimes it pays to be underestimated. Secondly, they were able to infiltrate spaces that men would have found tricky, and third, they were much better prepared for the sight of blood (I’m just guessing with that third one).

It was the only permitted combat role for women in the UK forces during the war, and it was also one of the most dangerous. Many of these women signed up under the cover of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, or FANY for short. Fany. Come on. COME ON. ‘Mother, I’ve joined up!’ ‘Oh, how marvellous darling, what are you doing?’ ‘I’m a FANY now! A real FANY! A complete and total FANY!’

But being a spy isn’t nearly as cool as James Bond makes it out to be. Especially not if everyone thinks you’re actually a FANY. I don’t think you’re allowed to put martinis on expenses or sleep with sexy women with rude names if you actually work for MI5. Not that I would know, I’m not a spy. Or am I? Haha, no, I’m not … or am I? Haha no. Or …?

It was unglamorous, dangerous work, and most of the time the pay wasn’t even that good. (That must be why Bond always looks so grumpy, he’s thinking about how he’s going to pay his council tax.) As an SOE operative, you would be dropped behind enemy lines and would just have to hope that you’d find your contact before the Gestapo found you. You might spend days if not weeks in cramped, unsanitary hiding conditions. You would probably witness lots of violence, bombings and chaos, and live under the constant fear that someone would betray you. If you were captured, it was pretty much the end of the road, but not before you had been tortured for information. Hitler and his right-hand men had personally ordered the execution of all spies. I don’t know if you’ve heard much about the Nazis, but they weren’t super-sympathetic guys.

What these real spies did have, however, was the cool gadgets, 1940s style. Underwater breathing apparatus, keys that hid microprints, radios disguised as suitcases and even, somehow, a gun disguised as a pen. In fact, the SOE’s ‘Toyshop’ as they called it, based in the Natural History Museum, would be a direct inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Q and his gadgets.

Noor’s training for the SOE was a bit of a mixed bag. Her WAAF background gave her a head start as a wireless operative, and she was a naturally talented signaller, something helped by her skills as a musician. Signalling, as far as I can tell, was a complex and time-intensive exercise that included coding and decoding messages, with special security checks to identify yourself. I’ll be honest, even the Wikipedia page gave me a bit of a headache. If I’d been alive during the war, I would definitely have been in the entertainment corps, doing bad impressions of Hitler, not in the SOE doing anything useful.

Noor being naturally fluent in French was also very important. SOE spies had to blend in as if they were citizens, and any trace of a foreign accent, hairstyle, or even the way you took your tea could give you away. Noor had to be reminded more than once not to take her tea ‘the English way’.

On the face of it, Noor wasn’t particularly suited to spying – she was described by her contemporaries as rather shy and gentle, alarmed by the potential brutality her job might entail. She was very upset about leaving her family, and her pacifist beliefs and kind nature meant that she didn’t enjoy the firearms portion of her training, and found the mock interrogations very difficult to handle. Gentle Noor had been taught that lying was one of the worst things you could possibly do, much to the frustration of some of her superiors. It’s also highly likely that she was subjected to discrimination, intentionally or not, as a mixed-race woman from a minority religion in 1940s Britain. Being seen as ‘other’ by officers and other superiors wouldn’t have helped to cement a trusting bond.

But she did have champions in the higher ranks. Many of her superiors were incredibly impressed with her signalling skills and enchanted by her beauty and gentle demeanour. Her training officer Lance Corporal Gordon described in a report:

She is a person for whom I have the greatest admiration. Completely self-effacing and unselfish. The last person who’s absence was noticed, extremely modest, even humble and shy, always thought everyone better than herself, very polite. Has written book for children. Takes everything literally, is not quick, studious rather than clever. Extremely conscientious.

Others, however, weren’t so sure that she was up to the task, worrying that her forgetfulness and tendency to panic might hinder her. Her SOE colleague Yvonne Cormeau recalled Noor as a ‘splendid, vague dreamy creature, far too conspicuous – twice seen, never forgotten.’

Unfortunately, Noor’s training was cut short due to the urgent need to get agents out in the field. Right before she was due to be dispatched, they asked her if she was really sure she wanted to go ahead with the mission. Noor was adamant that she did. She was ready to make the ultimate sacrifice.

On 17 June 1943, Noor and several other agents were flown into France. She was the first woman to be sent into the country for the SOE as a radio operator, rather than a courier, and her job was as important as it was incredibly dangerous. She was tasked with maintaining radio contact between the agents and the British HQ, ensuring that both sides were kept up to date with each other’s movements. This was one of the most lethal SOE jobs, because being caught with bulky radio equipment (which you had to carry with you at all times) was pretty much an instant death sentence, and the Nazis had special equipment for detecting radio signals, so you needed to constantly be on the move if you wanted to evade capture. The estimated lifespan of a field agent was just six weeks.

She was soon to prove that, despite her mild demeanour, she was an excellent agent. Noor demonstrated that she had the sheer chutzpah needed to be a spy during one incident where she was questioned about her wireless equipment by two German soldiers. Knowing she would only get out of it by keeping her cool, she explained it was a cinematographic apparatus, carefully explaining each part to the soldiers, who obviously had no idea what she was talking about, and, not wanting their bluff to be called, allowed her to pass by.

During her time in Paris, Noor worked carefully, sending messages to maintain contact between Britain and France, and constantly moving location to evade capture. More than once she had near misses with the Nazis, who had started to close in on her spy circuit, Prosper, and were arresting dozens of members. Eventually, Noor became the only radio operator still working in Paris. At one point, she was doing the work of six people. During this time, her work saved 30 RAF airmen who had become trapped behind enemy lines; she communicated to the British about important weapons and arms caches; and she maintained contact and supplies between Britain and the French Resistance.

On 13 October 1943, she was betrayed (we still don’t know exactly by whom) and arrested by the Gestapo, who spent months interrogating her. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the SOE HQ failed to pick up her distress signals showing that she had been captured, and they continued to send vital information directly to the Nazis under the false impression that it was still Noor. According to their accounts, the Gestapo considered her highly dangerous – she had never given up anyone else to the enemy and she had made several escape attempts. This is a hard image to square with the demure, fairy-tale-writing young woman known to her friends and family, and it shows Noor’s incredible bravery. According to others imprisoned with her, she refused to give the Gestapo any information, even under torture, and her only concern was that her mother would be devastated by her fate. As a ‘highly dangerous’ prisoner, she was kept in solitary confinement for ten months, shackled at both hands and feet, before being transferred to the notorious Dachau concentration camp, where she was finally executed on 13 September 1944. Her body, like all the others at Dachau, was cremated in the ovens. Her last word, according to another camp prisoner, was ‘Liberte’.

Noor’s story may not feel particularly inspiring or uplifting to modern readers. It ends rather abruptly, in squalid, horrific conditions. Her bravery was ultimately rewarded with death, and some of her superiors didn’t seem to have much faith in her to begin with. But her determination and belief in the cause of peace was unparalleled. She truly believed that defeating the Nazis was a cause worth dying for, as one of her interrogators remembered: ‘He [Vogt] once asked her whether she had wasted her life by joining the service and that her sacrifice was in vain … she replied it did not matter. She had served her country and that was recompense.’

Noor’s sacrifice showed that she was determined to defend a future where all humans could live in peace without fear of discrimination. One of her greatest hopes was that India would gain independence after the war, something that finally happened in 1947 with the Partition of India. An estimated three million troops came from the commonwealth of Britain’s former colonies, and 1.5 million alone came from India. About 87,000 of those perished. It’s believed by many historians today that Britain could never have won the war without the support of Indians such as Noor.

Noor’s gentle, peace-loving personality also teaches us that typically feminine qualities are not the antithesis of strength and courage. She maintained a steadfast belief in peace, truth and kindness, values that helped rather than hindered her as an SOE agent.

Due to the secrecy surrounding their missions, few SOE members are honoured today. But, wonderfully, Noor is one who is. She was posthumously awarded a George Cross in 1949, as well as a Croix de Guerre by the French. In 2021, a statue of her was unveiled. Noor is, incredibly (but perhaps not surprisingly), currently the only Muslim woman in the UK with a statue commemorating her. It’s near her childhood home, in Gordon Square, London, among the peace of the trees and flowers where she used to play as a child.

MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS

How to Know What You Want

Considering the impression you’re left with from the study of Scottish history at school, it might be surprising to learn that there are any women here in Scotland at all. I had to get a special licence from the council just to exist.

If representation in the media is anything to go by, there are just three famous Scottish women: Mary, Queen of Scots; Flora MacDonald; and Lulu. Mary is maybe one of the most famous non-famous people ever. By which I mean, everyone has heard of her, but not a lot of people know anything about her life. Even in Scotland, the main fact we all picked up about her was from the playground rhyme ‘Mary, Queen of Scots got her head chopped off’, where you would gleefully decapitate a daisy with your thumbnail as you sang it.

If you google Mary, most of the articles that pop up are littered with the same phrases over and over again: ‘tragic’, ‘glamorous’, ‘doomed’, ‘romantic’, they paint a picture of a woman who had few choices in a life that could only ever end badly. But I think Mary was savvier than that. And I think that, like many of the women in this book, she in fact made lots of difficult choices in an intensely dangerous environment. So, who was the real, human Mary, underneath the tragically, doomed, romantic, glamorous image?

I have always felt a bit of a kinship with Mary. Although it’s true that I do tend to feel a kinship with literally anyone else with red hair, including Kim Possible, Fat Bastard and Danny Alexander, so that’s not saying much. But learning about Mary as a teen, I was instantly drawn to this lonely girl, who never felt quite at home in her own country, who it seemed could never quite make the right decisions, and who felt at odds with everyone around her. Maybe it’s the Catholic mother, maybe it’s the terrible crushes, either way whenever I see a portrait of Mary I get a little wistful.

Mary, Queen of Scots, was born in Linlithgow Palace on 14 December 1542, daughter of King James V (we had a lot of Jameses, seven in total). In case you’re wondering why she is always referred to as ‘Queen of Scots’ and not ‘Scottish Queen’, I’ll tell you. In Scotland, the monarch is not in fact the ruler of the land, but of the people. So all Scottish monarchs are in fact ‘King/Queen of the Scots’ not of the country itself. Personally, I prefer this. It’s a reminder that, if you’re going to have a hereditary unelected leader, they have a duty to their people. So there you go. Lil fun fact. Whip that out at parties.

According to Reformation preacher John Knox, whom I do not trust (and you’ll find out why later), Mary’s father was heard to exclaim, when he heard of her birth, ‘It cam wi’ a lass and it will gang wi’ a lass!’ (‘It came with a girl and it will go with a girl!’), referring to the Stuart dynasty. A real vote of confidence from Dad there. A week later, her father died and she became queen at only six days old (what have YOU done today?). As historian Jenny Wormald points out in her book, Mary, Queen of Scots, James left Mary with a difficult inheritance: ‘He left behind him a baby daughter, a huge political and religious crisis, and a power struggle far more savage than had ever been experienced before, which began literally at his death bed.’

After spending her early years in Scotland, it was decided that she should be packed off to France when she was five to avoid the current conflicts with England (known as the ‘Rough Wooing’, which is a dodgy-as-fuck way to describe one country invading another). Her mother, Mary of Guise, was French, and it was arranged that the young Mary would be betrothed to the Dauphin of France. Mary of Guise stayed behind in Scotland to try to maintain some sort of peace.

The Auld Alliance is the name for the relationship between France and Scotland that existed for several hundred years before the British union of the crowns (and, some people would argue, for years afterwards). It was forged, as many friendships are, through the distrust of a mutual enemy, in this case England, in 1295, when John Balliol of Scotland and Philip IV of France signed a treaty agreeing that Edward I was a bit of a dick. The Alliance still cements a relationship between the two countries, and even today, you only need to say ‘No, no monsieur, je ne suis pas anglais, je suis écossais’ on holiday and suddenly waiters are a lot nicer to you.

After a rough start, and with her father deid as a doornail, Mary became something of the fairy-tale princess that we think of her as. She was brought up in the rich, fashionable splendour of the French court and its luxurious palaces, and spent her time hanging with her half-brothers (she had about seven half-siblings through her dad) and ‘The Four Marys’, four noble girls from Scottish families who had been sent to accompany her – Marys Seton, Beaton, Fleming and Livingston. Mary was taught Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish, and enjoyed riding and hunting. She played the lute, composed poetry and was taught to dance by France’s best tutors. Few depictions of Mary’s life choose to linger on these happier young days. In fact, one of the few that does is the Starz TV show Reign (although it looks as if it has been exclusively costumed by Boohoo.com and features no Scottish or French people). Apart from dressing Mary like she’s going to prom in 2005, the show adds a whole bunch of extra people who sound like they belong in a Hello! magazine spread: Lord Hugo, Penelope, Olivia D’Amencourt, and some guy called Colin. It also features a ton of additional (and fictional) drama such as attempted rape, Mary being carted off to a convent, and the real-life astrologer Nostradamus.

Apart from being a refugee with a dead dad and a mum still in Scotland, Mary had a charmed life at the French court. According to contemporary sources, she was beautiful, talented, charming and tall – even grumpy John Knox admitted she was ‘pleasing’.

Here’s how Pierre de Bourdeille, who attended her wedding to Francis, described her:

She appeared a hundred times more beautiful than a goddess of heaven … if the Kingdom of Scotland was anything of a prize, the Queen was far more precious than it, for even if she had neither sceptre nor crown, her person alone was worth a kingdom.

Everyone loved her and enjoyed hanging out with her, and she was thought to be highly accomplished and desirable. This is where she and I differ, especially the tall bit.

In 1558, aged just 15, she married the Dauphin and future king of France, Francis II and a year later, with the death of Henry II, became queen consort of France. So, just to recap: dead dad, fled from war-torn home country, married, queen of France and Scotland. All this before she was 18 years old. And I thought doing my standard-grade history exam a year early was impressive. Despite her husband Francis being by all accounts a bit wet (when he was crowned the crown was so heavy some nobles had to hold it for him) he and Mary seemed to get on well, and it looked like the start of a promising future full of love, laughter and croque-monsieurs.

Sadly, in 1560 her mother died, followed swiftly by Mary’s husband (then only 16), who was killed by an ear infection (being alive back then must’ve been terrifying). Without anything really keeping her in France (except the food, fashion, culture, art, language, wine and weather) it was decided that she should finally return to Scotland and take her place as queen.

I always get a bit defensive when people complain about Scotland’s weather (especially if those people are from tropical, exotic England) because what did you expect? That’s our whole THING. We’re gloomy, it’s our vibe. Didn’t you google it before you got on the plane? However, I don’t think I can deny it must’ve been quite a culture shock to go from sunny, sophisticated France back to her home country.

