March is Women’s History Month, and though it’s the last day of the month, it’s a topic that’s near and dear to our hearts. Every month Carrie tells us about a Kickass Woman in History, but here we thought we’d all take some time to tell you about historical women that are personally important to each of us.
RHG:
One of my favorite women is Abigail Adams- take-no-shit, John while you’re creating your new nation here, Remember the Ladies, I’ll get you your saltpeter when you get me some pins- Abigail Adams. While John was off not sitting down and making himself a generalized nuisance (it’s a thing we do here in Boston), Abigail wasn’t sitting down either- running the farm, raising 5 children (and a few grandchildren along the way). She took an active part in politics while John was President (some of their contemporaries called her “Mrs. President”) and kept her son, John Quincy Adams, on his toes during his political career.
  
She means so much to me because she was an ardent champion of women’s voices in politics – a notion near and dear to my heart:
“..remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”
I also have a very soft spot for Queen Elizabeth I; born into a hot mess of family, and through attrition of siblings ended up as one of the greatest queens regnant the world has ever known. Â Yes, she became queen of who her father was (’twas ever thus) but she ruled because of who she was.
Elyse:
When I was a kid, I read the book The Secret Soldier: The Story of Deborah Sampson obsessively. Sampson disguised herself as a man during the Revolutionary War in order to join the army. I don’t know why I loved that story so much, but it really stuck with me. Sampson was the first example I had of a woman in history who had zero fucks to give. Twenty-five years later and I’m in a job traditionally held by men in a male dominated industry with no fucks to give either. Coincidence? Maybe.
Truthfully I didn’t get the best education in terms of women in history in school. For the most part I learned about women in regards to the men they were (or weren’t) with. They were wives or widows or daughters before anything else. It wasn’t until college that I really started to explore history on my own. I did a study abroad and picked the three biggest books I could find to take with me-Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, and Memoirs of Cleopatra and Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles both by Margaret George. Fiction was my first foray into history from the female viewpoint. I’ve read a lot about European queens: the Tudor Queens, Mary Queen of Scots, Catherine the Great, Christina of Sweden, Catherine de Medici, and Isabella of Castille.
My mom recently had major surgery and while I waited (for two marathon fourteen hour sessions) in the waiting room I listened to two AWESOME audio books while knitting: The Rival Queens: Catherine de Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite of Valois and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom by Nancy Goldstone and Sister Queens: The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Isabella of Castile by Julia Fox. The narration on both was great and the writing was anything but dry.
Also she’s not exactly historical, but I have mad love for Elizabeth Zimmermann who revolutionized modern knitting and was quite the badass herself. She used to knit while riding on the back of a motorcycle. You go, Elizabeth.
Sarah:
I do have some people I want to mention, but I can’t think about women’s history without thinking about where I went to college. Remember how if you took the PSAT and then ALL THE MAIL arrived from every college ever? Through random fortune and past-very-young-Sarah’s foresight in applying to this school she’d never heard of, I was accepted at a women’s college in South Carolina, Columbia College. I was one of very few if not the only Yankee for awhile, and when I arrived I thought the humidity was kidding me. HA. IT WAS NOT.
Columbia College, or C2, is still under 1400 students, and it’s still a women’s college. I didn’t realize then what I know now: attending a small women’s college was incredibly formative to my worldview. For example, after four straight years of no one saying to me, “You can’t do that” based on my gender, I don’t take discouragement at all well. And, more importantly, after four years of Extreme Southernness, my answer to any attempts at dissuading me from doing what I want is usually, “Bless your heart. I’m doing it anyway.”
I’m still realizing the unique benefits of having attended C2. I know what a “surcie” is.  I know several key intonations of “Bless your heart.” I know what it means when yesterday your car was black, but today it seems to be yellow. More importantly, and more germane to this topic, I studied (with the deep and focused attention normally paid to very dead, very white male writers) authors like Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Octavia Butler, bell hooks, and many others I might not otherwise have known about. And wow, feminist literary theory courses taken in a South Carolina women’s college English department which focused intensively on Southern women writers… that’s some serious business right there.
Because history in the South has an entirely different set of meanings – it has layers, I tell you, like pollen on your car – I learned while I was there how women, both students and almunae, have supported and challenged the institution over the years. There were big changes when I was a student, and immediately afterward, and there have been since, and honestly, while I don’t always understand everything about its culture, I look at my alma mater as a piece of women’s history, and I’m proud of it. There aren’t many women’s colleges left, but I think they have as profound an impact on their students as C2 did on me.
A note: if you’d like to apply to Columbia College, my signature as an alumna will waive your application fee. I HAVE THE POWER! Well, a small amount of power. If you’re interested in learning more, please email me.
Also, can we do recent history? In romance? I’m feeling kind of self indulgent, so why not, right?
First, I miss and admire LA Banks, aka Laurie Esdale Banks, extremely much. I met her at several different conferences, but at her last one, the Writers for New Orleans conference hosted by Heather Graham, I learned so much about how she built her audience and her brand, and how she was one of the first to use some of the techniques in marketing and promotion that are so common now. She was brilliant at making readers feel incredibly special and valued, and built a fantastic writing career with inclusive stories and some scary ass monsters who freaked the hell out of me when I read one of her books too late at night.
And speaking of the women’s history of the romance genre, I want to mention Kate Duffy, too. She was an editor at Kensington, among several other publishing houses, and if you’re talking about the history of the romance genre and the women who helped create it, she’s an indelible part of it. She did things in a style that not many editors use, and she was formidable about developing and cultivating authors and their careers. She discovered Jude Deveraux and Judith McNaught, and Heather Graham, and so many other authors who we know instantly by name. Kate was also the founding editor of Silhouette, another name that’s part of recent romance history.
The romance genre itself is also a piece of women’s history, and a reflection of it in many ways, too. If I get started thinking about women who have shaped and changed the romance genre recently, I’ll never stop, so I have to take the laptop away now.
CarrieS:
I’m fascinated by how much of the history of women is invisible. In the general concept of history, women are important because of how they influence men as wives and as mothers. Men do, women coach. But throughout all of history, women have done that and more. They have been wives and mothers and soldiers and scientists. They have been sailors and pirates and doctors and explorers. They have led nations and been the small forces that allow nations to function. There’s nothing that women haven’t done and I’m enthralled by their stories.
As I study the lives of women, I find myself drawn to very different types. One is the Woman Who Gives No Fucks. Mata Hari was an irritating human in many ways, but I adore the fact that she knew what kind of life she wanted and for a long time she by golly carved out that life for herself with great success and without a single fuck to give. When women are culturally expected to sacrifice their own happiness at the altar of family, it’s a thrill to read about women who just went and did whatever the hell they wanted to, and damn the consequences.
I’m also increasingly interested in the Woman Who Gets Shit Done Day After Day. Mary Shelley is best known for writing Frankenstein, but I don’t think that was her greatest achievement. I think her greatest achievement was all those years she spent as a single mother and a widow, raising her son by her pen with minimal family support. She plugged away at things and while none of her other work was as commercially successful as Frankenstein, it paid the damn bills. Raising a child and educating him and supporting a ton of other starving writers was no small accomplishment for a woman of her time or of any time, but she wanted to live life on her own terms so she did what she had to do to make that happen. Some of the most interesting women to me are the least glamorous ones because they get shit done.
The third category (and there’s a lot of overlap here) is Women Who Won. Ching Shih didn’t get hung as a pirate; she bullied the Chinese government into funding her retirement. She died of old age, presumably on a mattress stuffed with cash. Isabella Bird sucked as a feminist (she insisted that ideally women should stay home) but I can’t help but admire her expert manipulation of public opinion. She maintained that of course IDEALLY women should stay home, but she HAD to travel all around the world, often alone or with single men, for her HEALTH. The doctor said she needed fresh air. So she had all kinds of adventures without ever ruining her proper Victorian reputation. Josephine Baker’s life had tons of ups and downs and personal tragedies but she became hugely famous, kicked Nazi asses, kicked the asses of racists in America, adopted twelve children, and died happy. I love that these women, though of course they all had challenges in their lives, didn’t die tragic deaths as matrys to a cause. They kicked ass and they were victorious.
As a child, I wanted to find an “idol” (that’s the word I used at the time). My school had a collection of short biographies of women and I read them all, searching for the perfect paragon to emulate. As an adult I’ve learned that the flaws of the women I study are as interesting and informative as their virtues. I’ve learned that we all operate within specific cultures, time periods, family dynamics, and personalities that constrain our choices and our attitudes. However, studying women in history has shown me how often people are able to rise to the occasion and become their best selves – sometimes in one very specific way and other times in a broader sense. These women have shown me both how vicious misogyny (as well as racism and homophobia) has been but they also show that it is possible to rebel and that history is packed with rebels.
So those are the women who influenced us. Who are the women in history that influenced you?
Natalie Clifford Barney!
So, my “discovery” of Barney is fairly recent but she was such an inspiration to my imagination, I more recently got a qoute of her’s tattooed on my arm (“I want to be at once the bow, the arrow, and the target.) She was an American writer, but is better known for the salons she held in Paris for mostly women writers and artists. She was openly gay and, fun note, she was one of those who, though she invited her to parties, could not stand Mata Hari!
If you’re interested, I recommended the excellent biography “Wild Heart: A Life – Natalie Clifford Barney’s Journey from Victorian America to the Literary Salons of Paris” by Suzanne Rodriguez.