Scotland at this point was a dour place. Firstly, we were in the middle of the Reformation, led by Party Pooper General John Knox, a fanatical Presbyterian misogynist whose idea of fun was praying extra hard. Knox was born in 1514, and had spent the years before Mary’s return as a French prisoner, and then in exile in England (after he got caught up in the messy murder of a Scottish cardinal). Lots of people hated Catholics in post-Reformation Scotland, but John was one of only a select few that made it his whole personality. Arguably, his most infamous text is The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, published in 1558, in which he basically says that queens are a mad idea, women are awful, and if we let women be in charge, God knows what insanity will happen next, we’ll probably let people marry their dogs and bring back Cadbury Dream bars.

On top of that, because Mary had been away so long, Scotland was ruled by a bunch of regents who were related to her by varying degrees, and thus the country was more than a leetle unstable. These regents tended to be Scottish noblemen, all vying for the crown themselves, and blood was shed fairly regularly in this pursuit. Think the Burnistoun ‘Mad Uncles’ sketch but they’re all wearing doublets, and at least half of them are called James. One of the most powerful of Mary’s Scottish Lords was James Douglas, the Earl of Morton. While it’s true that my family comes from the same area of Scotland that he did, I think it’s more likely that we were his servants than fellow nobles. If anyone can prove we were though, I’d love to claim Morton Castle and turn it into a year-round haunted house/breakfast food restaurant. If you want to stay in his Edinburgh house, you can! It’s now a backpackers hostel.

Mary arrived in Leith in 1561, welcomed by the people but distrusted by the Protestant aristocracy. Although aged only 19, Mary had been raised from birth to be queen, and was probably more excited than daunted about her new life. A bit like those Olympic gymnasts who start training aged three, the idea of being queen was all she’d ever known. Mary had two primary goals on her return: to meet Elizabeth I of England and pursue her to make Mary her heir presumptive; and to marry a powerful king and get a nice alliance set up. This would be no easy feat. And to top it all off, Mary felt out of place in the Scottish court. She was Catholic, she was ‘French’, she was a woman, and she was surrounded by men who all basically wanted her dead. On Sunday she would go to church (in order to pacify her Protestant Lords) and hear John Knox complaining about Catholics and women and birthday cake and kittens and anything else fun or nice.

It’s all too easy to see Mary’s strained homecoming as an omen of her ultimately doomed fate, but as historian and National Museum of Scotland curator Dr Anna Groundwater explains, Mary also had some great successes in her early years in Scotland from 1561. She maintained relative religious peace and put down two separate rebellions. In the beginning, she worked well with many of the nobles and was a beautifully dressed and exciting addition to the Scottish court. Groundwater doesn’t want us to think of Mary simply at her end point, but rather ‘In the moment’: ‘“Mary gets her head cut off” … we know that’s the end point, and we tend to then view everything that happens before as somehow leading to that end point.’

Groundwater also pointed out to me that we often forget how integrated Mary was into European politics. She had a French mother and upbringing, and Scotland had communities all over mainland Europe, including in Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium. Mary was as much a European monarch as a British one, and Scotland too had strong ties to the continent. Although Scottish politics were definitely tumultuous at the time, Scotland was not a medieval backwater, as is often depicted in films. It had a strong sense of its own government, in which councils and advisors to the monarch fulfilled an important role, and imported many European goods, fashions (such as Mary’s own beautiful French-made jewellery) and architectural designs.

Mary had to start securing Scotland’s future, and with one husband down, it was time to get onto number two. There was a lot of pressure on Mary to produce an heir, a male heir, obvs, and even though she would rather have married another ruler, to keep the peace with her court she needed to marry another Scottish noble with a strong claim to the throne. Enter Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. He was perfect! He had claims to both the Scottish and English thrones, he was cultured and, best of all, he was Mary’s cousin, a real must-have for any 16th-century love match. He also, rather notoriously, didn’t (or couldn’t) grow a beard, which means that Mary wasn’t reminded of Morton or Knox when she looked at him. And one more bonus: he was also Catholic. Mary was smitten.

Mary fell hard for the charming Darnley, but unfortunately for her, he was also a bit of a playboy and all-around classic dickhead. We’ve all been there. Either you’ve dated him, you’ve tried to date him or you’ve watched your friend date him. It never ends well. It doesn’t usually end in his murder, but we’ll get to that.

Mary and Darnley grew apart pretty quickly after their marriage in 1565, once Mary found out that he was a heavy-drinking posh boy with a violent streak. They did manage to produce a male heir, the future James VI (or I, if you’re English) but their marriage never really recovered from his killing her best pal, the Italian David Rizzio, in 1566. On 9 March, he burst into her chambers in Holyrood palace with several accomplices (including Morton) and stabbed Rizzio brutally in front of Mary and her half-sister Jean. You know how it is. You’re hanging out with another guy, he gets you, you like chatting, he’s probably gay so it doesn’t even matter, but your boyf has a tendency towards jealousy and murder. I’m not sure why he thinks stabbing your friend 56 times in front of you while you’re six months pregnant is going to win you back, but you know what he’s like. Anyway, very relatable.

After this Mary and Darnley were basically over as a couple. There’s really only so much a marriage counsellor can help with, and homicide isn’t one of those things. Darnley had also been supremely pissing off the other nobles for a while, and in a country where noble-on-noble crime was a huge problem, it was only a matter of time before something happened to him. Eight months after James’s birth, Edinburgh was rocked by a huge explosion. Darnley’s body was discovered in the garden of the Edinburgh house he was staying in, which had been blown up. To this day no one is quite sure how much involvement Mary had, but it certainly suited her to have him gone. And it’s important to remember that this is back in the day when killing your husband was seen as less shocking than divorcing him.

At this point, Mary was already involved with another guy, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. She was clearly going for the Terrible Boyfriend Triad: soft boi who needs you to mother him; self-absorbed dickhead; and then just straight up abusive piece of shit. To this day I still can’t quite imagine what she saw in Bothwell, who was already twice divorced, and who, in all his portraits, has a face like a skelped erse. I just don’t like him. It was also highly likely that he was involved in Darnley’s murder. But, again, we’ve all been there – a friend who likes this guy, he’s awful, you can’t say anything until they’ve broken up, when you discover that he was cheating on them the whole time with three different people, and staging a coup. Although there must have been initial attraction, by the time of their actual marriage, it was starting to take on a hostage-y vibe, and some people think she might have already been pregnant (and possibly raped) by Bothwell before the wedding. He was super-unpopular with the other lords, which didn’t help either. Soon after the wedding, the other lords confronted Bothwell and Mary and took her prisoner.

Hopefully, by now, you’re starting to see just how dangerous a place Scotland in the 16th century was in which to be queen. Religion, gender and political allegiance were just some of the things that could get you executed at the drop of a hat (as it falls off your severed head).

Mary was then taken to a castle owned by the Douglases on an island in the middle of Loch Leven in Kinross (now a beautiful wildlife sanctuary), very much cementing her romantic fairy-tale princess image. Her time there was filled with tragedy and humiliation – she miscarried Bothwell’s twins and was forced to abdicate in favour of her son James. On 2 May 1568, helped by loyal servants and the slightly love-struck 16-year-old Willie Douglas, she managed to escape. Several lords still loyal to her, including the Hamiltons, managed to amass a 6,000-strong army to fight against her son’s protector, her own half-brother Moray, for the throne. It’s all a bit messy, isn’t it? Many people love to compare this period of Scottish history to Game of Thrones, but I like to think of it as more like a particularly violent episode of EastEnders. With pikes.

Mary’s army was badly defeated at the battle of Langside, in the south of modern-day Glasgow. Realising that she might have a chance if she asked for Elizabeth’s help, she fled south, arriving in England on 16 May 1658. She would never see Scotland again.

I should mention at this point that Mary was only 25. All of this, three husbands, two murders, a prison escape and a battle had happened in the space of less than a decade of her young life.

In England, Mary was welcomed with open arms by her cousin Lizzie, who made her a cuppa and put on the heating.

Nah, not really.

Mary was imprisoned pretty much as soon as she arrived in England – her original plan was to get to France, and she was hoping Elizabeth might be kind enough to let her pass through on the way. No such luck.

She was imprisoned first in Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire, in 1569. For the next 15 years, she lived in what could be described as ‘Scandi-jailcore’: that is, imprisoned, but really nicely. She had servants, a chef, she was allowed to ride, hang out with friends and even visit a spa.

In 1585 she was moved, after Elizabeth and her spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham became worried that Mary might be involved in plots to overthrow the queen. Let’s be fair, who wouldn’t? As Mary, you had two choices: sit around waiting to be executed (if you were lucky you might be allowed to die of old age); or figure out a way out. If her only way to freedom was by killing the person imprisoning her, she was probably going to take it. On top of that, she had already suffered the deaths of her parents, two husbands and her best friend. By this point, death was just Something That Happened to Mary. It’s also important to remember that Mary wasn’t actually a subject of England – she was a queen in her own right, so locking her up was actually kinda rude of Elizabeth.

By this point James, now in his late teens, had sided with Elizabeth, probably because he’d grown up listening to all those protestant lords (and John Knox) complain about what a mouthy slag his mum was. Mary suggested that they could rule Scotland together, but he wasn’t having any of it, and in March 1585 he officially rejected her suggestion.

Mary’s downfall ultimately happened when the Babington Plot was uncovered in 1586, in which noble Anthony Babington got Mary to agree that he should assassinate Liz in her name. By this point, Mary had been imprisoned for 19 years and had written hundreds of letters to lots of different people. Many of the letters were in code, and some have only recently been deciphered. Babington was embroiled with a Spanish-supported plot that would see Mary take the throne once Elizabeth was assassinated.

Unfortunately, Mary didn’t know that Elizabeth’s spymaster Walsingham had intercepted her letters, and now had definitive proof that she actively wanted Elizabeth dead. Written on 17 July 1586, the ‘Gallows Letter’ (known as this because of the drawing of a gallows the codebreaker scribbled on it to indicate a ‘gotcha’ moment), sealed Mary’s fate. In the letter, she agreed ‘Sett the six gentlemen to woork’. She also acknowledged her desperation. She knew that if the plot failed, Elizabeth would ‘catch me again, enclose me forever in some hole, forth of the which I should never escape, if she did use me no worse’.

What Mary couldn’t know was that the plan had already failed. Mary’s letters to Babington were usually hidden in beer caskets, and Walsingham had been unsealing them, decoding them and resealing them for months now. Mary’s last ditch attempt at freedom had been thwarted.

She was moved to Fotheringhay Castle, where her trial was conducted on 15 October 1587. She was tried for treason, and again, I’m not really sure you can commit treason against the queen of another country. I’m not saying Mary was right to want Elizabeth dead, I’m just saying it’s interesting how the Scottish queen was treated more as a subject of England than a queen in her own right. Some would argue that Scotland is still treated like this within the UK today.

According to documents from the trial, Mary defended herself with skill:

The Queen answered to this effect, by way of protestation, that she was a free Prince and born a Queen, not subject to any but to God, to whom she must give account, and therefore that her appearing should not be either prejudicial to kings or princes nor allies nor her son, and thereupon desired an act to be made, that is, to have such her protest registered by public notaries, and required her own servants to bear her witness of it.

Of course, there was no way she would be found anything but guilty, and she was sentenced to be executed.

There’s a lot of conjecture about whether Elizabeth actually wanted to execute her cousin. She stalled for time, which some historians think was simply for show, to make her look sympathetic. Some think that she really didn’t want to go through with it. Whatever really happened when Elizabeth signed the execution order, her behaviour at that time was certainly erratic – crying, shouting at messengers, and issuing unclear orders.

As Anna Groundwater explained to me, Mary and Elizabeth actually had an intensely close relationship, despite never meeting. They wrote many letters to one another over the years, often using affectionate, sisterly language. As two female monarchs ruling Britain, they must have felt a kinship of sorts. Groundwater uses a poem attributed to Mary, ‘A Diamond Speaks’ to illustrate this. She says: ‘?“A Diamond Speaks” [is] said to have been written by Mary to accompany a gift of a diamond to Elizabeth, that uses the qualities of the diamond to voice Mary’s own qualities, and to demonstrate the benefits of a closer relationship between the two women – to the greater glory of them both.’

The poem is indeed a beautiful illustration of Mary’s writing skills and diplomatic talents:

It is not because of the hardness by which I overcame both fire and metal,

Or because of pride in the cut itself, produced by a craftsman’s hand;

Nor, indeed, is it because of the pure jewel, shining out of the circle of

Artfully wrought gold, more dazzling than Phoebus’ light.

But rather because my shape is like that of a heart, which my Lady’s

Heart itself resembles, although without the hardness.

For no victory comes from contraries, and because so great a purity

Is without blemish, I and she in this are equals.

Who could believe that after she sent me forth,

My new Lady would in turn find pleasure in me?

But that’s pleasing! Look, for this I am happy and thankful for my fortunate fate:

One queen possesses me, then does another, of no lesser worth.

O that I might join both their hearts with adamantine bands

(although you all favour gold).

Neither consuming envy, nor mistrust created by deceitful whisperings,

Nor time-induced decay wears those away.

Then shall I be called the most famous treasure from the East,

For this reason excelling extraordinary jewels.

Then shall I, glittering in flickering splendour,

Or with the light cast by my rays, dazzle those who are standing by.

Then shall I be considered, either on account of my worth, or the art which produced me,

The greatest jewel, a diamond of indestructible strength.

On 8 February 1587, Mary was executed. She wore a red petticoat, the colours of the Catholic martyrs, as she knelt on the block, dignified and prepared to meet her God. Unfortunately, the gravity of the moment was rather ruined when the executioner accidentally pulled the wig off her severed head, which rolled away. She was 44 years old. Mary was initially buried in Peterborough Cathedral, until years later when her son had her body moved to Westminster, showing that his feelings towards her may have softened over time.

Despite our ongoing fascination with Mary’s tragic life story, as far as I can tell, not a single Scottish actor has ever played her on film. We’ve had an American Mary (Katharine Hepburn), a Swede (Zarah Leander), a French Mary (Camille Rutherford), English Marys (Samantha Morton, Vanessa Redgrave, Barbara Flynn), an Australian (Adelaide Kane) and, most recently, an Irish Mary (Saoirse Ronan). Sometimes they do French accents (accurate), sometimes they do Scottish accents (but not speaking Scots) and sometimes, most of the time, they don’t bother. In reality, Mary would have spoken Scots (as we can see in her letters) with a French accent, so to be fair, that’s a pretty tricky combination. But why is it so hard to cast a Scottish actor to play the most famous and arguably most popular Scot of all time? I can think of a dozen actors off the top of my head who could have played her at any point over the last 50 years: Karen Gillan, Rose Leslie, Laura Fraser, Shirley Henderson, Kelly Macdonald, Neve McIntosh, Lindsay Duncan, Moira Shearer. Hell, why not combine two of Scotland’s only women and get Lulu to play her?

Anyway, with all that in mind, casting agents: here’s why I would make a great Mary:

1. Red hair, deathly pale

2. From Edinburgh

3. Doesn’t sound Scottish

4. Been to France loads, can order all sorts of drinks

5. Lots of Scottish men find me annoying and want to kill me

6. Terrible taste in guys

7. Very tall (don’t check that)

8. Know a guy called Morton who probably wants revenge on me (brother)

9. Can ride a horse (again, don’t check that)

10. Looks great in black.

Directors, I’m awaiting your call.

A morbid curiosity about Mary has endured down the centuries. Paintings, songs, poems, plays and, of course, films have told her story again and again, forgoing accuracy when it gets in the way of a good plot line. Some of the most famous portrayals, such as in Elizabeth, the Golden Age, rearrange the timeline of her life to better suit its own narrative. Like many films about Mary, it focuses on the relationship she had with Elizabeth, even though, in reality, they never met. Cinema likes to compare and contrast the two, with Mary as the beautiful youthful queen who is ultimately too delicate and unserious to beat the aged, calculating Elizabeth. While it appeals to us as cinemagoers to view their stories as ‘the battle of the queens’, it’s also true that they were both women who had to make hard decisions simply in order to survive; and they were judged for them in a way that male monarchs would not have been.

I asked Anna Groundwater what she thinks Mary can teach us. Like me, she feels that Mary’s self-belief and headstrong personality were her greatest strengths. Her confidence in her place as queen was unshakeable, even to the last (although, Groundwater admits, her choice of boyfriends leaves a lot to be desired).

Mary was dealt a difficult hand by life, and before we judge any of her actions as rash or impulsive, we have to ask: how would we have done in her situation? Who among us can say they’ve never made a terrible dating choice, or a rash decision in a life-or-death moment? She was not just a queen, she was a person. She loved dancing and music, she wrote poems, and during her long imprisonment she embroidered a very funny-looking cat on a cushion. Mary was a real person born into an almost impossible position. Who knows what she could have achieved in the right circumstances?

WILLIAMINA FLEMING

How to See Stars

What did you do during lockdown? Did you do anything mad? I don’t mean lie-face-down-in-the-carpet mad – we all did that – I mean a hobby or skill that you’d never attempted before. Did you bake a lot of banana bread? Get into sea shanties? I know a guy who started fixing pocket watches for fun.

Personally, I dabbled in a bit of stargazing. Using my dad’s birdwatching telescope and an app I downloaded to tell me what to look for, I set up camp in my parents back garden in rural Scotland. I had always hoped that when I looked through the lens I’d see something akin to those beautiful photos of multicoloured galaxies you get on the NASA website, but all I could actually see was the same sky, but slightly closer. I could recognise all the basics – the Plough, Orion’s Belt. But that was it. It was fun, but it wasn’t anything groundbreaking. I certainly wasn’t getting the experience that Scottish astronomer Williamina Fleming would have had. But there’s a chance that most amateur star gazers wouldn’t be able to appreciate half the things they see without her work.

Williamina was born in Dundee in 1857. At this point, deep in the Victorian age, women still couldn’t vote, own property or graduate from University. Female scientists at this time were made up largely of a handful of privileged wealthy women who had the time and money to dabble. Williamina was not one of those dabbling women. Williamina left school aged 14 and became a teacher. (I suppose, technically she didn’t leave school, she just started being paid to attend.) When she was 20, Williamina married James Orr Fleming, a bank worker who was considerably older than her. This must at least have provided some financial stability for Williamina and her family, whom she had been supporting with her teaching position.

Like many working-class people at the time, Williamina and her husband decided to emigrate to America. America was an attractive prospect: it was much easier to find work there as a servant or teacher, and Williamina probably envisioned a simpler, more prosperous life. Adverts from shipping lines such as White Star promised a better life in America, where it never rained, food was plentiful, and you go could around saying ‘I’m walking here!’ They sailed for the States in 1878, when Williamina was 21. Unfortunately, shortly after they arrived, for reasons unknown, her husband abandoned her. She was pregnant at the time.

How must Williamina have felt as a single parent? At an educated guess, I would say – not great. Not only was she a single mother at a time when this was stigmatised (although as a married woman she would have had much more sympathy than unwed mothers), she was living in a system with no safety nets. Worse still, she was on the other side of the Atlantic from friends and family, whom single mothers would normally have relied on for help. She must have felt, at the very least, anxious about the future and her ability to earn enough money for herself and her child.

Williamina’s predicament was not a new one. While single parents do of course include single fathers, the truth is that for most of human existence the burden of care when it comes to children would fall on the mother. Today, single mothers remain one of the most vulnerable groups in society.

In the US today, 81 per cent of single-parent families are lone mothers, which means that about 24 million children are being raised by a single mother. In the UK, 84 per cent of single parents are women. That’s about 2.5 million people. According to The Guardian, half of those UK single-parent families are in relative poverty, and with the current ‘cost of living crisis’ (a watered-down phrase that means ‘deliberately underfunding the poor’) single mothers bear the brunt of the economic crisis, food shortages and fuel poverty. Worse still, 68 per cent of those single-parent families have experienced ‘food insecurity’, or what the Victorians would have called ‘hunger’.

Today we look back on the Victoria era with an almost humorous attitude towards their lack of compassion for those who were poor, female, non-white, or disabled. We joke about children in chimneys and Oliver Twist and gruel and the empire. But, in fact, how much has really changed? When I stop to put something in the food bank in my local supermarket, I barely even question why we need food banks in the first place. It’s simply become part of our daily tapestry.

Williamina wasted no time finding employment after her husband left her. In 1878, she found work as a maid in the household of Edward C Pickering. Some sources say that she returned to Scotland to have her baby in 1879 and to leave him in the care of her mother in Dundee before returning to work for the Pickerings, but it’s hard to know for sure. Either way, her son appeared to be back in the US with his mother by the 1880s. If they did separate, it must have been very difficult for Williamina, so far from her child, trying her hardest to make enough money for them to live together again.

Pickering was the director of the Harvard College Observatory in Harvard, Massachusetts, and someone at the forefront of astronomical science. He was new to the post – appointed in 1877, he was tasked with gathering astronomical data through photographing the sky. This was a huge task that required lots of people to complete. These included ‘computers’, who would analyse the photograph data, a job Pickering deemed boring and repetitive enough to be suited to women, of whom he assembled a team. Originally, they were nicknamed ‘Pickering’s Harem’, which goes to show just how seriously women in science were taken at the time.

Pickering felt that Williamina and other women used to mechanistic domestic tasks would be best suited, and so he promptly hired her to head his team of Harvard Computers. There is an apocryphal story that Pickering, during a heated argument with a male colleague, had yelled ‘Even my Scottish maid could do better than this!’ and then decided to put his money where his mouth is. It’s a good story. A woman, underestimated, proves to be more capable and talented than anyone knew – but is it true? By the 19th century Scots had very much cemented their reputation as scientists, doctors and engineers, so it’s hard to believe that he would have used her nationality as an insult. Her being a maid, on the other hand, was indeed likely to have been alluded to dismissively.

Domestic service was in its golden age during the mid-to-late 19th century. Think Upstairs, Downstairs, or, a little later, Downton Abbey. Houses were run like clockwork to strict timetables, and books on housekeeping by authors like Mrs Beeton encouraged employees to maintain a rigorous daily routine of chores. As historian Lucy Worsley points out in her book If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home: ‘Mrs Beeton, on the other hand, made it quite clear that mistresses ought to treat servants as inferior beings.’ In the UK, almost every household that could afford it would have had at least one servant, a ‘maid of all work’. Bigger households would have dozens of staff for all sorts of jobs, including a ‘boot boy’ whose sole (heh) job was – you guessed it – to clean the boots. According to an article on the website of The History Press, more than a million women in the UK were employed as domestic servants in the 1890s. In the States, almost half of all working women were domestic servants.

Although this work was crucial for the running of a house, it was thankless and undervalued. As a young female servant, you would be treated almost as a child (and some of them literally were children). You had to live in the house, wear a uniform, be in bed by strict hours, and if you wanted to marry or get a boyfriend, you’d have to leave. In some cases, employers were encouraged to make sure that their maids’ rooms were as stark and unpleasant as possible, lest they become lazy and self indulgent.

Regardless of why Pickering decided to promote Williamina (some say that his wife had a hand in it) he had obviously seen in her a talent for organisation, something that no doubt had been strengthened by her time as a school teacher. Although we have to thank Pickering for plucking Williamina from obscurity, he wasn’t a perfect employer. His female staff, even the graduates, were paid much less than their male counterparts. Williamina challenged this, complaining in her diary in 1900:

I am immediately told that I receive an excellent salary as women’s salaries stand … Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a family to take care of as well as the men? … And this is considered an enlightened age! I feel almost on the verge of breaking down.

Despite this, she and Pickering were on good terms; she even named her son Edward Pickering Fleming after him.

What did Williamina’s work actually consist of? Now comes the bit I’m just not clever enough to explain, but I’ll give it a go. Williamina’s job, as far as I can tell, was thus. After astronomers had taken their photographs, Williamina and the other computers would examine them for stellar spectra. I don’t know what stellar spectra are, but luckily, I don’t have to! For this part of the chapter, I asked one of my best friends, astrophysics and science communicator Dr Joanna Ramasawmy, to explain stellar spectra to me, an idiot. It’s literally her job, so let’s see if she can get this dumb-dumb to understand it. Here’s what she told me:

The light from a star (for example, the sun) is not just one colour, but a spectrum – more specifically, the electromagnetic spectrum! If you think of a rainbow, that is the visible part of the spectrum. The different colours correspond to the wavelengths of light. Wavelength also corresponds to the amount of energy in that light. Red light is low energy, and long wavelength, and blue light is high energy, and short wavelength.

When all the light of different colours is combined together, it creates white(ish) light. So the light we see from the sun looks white. But when you split it up, with for example a raindrop in a rainbow, or a prism, you see all the different colours.

If you look carefully, there are lines of colour missing. This is because the star is made of atoms of different chemicals. Atoms can absorb and emit specific amounts of energy, and the energies they absorb are specific to the type of atom. We see those specific energies missing from the spectrum, because those atoms are absorbing all the light of that very specific colour.

So for example, the sun is mostly hydrogen. In a stellar spectra, we’ll see black lines in specific places distinct to hydrogen atoms. Each element has its own distinct signature of which colours it absorbs, and therefore where the black lines are in the spectrum. If you test the chemicals in a lab to see that signature, then you can work out which elements are in the star just by looking at the colours of light that are missing. This is stellar spectroscopy, and is one of the most useful tools in astrophysics!

Thumbs up to camera. Thanks Jo! Stayed tuned for next week when Jo will be teaching me why the sea is so big!

Williamina’s discoveries are a catalogue of triumphs, and indeed Williamina developed her own classification system of stars, to great success. She classified over 300,000 stellar spectra, and discovered hundreds of stars. She was able to identify, for the first time, the stars that would later be known as white dwarfs. Perhaps most noticeably, she discovered the horsehead nebula – one of the most famous astronomical bodies known to humanity. While this was a huge achievement, it would take years for Williamina to be properly credited for her discovery. In the meantime, Williamina’s daily life consisted of lab work while juggling her duties to her son, as she recorded in her diary in 1900:

My home life is necessarily different from that of the other officers of the University since all housekeeping cares rest on me, in addition to those of providing the means to meet their expenses. My son Edward, now a junior in the Mass. Inst. of Technology, knows little or nothing of the value of money and, therefore, has the idea but that everything should be forthcoming on demand.

Reading this, I think back guiltily to all the times when I, as a child, whined or complained when I didn’t get what I wanted, or my mum wouldn’t buy something for me, or I didn’t want fish fingers for tea again. It’s only as adults that we look back and realise how much our parents have to do just to keep us alive, and how every little part of our lives as children rely on their sacrifices.

Williamina also laments that she can’t spend as much time as she wants stargazing, but instead must do admin work for her male colleagues:

If one could only go on and on with original work, looking to new stars, variables, classifying spectra and studying their peculiarities and changes, life would be a most beautiful dream; but you come down to its realities when you have to put all that is most interesting to you aside, in order to use most of your available time preparing the work of others for publication.

Williamina’s efforts were, however, recognised over time. In 1898 she was appointed curator of the astronomical photographs at Harvard, and in 1906 she was given an honorary membership to the Royal Astronomical Society of London.

Williamina Fleming died on 21 May 1911, of pneumonia. She was 54 years old. The Fleming crater on the far side of the Moon is named after her and fellow Scot Alexander Fleming. I suppose it would be nice to have had her own crater, but you can’t have two Fleming craters on one moon or the Daily Mail will say its pro-Scottish moon propaganda.

It’s highly likely that without having been in the right place at the right time, Williamina’s story would have been lost to history. Women, especially working-class women, were simply not given the opportunity to obtain just this sort of education and position. Williamina did, in a way, have a lucky star. Without her tireless work and the work of the other Harvard Computers, astronomy today simply wouldn’t be the same. And so I have to ask, as I have many times in this book already: who knows how many other women from the last two millennia could also have contributed incredible things to the world, things that we will now never know about? Indeed, how many women today, prevented by barriers of class, race and, of course, gender, are not contributing to science and making new discoveries?

We also have to thank Pickering for recognising something in Williamina that science needed, even if it was simply that she was a ‘Scottish maid’. Not only did his instinct prove right, it’s doubtful that science and astrology as we know today would be the same without working-class single mother and Scot, Williamina Fleming.

10 Terrible Beauty Tips from History You Definitely Shouldn’t Try

1. Be like the most fashionable Renaissance women and use lead paint and mercury to whiten your complexion. You’ll look radiant! But you’ll have to keep putting more and more on to hide the fact that it’s making your face fall off.

2. If you want the tragic, drop-dead liquid eyes of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, you can’t go wrong with a couple of drops of Belladonna (aka Deadly Nightshade) in your eyes. From the 1600s to the 1800s, European women used this poison to achieve giant Bambi-esque pupils. It’ll give you that fresh ‘I am absolutely off my tits’ look all the men love.

3. Lengthen your eyelashes and define your eyebrows with the latest from Victorian Britain – coal dust! Or hold a lit match up to a hand mirror and brush the soot that forms on the surface (mix it first with water or oil) through your lashes. Might not look as subtle on blondes.

4. In ancient Central America, Mayan women knew that round skulls were basic. A nice elongated skull was the height of fashion. Babies had boards attached to their heads to make sure that their bones would grow into a nice egg shape.

5. If your hair is feeling dull and lacklustre, why not use a Regency-era shampoo to turn yourself into a Jane Austen heroine? All you need are the whites of six eggs, some rum and some rose water. Don’t use a hairdryer though, or you’ll scramble your hair.

6. Bad teeth? Then why not try a trip to a Georgian dentist? He’ll simply pull out the troublesome tooth (without anaesthetic) and replace it with one made of ivory, wood or porcelain, or even teeth from a corpse or, in some cases, those of an enslaved person. Or try the latest trend, sulphuric acid, to whiten your teeth, although it will strip them of their enamel completely.

7. If you’re in need of a blusher, how about following an ancient Roman tip – rub seaweed on your cheeks. As a bonus, you’ll smell like sushi too!

8. If you’re looking to get rid of pesky freckles and blemishes, you can always apply animal blood to your face, as 14th-century English women did. Those marks will clear up in no time!

9. Women in the 1930s were taken in by the magic of the newly discovered element radium, and bought radium make-up to give themselves that special glow. It’s unlikely that the tiny amounts of radium in these products would actually have done you any harm though (or good, for that matter).

10. In the 1970s, if you wanted a fashionable tan you didn’t need to bother with a bottle of tanner – you would instead douse yourself liberally in cooking oil, lie out in the sun, and let yourself literally cook.

THE DAHOMEY WARRIORS

How to Defend Yourself

I do not think I would be good in a fight. I panic far too easily and my hand-eye coordination is bad. This is not to say I haven’t trained for a fight. As a teen, I trained in Muay Thai boxing for about five years, which was a really fun way of getting different coloured bruises every week. As an anxious and dorky teen, I had this idea that, somehow, knowing how to hit someone in the face with my elbow at top speed would be very important to my life. I would be ready for the day when inevitably, according to every action movie I’d ever seen, I would be cornered by an attacker in a dark alley, who would ask ‘Hey lady, you going somewhere?’ in an American accent, before I high-kicked a gun out of his hand (in heels), with superhero-like precision and perfectly done hair and make-up. So far, this has not happened.

But even though I’ve yet to face down any New York thugs in a rainy side street, I actually really loved my time doing Muay Thai. Not only did I get stronger but knowing how to defend myself gave me a new-found confidence, something I was struggling to achieve at school. Thai boxing was very straight forward – you hit someone, then they hit you. You kicked someone, they kicked you. Repeat for an hour and then get a Twix from the gym vending machine.

Nowadays it’s very hard to see the word ‘Amazon’ and think of anything except huge warehouses full of underpaid workers (and yes, I’m aware that some of those workers may be sorting boxes of this very book). Your second option isn’t much less bleak; a beautiful rainforest, on the brink of devastation, on fire or being cut down so we can eat more Whoppers.

In fact, the word ‘Amazon’ is a literal description of the legendary ancient Greek female warriors who cut off one breast so they might better shoot with a bow and arrow (a = without, mazos = breast). Clearly none of these women were a C cup, because I have absolutely no issue at all with my boobs getting in the way of anything I do.

In much of our media, we long for stories of women fighters and warriors. The Marvel superheroes, the Wonder Women Amazons, the Valkyries, Jet from Gladiators. It’s a common universal trope. And yet there are few times in history when this actually played out. In fact, probably the most recent example is, unfortunately, Gaddafi’s infamous female bodyguards, who in reality were little more than a publicity stunt, and who, once free, told awful stories of sexual assault and virtual imprisonment. In many instances in history, female combatants have been sexualised, patronised and dismissed. But history also has many instances of women warriors making a substantial impact on warfare.

The Dahomey Amazons, as they are often referred to in the West, are a genuine instance of female warriors fighting for and protecting their nation in recent history. Two films in the past few years, Black Panther and The Woman King, both based their armies of female warriors on the West African Agojie, an elite fighting force made up entirely of women from the Dahomey Kingdom. This is the story of the Dahomey warriors.

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Dahomey was one of Africa’s wealthiest kingdoms, located in present-day Benin. It was a powerful and feared province, despite its location in the heart of West Africa, where invaders and colonisers had set up a slave trading system to Europe and America. It is estimated that the kingdom sold thousands of captured enemies to the Europeans as slaves from their first contact with white slave traders in the early 18th century to the early 19th century and its abolition in the West. Inevitably, all the written accounts we have today of the Dahomey are from Western observers who were connected in some way with the slave trade, which of course coloured their view.

The exact origins of the Dahomey female warriors, or Agojie, are unknown, but legend has it that they began as elephant hunters, though the most credible origin story is that they were created by Queen Hangbe, daughter of Houegbadja, the third king of Dahomey, who ruled from 1645 to 1685.

According to the oral histories, Hangbe was briefly the regent of the Dahomey in 1718, and during that time she established the Agojie as a female bodyguard. Whatever the origin of the Agojie, they really began to flourish under the rule of King Ghezo (r. 1818–1858). By the mid 19th century, they accounted for up to 40 per cent of the Dahomey army.

It seems that their rise to prominence in the 19th century was due to a lack of male warriors – the men had either been killed in battle or captured and sold as slaves by one of the several nations with whom the Dahomey were constantly in conflict. The Dahomey realised that using women could be just as effective, and the Agojie unit was formed. The Kingdom of Dahomey was not a matriarchy; on the contrary, like many cultures throughout the world, it was patriarchal, and the Dahomey people still have a king today. Women in general were not granted special status or indeed equal status with men, but they did seem to be granted many more choices than other women of the period. Women were recruited into the Agojie between the ages of 15 and 34. Although you could choose to enrol, many women were also forced into the regiment by their families as punishment, or, if they had been unfaithful, by their husbands. Some might even have been prisoners, or women who were considered unruly.

As well as being expected to fight, the Agojie, as Edna Bay describes in her book Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey, had a long list of other jobs, including as ‘guards, soldiers, messengers, spies, prostitutes, performers, political advisors, ministers of state, governmental record keepers, and makers of state policy’. Dahomey, it seemed, was miles ahead of any Western state when it came to the vast array of roles that women were capable of occupying.

Enrolment took place every couple of years; at one point, the Dahomey Agojie was roughly 4,000 strong. Training and discipline were harsh. As well as drilling with weapons – including firearms and machetes – it also included simulated battles. Any disobedience was punishable by death. It would also incorporate religious rituals and ceremonies; the Dahomey believed that sacrifices to their gods, incantations and talismans would help strengthen them and protect them in battle. They were legendary in both Africa and Europe for refusing to retreat even in the fiercest of battles. In an account from 1889, French naval officer Jean Bayol describes witnessing a new Agojie recruit being tasked with executing a prisoner as a test of her bravery: ‘[She] walked jauntily up, swung her sword three times with both hands, then calmly cut the last flesh that attached the head to the trunk … She then squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it.’

Bayol’s incredibly visceral account would have done nothing to dissuade westerners from their view that Africans were bloodthirsty savages, and we have only his account to rely on. Whatever really happened, the Dahomey’s reputation as terrifying and fearless was cemented by accounts like these.

In real life, battle is rarely sexy, except maybe mud wrestling, and many of the romantic depictions of the Dahomey (including their outfits in The Woman King) aren’t historically accurate. Depictions of the Agojie were fetishised and sexualised in Western media, where they represented the exoticism that Africa embodied for colonialists. Even the term ‘Amazon’ played into this picture of them as glamorous, almost mythical beings. In reality, they would probably have been dressed like the men. In fact, stories are told that their enemies often didn’t realise they were fighting women. As cool as Viola Davis looks in her leather bikini top, her real-life counterparts would probably have dressed in clothes similar to those of historical pirates – practical, loose, breathable linen tunics, headscarves and shoes. They did wear jewellery though, as photos and illustrations attest – traditional long necklaces of beads, and gold earrings.

The Dahomey were skilled and talented fighters and, as far as we can tell, didn’t cut off a single boob, showing that the Greeks just had some weird ideas about how women’s bodies work. They were trained in guerrilla tactics, including using a network of tunnels to evade capture, and used guns and knives among other weaponry. As well as neighbouring tribes, the Agojie faced colonial invaders in the shape of the French, who, like many European powers, were keen to nab their slice of Africa. Wall art depicting Agojie in battle decapitating their enemies can still be seen in Benin today, as can a throne decorated with enemy skulls, a symbol of Dahomey ruthlessness. At the height of their powers, the Agojie played a significant part in the defeat of several neighbouring kingdoms.

The history of the slave trade in West Africa is complex. In reality, slavery and the trade of people was an everyday part of life in many of these kingdoms, where people would often be captured by the enemy, or by warring tribes hoping to make a bit of extra cash by swapping their enemies for food, weapons and goods. However, it was not enacted on the industrial scale seen later by the peoples of Benin when European powers began their assault on the continent.

By the late 19th century, the European colonial presence in Africa had grown aggressively. In The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, Dan Hicks describes the last years of Queen Victoria as bringing ‘new extremes in militaristic corporate colonialism in Africa.’ The French in particular were keen to crack down on any opposition to their positions all over North and West Africa, and by the 1890s they were waging aggressive war against the Kingdom of Dahomey.

As well as this, the status of women within the Dahomey community was declining as colonisation took hold. The Agojie were defeated in battle by the French in 1892, in the Second Franco-Dahomean War, their last and bloodiest conflict. Of the 1,200 women who went into battle, only 60 survived. It was a brutal massacre. The French, with newer weapons, artillery and cavalry, were too much even for the Agojie. Despite defeating them, the French could not help but admire the female warriors’ skills, as a French Foreign Legionnaire, known only as Bern, remarked: ‘Warrioresses … fight with extreme valour … always ahead of the other troops. They are outstandingly brave, well trained for combat and very disciplined.’

The Agojie were disbanded by the French, and those women who did survive returned to their families, where they may have found it difficult to assimilate. Accounts differ, but some sources say that the last Agojie woman died as late as the 1970s. Today, many Benin families can claim Agojie ancestors, and oral histories and traditions keep those stories alive. Dahomey women still perform songs and dances that the Agojie would have performed all those years ago.

Despite the undeniable bravery and skill of the Agojie, their story is not one of fairy-tale heroism. They existed in colonial Africa, where violence and slavery were part of everyday life. The Agojie were soldiers, and with that came the brutality of war. They captured many people, either as slaves in their own communities, or to be sold to westerners. Even today, that legacy has left scars on the communities.

In Wives of the Leopard Edna Bay explores the complex legacy of the Agojie: ‘Dahomey was neither a state that terrorized its citizens nor a Garden of Eden whose citizens enjoyed an idyllic existence.’ Bay argues that while the Dahomey Amazons did not rule over a matriarchy, the Kingdom of Dahomey still ‘finds women exercising choice, influence and autonomy, if not in wholly egalitarian relationships with men, in situations where there was a clear recognition of their right to do so.’ The Dahomey warriors do not present us with an idealistic feminist paradise, full of sword-wielding Gal Gadots fighting the evils of sexism, but rather a real-life example of a community that chose to extend at least some power to its women on an almost equal footing with men. What 19th-century European country could claim the same?

Today, women in combat are still in the minority. In the UK in 2023, just 11.7 per cent of the regular armed forces are women, and combat roles were only fully extended to them in 2018. Women in the armed forces still face prejudice. According to one soldier, Private Lucy Gartshore, speaking to the National Army Museum, many male soldiers simply don’t take their female counterparts seriously:

There were a few people who had a problem with women being there, saying we’re not strong enough … The lads would just watch us doing it all because some didn’t think we could do it as some parts are very heavy, like the breech …[Eventually] we had definitely changed the minds of the lads as they loved us on the gun and all treated us equal.

As female warriors, the Dahomey Agojie were anomalies, but, in terms of their impact, they had one thing in common with every other army, in that, disproportionately, the people they affected were women. According to General Patrick Cammaert, a former UN peacekeeping commander, as quoted by the charity Women for Women, ‘It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict.’

As well as dealing with the impact of conflict, women often become their family’s sole breadwinner, caring for their communities in conditions of poverty and violence. Rape is a common weapon in modern warfare, and one-fifth of women displaced by conflict have faced sexual violence. Women are also less likely to have access to education and opportunities to improve or escape their circumstances.

The Agojie are an impressive and fascinating part of West African history. Their story may not be a feminist one, but there is still much we can learn from their strength and bravery – they had agency not afforded the majority of other women in the 19th century, and learning about their feats has been fascinating. Though we may admire their bravery in the face of colonialist warfare, it’s important to remember that they were complicit in a trade that led to the misery of thousands more women. Perhaps, in the future of warfare, women may be the solution to peace, not as warriors but as diplomats. According to Women for Women: ‘When women participate in peace processes, the resulting agreement is 35 per cent more likely to last at least 15 years.’

The Dahomey Agojie were not warrior princesses fighting for peace, justice and the American way. But their example may encourage us to recognise that women possess the fortitude, bravery and skill to bring down empires, should they so choose. How that may be accomplished, however, is up to us.

10 Ways Women Dealt with Periods Throughout History

1. According to primary sources from ancient Egypt, women would make tampons from cotton (nice) and papyrus (less nice).

2. Medieval Europeans used, among other things, sphagnum moss, known for being very absorbent. Don’t want your period? Don’t worry! Chances are you’re so undernourished you won’t get one anyway.

3. In ancient Equatorial Africa, grass was woven or rolled up to absorb blood as either pads or tampons.

4. In ancient Japan, women had to seclude themselves from everyone else and ritually purify. You don’t want your spirit escaping your body through your period blood, do you?

5. Having your period in 1500s China? Have some marijuana. It’ll help with the pain. And most things, to be honest. You can still buy CBD period products today.

6. In 17th-century France, take some motherwort to ease your period cramps. Or how about an enema?

7. In Victorian Britain, women used rags, sponges or bags of ashes or sawdust as pads and tampons. Also be careful not to commit any murders or other violent acts – you’re more likely to do so on your period, according to doctors.

8. Ancient Mayan women were banned from rituals and sacred places during their periods, as the blood was believed to have mystic energy. Since the Mayans performed blood sacrifices, any other spilling of blood was considered taboo.

9. In the first half of the 20th century, sanitary belts kept your towel in place before adhesive strips were invented in the 1970s. It was sort of like a mini version of the wraps sumo wrestlers wear.

10. Can’t be arsed with any of this? Be like marathon runner Kiran Gandhi in 2015, and proudly free bleed all the way to the finish line.

ANGELA MORLEY

How to Thrive

I’m about nine years old, and I wake up in the middle of the night. It must be 3am, and I’m very annoyed, because I’ve been woken up by some girls from school sitting on my bottom bunk and talking about me. ‘I can hear you, you know!’ I say loudly, but they keep chatting. I am hallucinating, but I don’t know this yet. Thirsty, I get up to go to the bathroom, but I’m feeling very hot and the bathroom seems a long way away. I lie down on the cool carpet of the landing for a bit of respite, and am just enjoying this when my dad’s face, turned sideways, comes into view. I stare back for a second, trying to figure out what’s happening. ‘What are you doing?’ he whispers. I explain I am too hot and the carpet is cooling me down.

This was the first time I can ever remember being properly ‘ill’ – I have a fever, a temperature, I am exhausted and I feel sick. It lasts for several days, all of which have blurred into one, single, boring and horrible event. It’s unrelentingly rubbish. I can’t even sit up and read in bed, and I quickly get bored of all my audio cassettes. During one hazy state, which may have been daytime or night-time, my dad puts a pile of new tapes onto my bedside table. He says that he knows I’ve run out of things to listen to, so here are some of his tapes I might enjoy. Listening to these tapes was a formative moment of my life, and led to my becoming a comedian.

The tapes in question were as following:

Not the Nine O’Clock News

Round the Horne

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

And

The Goon Show.

When I look at my sense of humour now, I can see how every one of these shows influenced it. The silly but sharp characters of Round the Horne, all pulled together by the deadpan Kenneth Horne. The dry, nonsensical wit of Hitchhiker’s Guide, interspersed with fantastical situations and ideas. A song about liking trucking from Not The Nine O’ Clock News. But I think The Goon Show influenced me most of all. I knew, right from the start, that it was funny. Sometimes I didn’t know why it was funny – It’s packed with 1950s references and jokes that a nine-year-old in 2001 would not have understood. But everything, from the situations to the songs, to the writing to the comedians, made me madly happy. I couldn’t believe the range of Peter Sellers. I loved Neddie Seagoon’s stupid but endearing personality. I perfected an impression of Spike Milligan’s Eccles. It was a completely different, completely stupid world. And nothing brings me back to that world more instantaneously that the show’s theme, a lively, big band number.

Cut to a few years down the line. Now a full-time fan, I’m a teen really enjoying the new-found freedom of Wikipedia. On one of my Goon Show rabbit holes, having googled everything I possibly could about the Goons themselves, I start clicking on the other cast members, the announcer, the musicians, and the music arranger from Series 3 onwards, Angela Morley. I read that Angela, a well-respected and successful composer, was also a trans woman. Reading this, I am surprised. My limited knowledge of trans people in the mid 2000s meant that I had never come across an example of a famous trans person before, and especially not one I felt a personal connection with.

What surprised me was not necessarily that Angela was trans, but that a trans woman at that time could not only be visible, but very successful. The sad reality is that for the majority of history, being trans comes with heavy baggage. Even those who start in privileged positions are often forced into difficult ones by the rejection they endure. How did Angela deal with the problems she encountered, and why did she choose to come out as a trans woman in 1970? I wanted to explore more about the life of Angela Morley: who she was, what she did, and how she came to help create some of film’s most iconic music.

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Angela Morley was born in 1924 in Leeds, Yorkshire, and given the name Walter by her parents. In a documentary filmed later in life, she recalls falling in love with music before she could even read or write, developing the ability to recognise tunes and reproduce them from an early age. She came from a musical family, and, due to money restrictions, was largely self-taught, only having piano lessons aged eight. Leaving school at 15, she joined a dance hall band and soon began earning money, and continued working in jazz bands for the remainder of the 1940s. She then decided to move into full-time work as a composer, conductor and arranger, rather than continuing as a musician. Angela found composing and conducting much more rewarding; she was able to realise her own ideas for the first time. She was just 26 at the time. Soon she was working for BBC Radio, writing and arranging music on the fly. She recalled that, while working with the Goons, she was given mere hours sometimes to arrange music in time for the show. This was back in Radio’s heyday, when the Goons attracted millions of listeners. She also composed and arranged the music for the legendary Hancock’s Half Hour. Yes, the iconic, jumpy, grumpy theme that is still instantly recognisable today was by Angela.

Life as a BBC in-house composer and arranger was stressful. Various programme producers and directors would call you up and say something like ‘I need some music for a documentary about starfish by Wednesday; it’s got to sound really star-fishy’ and then you had to get to work. Your music had to be as good as any orchestral piece, but produced in a fraction of the time and with a miniscule budget.

In the 2019 BBC Radio 4 documentary, Musical Variations: The Life of Angela Morley, Stuart Barr delves into what made Angela’s work so compelling. Part of her talent lay in the way that, as Stuart Barr describes, she was able to incorporate different ‘voices’ of instruments and melodies, without the piece ever sounding crowded or jumbled. In the Hancock’s Half Hour theme, for example, a tune that’s familiar to many people of a certain age (and to comedy nerds of all ages), Angela perfectly encapsulates the mood of the show: jumpy, bright strings undercut by a morose tuba – the cynical personality of Hancock, browbeaten by his cheery friends.

Angela’s career was coming on in leaps and bounds, and soon she was a musical director for acts like Shirley Bassey, Dusty Springfield and Marlene Dietrich. In fact, as Shirley Bassey’s first musical director, one could argue that Angela helped to shape the sound that made Bassey famous. If you’ve ever heard an early Bassey record, for example the album Bassey Spectacular, you’ve also heard Angela and her arrangements. As musical director, you were not simply writing or arranging music – you were a manager, a therapist and a creative partner all rolled into one. Angela’s shy and sensitive nature seemed perfect for working alongside the big divas.

Angela’s career was growing, but what she really wanted, more than anything, was to compose for film. By 1953 she was already musical director of Philips Records in the UK, aged only 29. TV and radio had made her, but she began to look at much bigger projects. In the 1960s, she began arranging music for British films such as The Looking Glass War, as well as arranging music for Britain’s Eurovision entries.

To many, Angela’s life must have looked like a dream – she was scoring films, writing for TV, conducting orchestras; everything a musician could want. But she wasn’t living her full life. She was still living publicly as male, despite knowing that this was not her true identity. In interviews, friends and family note that she had always been ‘gentle’ and ‘sensitive’, descriptions that might, perhaps, be easier to ascribe to her in hindsight, knowing that she had in fact been female the whole time. Others describe her as awkward, shy, and clearly uncomfortable in her body – again, something it’s all too easy to account for now that we know who she really was. Many trans people speak of a physical discomfort they feel before they transition. Angela was obviously unhappy in her skin, and unable to communicate this in a world where transgender people were barely beginning to be understood. Transgender people have existed as long as humans have, but transitioning publicly was something entirely new. Although there had been historical cases of people living as their preferred gender, only a handful had actually had access to any gender-affirming surgery.

In 1970, Angela married her second wife, Christine, a singer (her first wife, Beryl, having passed away a few years before), and in the same year started to live openly as a woman. Angela seems to have been given a lot of support by her partner in the decision, saying that she could never have done it without Christine’s help. When Angela was asked how they would work as a couple after her transition, she simply said ‘We’ve got more than love. We’ve got music.’

The public reaction was a lot more understanding than I assumed it would have been, speaking as I am from the vantage point of 21st-century Britain, where trans people’s identities are under constant threat and scrutiny. I spoke to journalist and writer India Willoughby about coming out as trans while in the public eye. For most folk, meeting or knowing a trans person is uncommon. ‘You’ve got to remember, more people have claimed to have seen a ghost than have met a trans person’, India told me. I love this stat. What a great way to put it. I asked India what it was like to grow up in the 1960s and 1970s and whether there was any real awareness of trans people in the media or everyday life.

My first awareness was a story in a Sunday tabloid in 1981 … the front page story was about [actor and model] Caroline Cossey … the headline was along the line of ‘Bond Girl is Really a Boy’ … before she was outed, she had a regular career … I can remember the day that paper came into my house … I was a teenager … I kind of almost felt guilty about how I felt … my only references until then were comedians [in drag] like Dick Emery … I felt I was going to be ridiculed … but when I saw the Caroline Cossey story, it was the first time I’d seen anyone [trans] in the real world … she was just so beautiful.

In fact, although there were the usual tabloid ‘sex change’ headlines, all in all, Angela’s transition was received with little fanfare. Her colleagues at the BBC seemed more concerned with how they should now address her than anything. At the end of her first rehearsal back at the BBC after her transition had been complete, the orchestra stood up to applaud her. According to Rosemary Squires, who worked with Angela at the time, she pulled out her handkerchief as they applauded, saying ‘Thank you, fellas, thank you’. Her stepsister Sylvie, although initially shocked, also didn’t treat her any differently. ‘You’re still the same person’, she told Angela. Of course, this didn’t mean that there weren’t difficulties. Angela turned down the opportunity to appear in The Last Goon Show of All TV special, because she feared a public backlash to her transition. She was similarly hesitant about her later film work fame as a composer, where she would be credited as ‘Angela Morley’ (Morley was her grandmother’s maiden name). While Angela knew that living as herself was the right thing to do, she was also aware of how vulnerable it made her.

Finally, in the 1970s, Angela’s big Hollywood break came in the form of … rabbits. At the last moment, the composer for 1978’s bunny bloodbath Watership Down dropped out, and needed replacing with only weeks to go. Angela stepped up, and the resulting score – at once dreamy and menacing – has become a cult classic. I did think about watching Watership Down for this book, but I just couldn’t face it. I’m not a gritty 1970s animation gal. I like Thumper too much. But I have listened to the soundtrack, and it’s beautiful. (During my interview with India, Bright Eyes came on the radio in the background of the café she was in, which was a lovely coincidence.) Watership Down launched Angela not only into a bigger world of film-making, but also, and finally, as herself: Angela Morley.

Scoring films about murderous rabbits was not Angela’s dream pursuit, though. She still wanted something more prestigious on her resumé. But, like the rest of us, she had to make money. The world of TV music scoring was opening up all sorts of avenues. TV was entering a golden era and Angela was behind music for some of the 1970s and 1980s most iconic shows, like Dynasty, Dallas, Wonder Woman, and Cagney & Lacey. I do wonder if, even subconsciously, she was picked to score for women’s TV shows because of her gender. Angela’s earlier work in ‘light’ music, before she transitioned, was also associated largely with female audiences and was not given the recognition that more ‘serious’ music might have attracted. Even today, an idea persists that ‘women’s’ culture is exclusively for other women to make and consume. Work made by and for women, it seems, is not to be taken seriously. According to research done by AT&T into podcast audiences, for example:

When it comes to sports, 58% of men that listen to podcasts prefer listening to a male voice. When it comes to true crime podcasts, 60% of female listeners claim they don’t have a strong preference for the hosts’ gender, compared to only 40% of men that listen to podcasts [who] claim the same.

Recognition of Angela’s talent has slowly grown over the years. As well as the BBC documentary, there have been some shows and programmes made about Angela, including a radio drama starring Rebecca Root, but there are still no biographies of her. It seems that her talent and pioneering achievements have been largely overlooked. It’s still a struggle to find, all the way down a long Wikipedia list, her achievement as the first openly trans person to be nominated for an Oscar (twice). Angela never did get her big Hollywood blockbuster composing job. Composing success outside of TV work proved elusive. Was it possible that the world wasn’t ready for a transgender female composer to make her mark? Only Angela herself will really know how differently she was treated as Wally and as Angela.

I wondered how Angela must have felt as a woman in a largely male industry, and so I asked India if she was conscious of being treated differently after her transition. She recalls an incident at work, in a new job after she had transitioned, when, during a meeting, and as the only woman, she was asked to get everyone tea and coffee, despite being one of the most senior people in the room. She also recalled:

There were times when we would have a big group meeting, and I would put forward a suggestion, and they would write it down, and then towards the end of the meeting they would say, ‘Oh I really liked that idea that Bob, or one of the other guys said earlier’ … I swear to God that never used to happen [before she transitioned].

I am pretty confident every women reading this book will know the feeling. Just as Angela surely had, India also became more aware of other dangers she faced. She told me about being followed to a taxi rank late one night in central London, by a man who only went away after the taxi driver intervened: ‘In a way, you’ve got to go through your second life at fast forward … [in] the first part of your life [these incidents] weren’t even considerations … largely, I think that men just aren’t aware that they still aren’t giving that respect … they just don’t get it.’ Angela too now had to face a more dangerous world, the very real price she paid for living as her authentic self.

Angela’s biggest accolades came when she was introduced to legendary film composer John Williams, whose name has become synonymous with epic Hollywood scores, such as Indiana Jones, E.T. and the original Star Wars trilogy were all Williams’s work, but composing and arranging for such mammoth projects was no easy feat. Instead, Williams, like many composers, hired other musicians to help score or arrange his work. Angela became one of them when she was introduced to Williams in the 1970s. Her work on his films spans decades of legendary classics: Star Wars, E.T., Hook, Home Alone and Schindler’s List. Angela was not credited for any of her work, simply because arranging was not normally credited. In fact, Williams seemed a little embarrassed to ask someone as accomplished as Angela to do this smaller task. In 2019, he sang her praises highly: ‘[She was] one of my favourite go-to people … personal, immaculate, very refined … I didn’t want to miss this phone call, because I’m just happy to add these few words to extolling this great person.’

Angela continued to compose for TV and score for films into the 1990s, as well as create her own compositions purely for her own enjoyment. Funnily enough, Angela didn’t actually like listening to her own scores in the cinema, because she felt the audio technology didn’t do them justice. She called it ‘torture’. She also had one more chance at the big Hollywood movie when she was asked to score the second Harry Potter film (of all the things a trans women could be asked to do!) using Williams’s work from the first. But Angela turned it down. If she couldn’t compose her own stuff, she wasn’t interested.

Angela Morley died in Scottsdale, Arizona, on 14 January 2009, aged 84. She had been living in the US since the 1970s, and moved to Arizona from California in the 1990s. She was survived by Christine, her wife of almost four decades, and one of her children from her first marriage, the other having predeceased her. There are two plaques in her memory in Leeds: a rainbow one and a blue plaque commemorating her birthplace.

I asked India if she feels, as I have also wondered, if coming out as trans in the 1970s was, in some ways, easier than it is today, given the heightened publicity and media attention surrounding trans people. India agrees:

I think now is the toughest time in history to be trans. Because while there was generally across society as a whole more ignorance in the 60s, 70s and 80s … trans people were so rarely mentioned … they were kind of seen as … one-off and inconsequential that there wasn’t great kickback on a societal level … governments weren’t shouting about them every day, papers weren’t screaming about them every day … that’s not to distract from the courage [It took in the past], it was incredibly difficult for trans people in the 60s and 70, but in a slightly different way.

And it’s not just India. According to Stonewall:

Transphobic hate crime has been rising faster than against any other group, with the latest Home Office figures showing a 186% rise in Transphobic hate crime reports in England and Wales between 2018 – 2023 … One in eight trans employees (12 per cent) have been physically attacked by a colleague or customer in the last year … Half of trans people (51 per cent) have hidden their identity at work for fear of discrimination … A quarter of trans people (25 per cent) have experienced homelessness.

Given that people like Angela are only just starting to gain wider recognition, it seems appropriate to highlight the voices of other trans people in the UK today. I asked India if there was anything she wanted people to know about the trans community. Her answer was simple and poignant.

Just that being trans is real … you’d have to be crazy to choose to be trans … when you transition it ripples out … it affects family, it affect friends … we’re also a tiny percentage of the population … we’re just human beings. We just want to have a normal life.

Angela’s talent and skill helped take her from her working-class childhood in Leeds to Hollywood. She never fully realised her dream of composing her own live action film score, but the work she did do, on John Williams’s scores, on Watership Down, and even on Hancock’s Half Hour, has become part of music legend. As Angela’s story becomes more widely known, I hope her legacy helps to encourage new generations of trans youth to flourish in whatever way they dream.

JUDITH KERR

How to Appreciate the Small Things

Like many, many British children, one of my very earliest reading memories is the picture book The Tiger Who Came to Tea. The book is a classic of children’s literature, and I’ve always loved it and the adjacent series, Mog, about a silly cat, but it was only when I was given Bombs on Aunt Dainty as a teen that I became really interested in the life of the author of these books, Judith Kerr. Not only was Judith a brilliant writer and artist, she had lived one of the most extraordinary childhoods of anyone I’d ever read about.

Judith Kerr was born in Germany in 1923, which is a bad start. You really don’t want to be born in 1920s Germany. Especially if you’re Jewish and ESPECIALLY if your dad is one of the top celebrity Jewish writers of his day. Alfred Kerr (né Kempner) was so famous and well respected, in fact, that he was nicknamed ‘das Kulturpapst’ or ‘the Culture Pope’. I’m not sure that we have an equivalent in Britain today. Maybe if Mary Beard was merged with Richard Osman?

Judith spent the first ten years of her life as the privileged child of the literati, her writer father and a composer mother, Julia Weismann – they lived in a leafy suburb, had servants, and Judith and her brother played happily together after school. In her book Judith Kerr’s Creatures, A Celebration of Her Life and Work, Judith describes her early interest in illustration as a small child: ‘I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to draw. It seemed a normal way to pass one’s time, just as it was normal for my brother to kick a ball about.’

But a dark cloud loomed over Judith’s childhood, and it was growing every day. Every year that Judith grew older, the Nazis were growing more powerful, until in the 1933 election, they were voted in and suddenly their thuggish and bigoted behaviours became law.

The Nazis had never been reticient about their antisemitism, but now their plans were laid completely bare. Jewish citizens were rapidly stripped of their rights – boycotts, and then attacks on Jewish businesses began. Then the Nuremberg Laws came into effect. These were a series of laws stripping Jews and other ethnic minorities of their civil rights. Jewish children could only be given specific, Nazi-approved names. Passports became invalid unless stamped with a ‘J’. Jewish people couldn’t vote, or hold positions of power. They were no longer allowed to practise medicine. Then they were banned from any professional jobs. They couldn’t go to ‘German’ schools, and their assets would be seized if they left the country. Simply having a Jewish grandparent was enough for you to be marked out.

Alfred was already in his 50s when Judith was born, and had been at the heart of Germany’s literary and cultural spaces for decades. But almost overnight, he became a wanted man. He had received a tip-off from a friend that he was mentioned in the Nazis ‘Black Book’, a book of cultural figures and politicians who they wanted to get rid of.

After the war, it was discovered that the Nazis had also compiled a black book for Britain, which included, among the usual suspects, E M Forster (author of A Room With a View), Noël Coward (his words could kill, I suppose) and J B S Haldane, the guy who said that if God did exist, he had an ‘Inordinate fondness for beetles’. Nice one, Nazis. You got our three most powerful guys there.

In February 1933, the Kerr family decided that there was no time to lose in getting out of Germany. With hindsight, it seems obvious to us now that they urgently needed to escape, but the fact is that a lot of Germans in 1933 had no idea just how bad it was going to get. The first Judith knew of the situation was when her father, who had been ill in bed with flu, disappeared. Their mother explained that he had gone to Switzerland, and that the family would follow him a few days later. On 5 March 1933, Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany. The very next day, Nazis officials arrived at the Kerr household to seize their passports. They were too late. The Kerrs had gone.

Years later, Judith discovered that her mother, who was proud of her daughter’s art work, had chosen to pack some of Judith’s drawings: ‘I still find it very moving that when we had to flee Germany early in 1933, she packed these pictures among the things she thought most important to save.’

The drawings are mostly simple city scenes: children playing in a park; people dancing; a funfair with a Punch and Judy show; a tram going down a Berlin street. Scenes of a life Judith was about to lose forever.

Judith, her parents and her brother Michael first escaped to neutral Switzerland, with the idea that they might be able to go home once it was all over. The Nazis had wasted no time; they had already started burning Alfred’s books. Life as refugees wasn’t easy. Alfred was deprived of his income when the Nazis stopped payments from his books and articles, and he found it difficult to get published in seemingly neutral Switzerland. Despite this, Judith says that her parents never let her or Michael feel scared – to them, it was all one big adventure. The Kerr family lived for a while in a guesthouse, before finding out that Alfred had a price on his head, dead or alive. Knowing that some people in Switzerland would have happily sold him to the Nazis, he decided they should move again.

Judith’s parents settled on France, where they had some family. They emigrated to Paris and Judith and Michael began learning French and settling into life as Parisian children. Judith must have had a gift for languages because I did five years’ worth of French in school and all I can say is ‘S’il te plaît, papa, pouvons-nous avoir un gros Toblerone quand nous arriverons au tunnel sous la Manche?’

Life as a refugee must have been hard, but as Judith remembers, her parents turned it into a game, delighting in all the different surprises and adventures they had along the way, even when they lived in tiny, grotty flats and couldn’t speak the language. As children, Judith and Michael had no real idea of the constant danger they were in. Judith continued to paint and draw, even producing an 80-page story complete with illustrations, and paintings depicting a holiday in Belgium and a stay with her grandparents, who lived in Nice.

In 1936 Alfred sold a screenplay to a UK film company, and they decided to move again, to London. A refugee organisation had also agreed to help them out, and they arrived in March, three years after leaving Berlin. The Kerrs seemed to possess precognitive powers – less than five years later Paris too fell to the Nazis and once again they had escaped in the nick of time. Judith was very lucky – over 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust. Others who did escape to Britain and other countries never saw their families again.

Once again, Judith had to start over, learning a new language and a new culture. She often found herself switching between German, French and English without meaning to, which made conversation with strangers difficult. She and Michael both received support from sponsors that gave them the chance to go to private schools, although Judith did not enjoy her experience, feeling rather awkward and out of place. Her drawings reflect this; she seems only to have used black and white during these in-between years.

Judith spent her teenage years in wartime London. Finally able to turn her attention to her real passion, she began attending art classes at the London Polytechnic, while also working for the war effort as a fire-watcher and for the Red Cross.

But although she now had the chance to hone her artistic skills, there were bigger problems to deal with. Her brother, Michael, was briefly imprisoned as an enemy alien due to his status as a German-born man of fighting age, and Judith too found it difficult to manage as a German-born English girl. She had to constantly assert that she was a victim of the Nazis, not a supporter. During this time, Judith also began to see her parents, as we all do eventually, as the fragile humans that they were. Her father, once a renowned celebrity, was reduced to living in shabby London hotels and to writing prose only heard by other refugees (the screenplay fee had quickly run out, and the film was never made). But Judith was determined to see the positive in every situation. Despite some reactions to her background, Judith felt that she was truly beginning to belong:

I think it was during these dark months in 1940 that I became a Brit … now for the first time I saw the patience and humour of the ordinary people as, after terrifying sleepless nights, they struggled to work through the broken streets. And their tolerance: though my parents both spoke with unmistakable German accents, no one ever said anything nasty to them.

And then there was the Blitz. The Blitz lasted from September 1940 to May 1941, starting with a 57-night bombing campaign and killing over 40,000 civilians in London, and in cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool, Belfast and Cardiff. Despite the legendary ‘Blitz spirit’ that many people speak of today, living through it was a terrifying, ruthless and exhausting existence. My own grandpa, who worked as a solicitor in London before he was called up to the RAF, recalls turning into his offices’ street one day, to find that the entire building had been obliterated. With no digital backups, he and his colleagues simply had to sit down and try to remember as much about their files as they could. He also recalled the terror of a later Nazi weapon, the doodlebug; ‘If you heard the noise of one, you just prayed the noise wouldn’t stop,’ he told me many years ago, ‘because the second the noise stopped, that meant it was going to fall on you’. Such things became commonplace in Judith’s life. Speaking to The Guardian in 2018, she recalled the terror of living through the Blitz as a teen, and her determination to make something of herself:

‘I was sleeping on a chest of drawers in the cellar,’ she says. ‘Everyone expected the invasion any day and I knew we wouldn’t survive. I remember lying there thinking: “I’m 17, and I don’t yet know what I can do, and I would so like to find out.” ’

Even in this moment of absolute terror, as a teenage refugee sheltering from the bombs, Judith maintained an incredible determination to try to live life to the fullest. Air raids had disrupted Judith’s nightly art classes, so she attended some on Sundays at St Martin’s College (and although she did have a thirst for knowledge, I don’t believe she studied sculpture). Here she spent hours sketching life models and learning new techniques that helped her study her subjects and their movements.

Judith and her family survived the war, and became naturalised British citizens in 1947. Despite his difficult life as a refugee, Judith’s father was as well-respected as ever, and his citizenship sponsor was George Bernard Shaw. He died in 1948, aged 80, after a final return trip to Germany, where he was met with rapturous applause and celebration, finally vindicated by his homeland. Now that the war was over, Judith decided that she wanted to attend a proper art school. Initially she had difficulties in being accepted – all the scholarships were for British-born students. Eventually, however, she got a trade scholarship (meaning that she had to have a job connected to her studies), and she enrolled on an illustration course. She actually spent much of her time designing prints for textiles, but she had already begun to hone her vibrant block colour illustration style, as is evident in her textile designs of the time.

In 1951, while working at a girl’s school opposite the new BBC television centre, she went for lunch in the BBC canteen, and there met her future husband, writer Nigel Kneale, of Quatermass fame. (For those not familiar with it, Quatermass was a pioneering BBC sci-fi show made in 1979 that managed to absolutely terrify viewers using little more than some cut-out backdrops and basic special effects.) Judith’s relationship with Nigel (or Tom, as she called him) would provide her with the security and support she needed to pursue her artistic passions. Judith got a job at the BBC, and they married and had two children. During these early years, Judith would take her young daughter to the zoo and make up stories for her about the animals there, particularly the tigers. Once the children were in school, Judith had a choice to make: go back to the BBC, or into teaching. She hadn’t done any drawing in over a decade. But she wanted to write a children’s book. She went back to the zoo with her sketchbook and began to draw.

Those drawings would become The Tiger Who Came to Tea, in which a tiger (don’t think about it too hard) arrives for tea at the house of a little girl called Sophie, and proceeds to eat them out of house and home. Once the tiger has left, Sophie and her parents, with nothing left to eat in the house, have to go out for their tea. The next day Sophie buys a big tin of tiger food in preparation for his return (presumably from one of those artisan whole food shops where all the cereal is in bins), but the tiger never comes back. It was an instant success and remains to this day a classic children’s book.

Some people have suggested that the tiger may be an allegory for Nazism, that the house is Germany, and that Sophie and her family are the German people, whose resources are depleted in order to feed this hungry monster. I think it’s about a tiger who came to tea, and so did Judith Kerr, who was at pains to point out that she didn’t need to write an allegory about the Nazi regime – she would go on to write three novels directly addressing it. As a young child, Judith simply didn’t have the capacity or information to truly understand the threat posed by the Nazis, and she writes about this in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. I have to admit that, as an English literature graduate, I can be as guilty as the next person of reading too much into a text, but there are people who will look for symbolism everywhere (‘of course, the caterpillar is hungry because he, as the worker, has been denied the fruit of his labour’).

Judith loved creating children’s books. Her illustrations have a bright, patchwork quality to them: the shades of orange in the tiger’s fur; the purplish tinge to Mog. They are a splash of joyful colour and perfectly reflect her joie de vivre. As a writer, she shared her father’s sense of humour, but otherwise her work couldn’t have been more different. Looking at her illustrations today, I find them lively and unpretentious, instantly recognisable, and beautifully warm.

In the 1970s, she began working on her Mog series, which, unless you spent your childhood under a rock, you will probably be familiar with. Mog, a beloved family cat based on several of Judith’s own, was forever getting into scrapes and misunderstandings, occasionally accidentally foiling a burglar or losing her favourite pink rabbit toy (maybe a reference to Judith’s own pink rabbit, which was to inspire her later books). Mog passes away in the last book of the series, something children’s picture-book characters don’t normally do. Perhaps Judith knew from her own experiences that it was better to introduce children to the realities of death than to live in a dream world.

Now with two young children of her own, Judith was finding it difficult to explain to her family exactly what her own childhood had been like: the travelling, the Nazis, the war. She decided to tell her story in a series of books. After watching The Sound of Music, her son had said, ‘Now we know what it was like when Mummy was a little girl!’ Realising that children had few opportunities to learn about the war other than through all-singing, all-dancing Hollywood musicals, she began her trilogy, Out of the Hitler Time. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Bombs on Aunt Dainty and A Small Person Far Away are the fictionalised chronicles of Judith’s (Anna’s) childhood, her teen years and her young adulthood as a German-born refugee. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit is a reference to Judith’s toy, Pink Rabbit, which she had had to leave behind in Berlin, while Bombs on Aunt Dainty recalls an encounter with a doodlebug at a funeral in 1940s’ London. A Small Person Far Away, the final book in the series, fictionalises Judith’s brief return to Germany, to the places where she had once played, and where she had had to leave her childhood and German identity behind. It might be my favourite – in many ways it’s darker and more pessimistic than the first two books, but I loved learning about post-war Germany and the way the people had had to rebuild both their country and their psyches. Judith knew that it was important to tell her parents’ whole story, not just the adventurous parts.

It wasn’t easy to write about the war and the Holocaust in the 1970s. It had become something that everyone wanted to forget. The original French edition of Pink Rabbit had all references to Hitler and the Nazis removed, which must have been a bit confusing for the plot. The Holocaust was not yet a subject taught in schools, and Judith’s book provided a gentle way to introduce the topic to children. She did not set out to write a book about politics or history: ‘I just wanted to tell the story of my family – how, when my brother and I were young, our parents were always able to protect us … and how gradually that relationship changed until … the position was totally reversed.’

Judith’s books have brought hours of joy and comfort to children everywhere, a comfort she herself was not afforded during her own childhood. Today, child refugees like Judith still make up a huge number of people fleeing danger. According to the Red Cross: ‘Around 43 per cent of people seeking asylum in the UK in 2020 were women and children. Overall, 8 per cent were children who had arrived in the UK alone without a parent or guardian.

In the UK today, we’re so used to phrases like ‘Big Brother’ and ‘1984’ and ‘Nazis’ that they can begin to lose their meaning. But I don’t think it’s an over-reaction to be concerned about recent government attempts to clamp down on free speech. In 2022, the Conservative government proposed that the UK should repeal and replace the Human Rights Act of 1998 – you know, the one that gives us all those human rights. It protects freedom of speech, the right to protest, the right to life, freedom from torture; in short, everything that the Nazis abolished during their regime. Instead, the government insisted that these rights would be protected in a new, unimaginatively titled Bill of Rights Bill. It was announced in June 2023 that the government would not be proceeding, but they continue to pursue changes to laws that protect the rights of refugees and prisoners, aka human beings.

Certain columnists and politicians continue to encourage the idea that refugees are a threat to the UK – in much the same way that the Nazis portrayed Jews – instead of understanding that helping asylum seekers can only improve the lives of everyone. If Judith and her family had been denied entry to Britain, it’s very likely that she too would have been murdered in the Holocaust, and we would never have known the joy her work has brought. Anti-refugee rhetoric dehumanises people, but it also refuses to see their potential as contributors to our art and culture. Other children, like Sir Mo Farah, who was trafficked to Britain and forced to work as a domestic servant, only feel safe sharing their stories as successful adults, protected by celebrity and achievement. It’s so important that children who are asylum seekers, refugees and trafficking victims are safeguarded, not prosecuted.

Judith Kerr died on 22 May 2019. She was 95 years old. During her long life, she produced dozens of books, which went on to sell over ten million copies worldwide and continue to delight generations of children. Two language schools, one in London and one in Berlin, are named after her.

Judith’s attitude to life, at least partly informed by those perilous and difficult early experiences, has always seemed exemplary to me. Despite the precarity of the family’s circumstances during some of history’s darkest moments, Judith retained a faith in humanity and in the possibility of kindness and acceptance. She remained optimistic and hopeful, and her own sense of beauty and her parents’ loving protection allowed her to live fully, even while being displaced, as she remembered, looking back on her childhood in Paris:

I loved being in Paris – so much so that one evening, when my father and I were looking out over the Paris rooftops at the lights below, I’m told I said ‘Isn’t it lovely being a refugee?’

EPILOGUE

It’s summer 2021, 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and I’ve decided to splash out and go to an actual real-life bar, something we’re allowed to do again, although the rules remain vague and confusing. I’m a sucker for an aesthetically pleasing cocktail, and I’m with my friend Maddie in one of those hyper-femme cocktail places that was built with the sole purpose of being as Instagrammable as possible – neon signs, glittery drinks, vintage wallpaper, all the usual stuff. It is entirely populated by women, hen nights, girly catch-ups and outings and I LOVE IT. I take about 50 pictures in various poses with my pink cocktail and a pink neon sign. One of the quotes spelled out in neon is a particularly big crowd pleaser – every three minutes or so a girl will get up and pose next to it for the ‘gram. It’s a pretty famous quote, it’s gone round the world in songs, lyrics, speeches and art:

Well-behaved women seldom make history

‘Can I ask you to indulge me and take my photo?’ I ask my friend Maddie.

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘That’s a misunderstanding of the quote though, you know that?’

I did not. She goes on to explain. The quote comes from historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s 1976 scholarly article about little-studied Puritan funeral services (I know?! Who wouldn’t want to study that!). The quote in full reads: ‘Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all.’

Rather than producing a rallying cry to feminists to go out there and MAKE SOME NOISE, Ulrich was lamenting that the majority of women throughout history, by way of being ‘well behaved’, have remained unknown and silent.

There is a prevailing idea in Western society that all of us, regardless of gender, must do something special or noteworthy in order to be worthy of comment, praise or simply a place in the world. Women in particular, as I hope I’ve shown throughout this book, are often forced to take radical steps simply to show up in the pages of history textbooks. It is not enough simply to exist, to love, to be kind, to get up every day and be alive. A woman cannot just be an artist, or a writer, or a scientist. She must paint incredibly, write profoundly, make major breakthroughs in order to be recognised. Women’s lives are overshadowed by the men they knew, the trauma they endured or the rumours that dogged them. And many of them, having done their incredible deed, melt back into the pages of history to die obscure and undocumented.

And yet I also chose these women not just because they did extraordinary things, but because they did normal things too. Each one of them was as real and as tangible as you or me. I loved that Noor Inayat Khan wrote poems for her family on their birthdays, that Bobbi Gibb had to wear her brother’s running shorts, that Emily Davison once threw sweets in the air to celebrate graduating, that Junko Tabei got to the top of Everest and thought ‘huh’. That the match women were really proud of their hats and that Mary, Queen of Scots embroidered a funny-looking cat.

I look back to that moment with my grandma in that Irish pub, and I think of all the women in my life who are unlikely to get a book written about them, or a film made, or a portrait painted. Women who raised me, taught me, loved me, inspired me, supported me, and how these women are no less deserving of their place in history simply because they lived quietly. Women whose small acts of courage or compassion touched the lives of everyone around them. I’m sure there are women in your life about whom you feel exactly the same.

So this is my chance to say to you: you do not need to make history in order to live a life worth remembering. You do not need to make it onto an inspiring internet listicle. You do not need to be the best, the smartest, the thinnest, the most beautiful, the youngest, the most conforming or non-conforming, the most talented, the bravest or the most moral. Your life will be painted in the history books of the minds of every person whose life you’ve touched, in actions so small you may have forgotten them. As Maya Angelou said: ‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’

History has chosen to remember only the most pivotal parts of the lives of many of the women in this book, but the people who loved them remembered everything. The women I’ve written about were extraordinary, they broke barriers and boundaries, but they were also mothers, wives, sisters and friends, people who did everyday chores and errands, who had less sanitary opinions than we might like, who argued and got colds and wrote letters and watched birds on branches. More importantly, they are remembered by those who loved them. To live at all is worthy of history.

So as I close, I’d like to think of all the well-behaved women, the ones who didn’t make history, but who are no less important for it.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book wouldn’t exist without the hard work of my agent Marilia Savvides at The Plot Agency, who convinced me that someone might like to read my nonsense. Thank you, Marilia, for your support, hard work and incredible can-do attitude. It also would not have been possible without my brilliant editors Briony Gowlett and Richard Roper, and their invaluable notes and feedback; and Pauline Bache and Susanne Hillen, for their copy-editing and notes. Thank you to Mel Four for letting me live out my rococo costume dreams, and to everyone else at Octopus for their hard work. Thank you to Anna Groundwater, India Willoughby, Jo Ramasawmy and Chesca Forristal for speaking to me about their experiences and expertise: you were pivotal in bringing this book to life. Thanks to Maddie Campion for setting me straight on well-behaved women. Thank you to the countless people whose own research and passion for these women’s lives allowed me to learn so much about them. A huge thanks to my parents for sparking my interest in history and dragging me to rainy ruins every weekend in my childhood, and my high school history teachers, Miss Bebb, Miss Sommerville and Miss McPherson for fuelling that passion further. Thank you, everyone who’s ever enjoyed any of my silly history videos – you made this book happen, for better or worse. It’s been truly lovely to know that my weird ideas bring people a bit of joy. And finally Caitlin, who I would never ever forget to include, especially not at that speech at Becky’s wedding. I am really sorry. We square?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Junko Tabei

Books

Junko Tabei andHelen Y Rolfe, Honouring High Places: The Mountain Life of Junko Tabei, RMB Books, Surrey, Canada, 2021

Websites

https://mount-everest.net

Mai Yoshikawa, ‘Mountain Queen Not Done Yet’, February 2023, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2003/02/25/national/mountain-queen-not-done-yet/

Tabitha Lending, ‘Junko Tabei – Reaching New Heights’, Women In History, January 2022, https://womeninhistory.education/junko-tabei/

Freddie Wilkinson, ‘Want to Climb Mountain Everest? Here’s What You Need to Know’, Nat Geo Home, October 2022, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/climbing-mount-everest-1

Brad Frenette, ‘A Final Interview with Junko Tabei’, Outside, 20 October 2017, https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/junko-tabei-anniversary/

Rebel Girls, ‘Junko Tabei Read by Kit Deslauriers’, transcript, https://www.rebelgirls.com/podcast/junko-tabei-read-by-kit-deslauriers

The Match Women

Books and articles

Annie Besant, ‘White slavery in London’, The Link, June 1888

Louise Raw, Striking a Match: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History, Bloomsbury, London, 2009

Hallie Rubenhold, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, Doubleday, London, 2019

Websites

The Matchgirls Memorial; https://www.matchgirls1888.org

‘What was the significance of the Match Girls’ Strike in 1888?’, The National Archives, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/what-was-the-significance-of-the-match-girls-strike-in-1888

Mary Bryant

Books

Inga Clendinnen, Dancing With Strangers: The True History of the Meeting of the British First Fleet and the Aboriginal Australians, 1788, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2012

Cate Ludlow and Graham Jackson, A Grim Almanac of Georgian London, The History Press, London, 2011

Frederick A Pottle, Boswell and the Girl From Botany Bay, Heinemann, London, 1938; available online at: https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.123069/2015.123069.Boswell-And-The-Girl-From-Batany-Bay_djvu.txt

Websites

Sarah Hughes, ‘From convict to heroine: the fall and rise of Mary Bryant’, The Guardian, 13 April 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/13/meg-keneally--father-thomas-inspired-story-of-mary-bryant-botany-bay-escape

‘Dame Ellen MacArthur: The Surprising Thing I Learned Sailing Solo Round the World’ (TED Talk transcript), Scuttleboat Sailing News, 30 June 2015, https://www.sailingscuttlebutt.com/2015/06/30/dame-ellen-macarthur-the-surprising-thing-i-learned-sailing-solo-around-the-world/

‘Barangaroo the Woman’, https://www.barangaroo.com/past-present-future/history-of-barangaroo/barangaroo-the-woman

Refugee Council, ‘The Truth About Channel Crossings’, March 2023, https://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Refugee-Council-Channel-Crossings-briefing-March-2023.pdf

Josephine Baker

Books

Diana Vreeland, D.V., DaCapo Press, New York, 2003

Websites

Lauren Michele Jackson, ‘Josephine Baker was the Star France Wanted and the Spy it Needed’, 8 August 2022; https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/josephine-baker-was-the-star-france-wanted-and-the-spy-it-needed-damien-lewis-agent-josephine

Jemma Grace Carter, ‘Of Double-Blooded Birth: A History of Mixed-Race Women in the United States during the Early Twentieth Century’, unpublished thesis, University of East Anglia, 2020, https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/79838/1/2020CarterJGPhD.pdf

‘The extraordinary life of Josephine Baker’, France 24, November 2021, https://webdoc.france24.com/josephine-baker-paris-pantheon/

Clarence Lang, ‘Black Freedom and Social Class in St. Louis, Missouri between the Great Depression and the Great Society’, BlackPast.org, 30 January 2012,

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/black-freedom-and-social-class-st-louis-missouri-between-great-depression-and-great-soc/

‘(1963) Josephine Baker, “Speech at the March on Washington” ’, BlackPast.org, 3 November 2011, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1963-josephine-baker-speech-march-washington/

Lisa Waller Rogers, ‘Josephine Baker’s cheetah’, Lisa’s History Room, 1 July 2014, https://lisawallerrogers.com/tag/josephine-bakers-cheetah/

Kristen D Burton, ‘Siren of the Resistance: The Artistry and Espionage of Josephine Baker’, The National WWII Museum, 1 February 2020, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/siren-resistance-artistry-and-espionage-josephine-baker

‘Josephine Baker, the first pilot at the Pantheon’, The Institute for Women of Aviation Worldwide, 1 December 2021, https://www.iwoaw.org/women-aviation-news/women-in-aviation-history/josephine-baker-the-first-female-pilot-at-the-pantheon

Janelle Okwodu, ‘Kerry Washington on Her Elegant, Josephine Baker-Inspired Jewelry Collection’, Vogue, 9 November 2021, https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/kerry-washington-aurate-jewelry-collection-interview

Videos

‘(1925) Josephine Baker dancing the original Charleston’, Duncan Automatic Shop, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEH6eDpjgRw&ab_channel=DuncanAutomaticStop

‘Siren of the Tropics: Josephine Baker (1927), silent film’, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/SirenOfTheTropics-josephineBaker1927-silentFilm

Bobbi Gibb

Books

Bobbi Gibb, Wind in the Fire, Y42k Publishing Services, Arlington, MA, 2016

Websites

Olivia Waxman, ‘The Story Behind the Photo of a Turning-Point Protest at the New York Marathon 50 Years Ago’, Time, 3 November 2022, https://time.com/6226132/six-who-sat-history-new-york-city-marathon/

Joseph Hayes, ‘The Victorian Belief That a Train Ride Could Cause Instant Insanity’, Atlas Obscura, 12 May 2017, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/railway-madness-victorian-trains

Videos

‘Can 4 Guys Beat A Professional Pool Player?’, The Try Guys, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVTjxayKsVI&ab_channel=TheTryGuys

‘A Boston Marathon First: Bobbi Gibb On Her History-Making Run’, CBS Boston, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yKILypImQ&ab_channel=CBSBoston

‘Boston Marathon: Meet the first woman to run it – BBC News’, BBC News, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO2ChjVGL7c&ab_channel=BBCNews

‘Boston Marathon Women’s Winner Gives Trophy To Bobbi Gibb’, CBS Boston, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKlPFcKB9Ns&ab_channel=CBSBoston

Artemisia Gentileschi

Books

Mary D Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1989

Websites

‘Rape Cases Seize Italy’s Attention and Expose Cultural Rifts’, The New York Times, Gaia Pianigiani, 3 September 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/03/world/europe/italy-rape-women-violence.html

Documentaries

Michael Palin’s Quest for Artemisia, BBC Scotland, Eleanor Yule (director), BBC4, 2015

Pocahontas

Books

Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Hill and Wang, New York, 2004

Websites

Meera Baswan, ‘The True Story Behind Disney’s Pocahontas’, The Indigenous Foundation, https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/the-true-story-behind-disneys-pocahontas

Jackie Mansky (updated by Sonja Anderson), ‘The True Story of Pocahontas Is More Complicated Than You Might Think’, Smithsonian Magazine, 23 March 2017 (updated 20 February 2024), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-pocahontas-more-complicated-than-you-might-think-180962649/

Vincent Schilling, ‘The True Story of Pocahontas: Historical Myths Versus Sad Reality’, ICT, 8 September 2017, https://ictnews.org/archive/true-story-pocahontas-historical-myths-versus-sad-reality

‘Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’, Native Hope, https://www.nativehope.org/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-women-mmiw

Bernadette Devlin

Books

Bernadette Devlin, The Price of My Soul, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1969

Websites

David Beresford, ‘Devlin is “very ill” after shooting’, The Guardian, 17 January 1981, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1981/jan/17/northernireland.davidberesford

Hansard, HC Deb, 31 January 1972, vol 830 cc32–43; https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1972/jan/31/northern-ireland

Transcript from a conversation with Eamon McSweeney from Derry Journal, 21 May 2016, https://www.thepensivequill.com/2016/05/bernadette-devlin-mcaliskey-what-does.html

Documentaries

Once upon a time in Northern Ireland, KEO Films and Walk on Air Films, James Bluemel, Sian Mcilwaine (directors), BBC, 2023

Podcasts

The Blindboy Podcast: Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, November 2018

Mary Seacole

Books

Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, Penguin, London, 2005 [1857]

Websites

Lynn McDonald, ‘Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole: Nursing’s Bitter Rivalry’, History Today, 9 September 2012, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/florence-nightingale-and-mary-seacole-nursings-bitter-rivalry

Natalie Stake-Doucet, ‘The Racist Lady With the Lamp’, Nursing Clio, 5 November 2020, https://nursingclio.org/2020/11/05/the-racist-lady-with-the-lamp/

‘Mary Seacole’, National Geographic, https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/mary-seacole

Research Briefing: ‘NHS staff from overseas: Statistics’, House of Commons Library, Carl Barker, 20 November 2023, statistics https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7783/CBP-7783.pdf

NHS Workforce Race Equality Standard Report, NHS, March 2022, https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Workforce-Race-Equality-Standard-report-2021-.pdf

Christopher J Gill, Gillian C Gill, ‘Nightingale in Scutari: Her Legacy Reexamined’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, vol 40, issue 12, 15 June 2005; https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/40/12/1799/314039

CEO Magazine, 8 March 2024, https://www.theceomagazine.com/business/management-leadership/countries-with-the-most-female-ceos/

Ada Lovelace

Books

Julia Gray, I, Ada: Ada Lovelace: Rebel. Genius. Visionary, Andersen Press, London, 2020

Websites

‘Ada Lovelace: Celebrating 200 years of a computer visionary’, Bodleian Library blog, Liz McCarthy, 2015, https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/adalovelace/about-ada-lovelace/

‘What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?’, Sinclair Target, Two-Bit History blog, 18 August 2018, https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.html

Christopher Hollings, ‘The Lovelace–De Morgan mathematical correspondence: A critical re-appraisal’, Historia Mathematica, vol 4, issue 3, August 2017, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0315086017300319

‘Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and the Science Museum’, Science Museum, 18 July 2023 https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/charles-babbages-difference-engines-and-science-museum

Laura Bates, ‘Women in science: “Whoa, what are you doing here?” ’, The Guardian, 17 October 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2013/oct/17/women-in-science-ada-lovelace-gender

‘Ada Lovelace: Not a Feminist, but a Rallying Cry’, Jane Perrella blog, 10 September 2017, https://www.janeperrella.com/blog/ada-lovelace-not-a-feminist-but-a-rallying-cry

‘Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace’, Stephen Wolfram blog, 10 December 2015, https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/

Stormé DeLarverie

Websites

Ella Braidwood, ‘Sequins, spoofs and salaciousness: meet drag king and queen improv duo Dragprov’, The Guardian, 18 February 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/feb/18/drag-king-queen-improv-duo-dragprov

Marcus Wratten, ‘Victoria Scone doesn’t understand why Drag Race won’t cast drag kings: “Absolutely no reason” ’, Pink News, 5 July 2023, https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/07/05/victoria-scone-rupauls-drag-race-cast-drag-kings/

Rebecca Batley, ‘Someone was always chasing Storme DeLarverie. Then she stopped running’, LGBTQ Nation, 26 February, 2023, https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2023/02/someone-was-always-chasing-storme-delarverie-then-she-stopped-running/

‘Gay Rights’, Sky History, 28 June 2017, updated 27 April 2023, https://www.history.com/topics/gay-rights/history-of-gay-rights,

Jo Yurcaba, ‘Different fight, “same goal”: How the Black freedom movement inspired early gay activists’, NBC News, 28 February 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/different-fight-same-goal-how-black-freedom-movement-inspired-early-n1259072

‘Stormé DeLarverié,’ Drag King History, Mo B Dick, https://dragkinghistory.com/1955-1969-storme-delarverie/

Rachel Tashjian, ‘A Brief History of Stormé DeLarverié, Stonewall’s Suiting Icon’, GQ, 27 June 2019, https://www.gq.com/story/storme-delarverie-suiting

https://www.storme-delarverie.com/

‘Jewel Box Review Programme’, Queer Music Heritage, https://queermusicheritage.com/fem-jewl.html

David Carter, ‘Exploding the Myths of Stonewall’, Gay City News, 27 June 2019, https://gaycitynews.com/exploding-the-myths-of-stonewall/

Tessa Stuart, ‘Full Moon Over the Stonewall: Howard Smith’s Account of the Stonewall Riots’, Village Voice, 26 June 2015, https://www.villagevoice.com/full-moon-over-the-stonewall-howard-smiths-account-of-the-stonewall-riots/

‘Gay rights activists give their verdict on Stonewall: “This film is no credit to the history it purports to portray” ’, Nigel M Smith, The Guardian, 25 September 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/sep/25/stonewall-film-gay-rights-activists-give-their-verdict

Robyn King, ‘Chesca Forristal: Stage & Screen Writer, Drag King’, University of Oxford Online, August 2021, https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/chesca-forristal-stage-screen-writer-drag-king

Documentaries

Storme, The Lady of the Jewel Box, Michelle Parkerson (director), 1987

A Stormé Life, itlmedia, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgCVNEiOwLs&ab_channel=itlmedia

Emily Davison

Websites

‘Early suffragist campaigning’, UK Parliament Online, https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/overview/earlysuffragist

June Purvis, ‘Cat and mouse: force feeding the suffragettes’, History Extra, 25 April 2023, https://www.historyextra.com/period/edwardian/cat-mouse-force-feeding-suffragettes-hunger-strike/

June Purvis, ‘Remembering Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913)’, Women’s History Review, vol 22, no 3, June 2013, https://pure.port.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/3502250/Remembering_Emily_Wilding_Davison_1872_1913_.pdf

‘Non-violent suffragists’, an Illustrated London News article, 2 August 1913, The National Archives, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/suffragettes-on-file/non-violent-suffragists/

Videos

‘Emily Davison: Suffragette Killed by King’s Horse at Derby (1913)’, British Pathé, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVrlLKAR1S0&ab_channel=BritishPath%C3%A9

Noor Inayat Khan

Books

Shrabani Basu, Spy Princess, the life of Noor Inayat Khan, The History Press, UK, 2008

Noor Inayat Khan, Twenty Jataka Tales, Camelot Press, UK, 1983

Websites

Usaid Siddiqui, ‘Noor Inayat Khan: The forgotten Muslim princess who fought Nazis’, Aljazeera, 28 October 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/10/28/noor-inayat-khan

‘Musician, author, princess, spy: Noora Inayat Khan’, Dr Elizabeth Dearnley, University of London, 21 June 2018, https://www.london.ac.uk/news-events/blogs/musician-author-princess-spy-noor-inayat-khan

Special Operations Executive, National Army Museum, https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/SOE

Mary, Queen of Scots

Books

Jenny Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure, Hamlyn, London, 1988

Websites

‘Mary, Queen of Scots and the Silver Casket’, National Museums of Scotland, https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/stories/scottish-history-and-archaeology/mary-queen-of-scots/mary-queen-of-scots/mary-queen-of-scots-and-the-silver-casket/

Meilan Solly, ‘Code Breakers Discover – and Decipher – Long-Lost Letters by Mary, Queen of Scots’, Smithsonian Magazine, 10 February 2023, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/codebreakers-discoverand-decipherlong-lost-letters-by-mary-queen-of-scots-180981613/

Alan Bryson, ‘The Gallows Letter’, British Library, 5 February 2022, https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2022/02/the-gallows-letter.html

Trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, from History of the Life of Mary Queen of Scots, 1681, transcribed and modernised by Maggie Pierce Secara, https://elizabethan.org/maryqos/MQoSLettersandTrial.pdf

‘Mary Stuart: Adamas Loquitur, The Diamond Speaks’, Early Modern Women Research Network, https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/emwrn/index.php?p=diamond

Williamina Fleming

Books

Lucy Worsley, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, Faber and Faber, London, 2012

Websites

Kate Clarke, ‘Women and Domestic Service in Victorian Society’, The History Press Online, 16 December 2015, https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/women-and-domestic-service-in-victorian-society/

Richard Partington, ‘Half of all children in lone-parent families are in relative poverty’, The Guardian, 4 July 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/04/half-of-all-children-in-lone-parent-families-are-in-relative-poverty

Alan Hirshfeld, ‘Williamina Fleming: Brief life of a spectrographic pioneer: 1857-1911’, Harvard Magazine, January–February, 2017, https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2016/12/williamina-fleming

Jillian Hyland, ‘The Harvard Computers’, Astrobites, 4 November 2019, https://astrobites.org/2019/11/04/the-harvard-computers/

‘Excerpts from the Journal of Williamina Paton Fleming March 1 – March 12, 1900. Strategies and Compromises: Women in Astronomy at Harvard College Observatory’, American Institute of Physics, https://www.aip.org/sites/default/files/history/teaching-guides/strategies-compromises-harvard-astronomy/Strategies%20and%20Compromises_Fleming%20Journal%

The Dahomey Warriors

Books

Edna G Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA, 2012

Websites

‘The women soldiers of Dahomey’, Women in African History, UNESCO, https://en.unesco.org/womeninafrica/women-soldiers-dahomey

Rachel Jones, ‘The warriors of this West African kingdom were formidable – and female’, National Geographic, 14 September 2022, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/the-true-story-of-the-women-warriors-of-dahomey

‘Why Women in Conflict’, Women for Women International, https://womenforwomen.org.uk/work-we-do/why-women-conflict

George Allison, ‘Diversity on the rise in UK Armed Forces say figures’, UK Defence Journal, 22 December 2023, https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/diversity-on-the-rise-in-uk-armed-forces-say-figures

‘Fit to fight: Women in the Army today’, National Army Museum, https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/fit-fight-women-army-today

Michael Bamidele, ‘The story of the fearless women warriors of Dahomey’, Guardian Nigeria, 14 June 2020, https://guardian.ng/life/the-story-of-the-fearless-women-warriors-of-dahomey/

Documentaries

Warrior Women with Lupita Nyong’o, Sandstone Global Productions, Anna Cox (director), Channel 4, 2019

Angela Morley

Websites

‘The Right Pitch: A Look into the Popularity of Podcast Hosts by Gender’, AT&T, https://www.attexperts.com/podcast-host-gender-vs-genre

‘The Truth About Trans’, Stonewall, https://www.stonewall.org.uk/the-truth-about-trans

Sarah Wooley, ‘Writing “1977” for BBC Radio 4, and why it’s about so much more than “a transgender woman in the 1970s” ’, BBC Writers, 30 November 2015, https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/writersroom/entries/7c87da6e-c8b0-462e-86a9-b4227fdd25de

Spencer Leigh, Obituaries: ‘Angela Morley: Composer and arranger who worked with Scott Walker and scored “Dynasty” and “Dallas”, Independent, 22 January 2009, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/angela-morley-composer-and-arranger-who-worked-with-scott-walker-and-scored-dynasty-and-dallas-1488590.html

Documentaries

The Story of Light Music, BBC, 2005

Musical Variations: The Life of Angela Morley, BBC Radio 4, Stuart Barr, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03kr6bs

Judith Kerr

Books

Judith Kerr, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Harper Collins, London, 1971

Judith Kerr, Bombs Over Aunt Dainty, Harper Collins, London, 1975

Judith Kerr, A Small Person Far Away, Harper Collins, London, 1978

Judith Kerr, Judith Kerr’s Creatures, Harper Collins, London, 2013

Websites

‘Judith Kerr was both sweetness and steel – and I’ll miss her’, Nancy Banks Smith, The Guardian, 23 May 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/23/judith-kerr-nancy-banks-smith

Tim Adams, ‘Judith Kerr: “I like this generation of teenagers. They seem kind and idealistic” ’, The Guardian, 16 December 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/dec/16/judith-kerr-interview-tiger-who-came-to-tea-teenagers-kind-idealistic

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eleanor Morton is a Scottish comedian, writer and actor who started performing stand-up when she was 18 years old. She is perhaps best known for her online videos and characters, including the dour Scottish tour guide ‘Craig’. Her 2023 Fringe show, Eleanor Morton Has Peaked, enjoyed a sell-out run, and she wrote and recorded The Rest of Us, a show for BBC Radio 4 about overlooked figures in UK history, alongside Welsh comic Esyllt Sears and Northern Irish comic Mary Flanigan.

Morton is currently based in Edinburgh and Life Lessons From Historical Women is her first book.

@eleanormortoncomedy

@EleanorMorton

@EleanorMortonable

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Radar, an imprint of

Octopus Publishing Group Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.octopusbooks.co.uk

An Hachette UK Company

www.hachette.co.uk

Text copyright © Eleanor Morton 2024

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All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Eleanor Morton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

eISBN: 978-1-80419-229-0

Publisher: Briony Gowlett

Creative director: Mel Four

Senior developmental editor: Pauline Bache

Copyeditor: Susanne Hillen

Production managers: Nic Jones and Lucy Carter