Two artistic women, both married to men named Charles (how weird is that coincidence?), are near and dear to my heart: Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1864-1933), partner to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Ray Eames (1912-88), partner to Charles Eames.
Both were artists in their own right – Margaret in the Art Nouveau/Glasgow Style and Ray in the Modern – as well as helpmeets and collaborators with their husbands, and both made the world a more beautiful place.
If I had had a girl, she was going to be named Eleanor after Eleanor of Aquitaine and Eleanor Roosevelt. Two powerful women who had the courage to live lives on their own terms, even though they were expected to sit quietly in the background and breed. They may not have always made the best choices (Richard II was a spoiled incompetent ruler and his mother encouraged his follies), but they were smart, driven and had the guts to stand up for what they believed.
This thread is going to be amazing. It is already. I love Eleanor Roosevelt, and now I want to read about Natalie Clifford Barney. The number of women artists whose creative careers were overshadowed by the men in their lives is considerable – I think there are so many, there could be an encyclopedia series featuring all of them.
Taking it back to antiquity: Queen Salome Alexandra. She was the widow of a Judean king and after his death, she was the independent ruler of Judea from 76 to 67 BCE. A master politician, she ushered in an era of peace and stability that the country had never seen. I still remember when I first learned about her – I had had no idea that there was a Jewish queen who kicked ass in antiquity. Mind. Blown.
http://thetorah.com/jewish-queens-from-the-story-of-esther-to-the-history-of-shelamzion/
I was heavily influenced as a child by an extremely cheesy (though well done and full of facts) called Value Tales. It was a bunch of books about historic figures and they were very engaging as each one had an imaginary friend who helped them out. The books were very gender balanced, so I grew up reading about Margaret Mead, Jane Adams (Hull House), Marie Curie, Sacagawea, and many more. Nellie Bly was maybe my favorite and in all, I was amazed by all these women and what they had accomplished.
Along the lines of Secret Soldier, there’s an autobiography called Cavalry Maiden of a woman who disguised herself as a man and fought in the Napoleonic War (and when eventually she was outed she talked the czar into letting her stay in the army anyway). Iirc it was published by Pushkin? Possibly that was Karolina Pavlova, who was a literary bad ass of that time? But I think it must have been Cavalry Maiden because Pushkin may have been subversive but he’d probably have been jealous of Pavlova if they did overlap, I feel like everyone was, which is why no one knows about her.
The Met right now has a great Vigée Le Brun exhibit up, including the paintings of Marie Antoinette scandalously painted in casual clothes, and the follow up of her in court dress but in the same pose with the exact same expression. Such a fabulous fuck you to the critics.
I don’t know that they influenced me growing up, because the role models I was offered were pretty much limited to, idk Betsy Ross (she could sew!) and maybe Pocahontas (yet they always neglected the dying of probably syphilis in England part, which, if you’re going to learn anything about colonialism seems essential)? It was a sad time in the history of history.
Small women’s colleges ftw!
This year I’ve been reading women only, and trying to bump up my nonfiction reading as well. So I’ve already read a bunch of biographies, on women from Hatshepsut to Catherine de Medici. To me it’s really interesting to see how our perceptions of vastly different women from vastly different times and places are still so often informed by the same tired biases.
Oh, oh! Alina made me watch a Russian movie about a woman who dsigusied herself as a dude to go smack napoleon around, it was on YouTube. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussar_Ballad
I did, in fact, make Redheadedgirl watch that movie. It’s a musical romance, in addition to its other merits. (Watch it and tell me you wouldn’t have left Rzhevskiy with his stupid moustache to freeze his ass off and climbed the yummy Italian soldier like a tree instead.) And best of all: based on a true story of a real woman who dressed up as a dude to go soldiering against Napoleon.
As far as powerful women go, Russian history is basically dominated by the shadow of Catherine the Great (who wasn’t Russian). For nebulous and hard-to-define reasons, I’m more of a fan of her predecessor, Elizabeth (Peter the Great’s daughter; Catherine got to the throne by deposing her husband, Peter III, who was Elizabeth’s nephew).
In old, semi-apocryphal, pre-recorded history of Russia, Olga is probably the most famous ruler. Renown for her wisdom, she outwits a whole host of people, including burning a bunch of dudes alive as revenge for the death of her husband, and sneakily outwitting the Byzantine Emperor in order to avoid marrying him (this probably definitely never happened).
I’m sharing the love for Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt. Whenever someone asks you that “If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead?” question, they are my go to responses – with preferably living tacked on.
Look at Abigail, reminding her husband that not all men are his equal when it comes to their wives and daughters. Their letters to each other are so wonderful. People today with cell phones and skyping and airplanes can’t make a long distance relationship work. John and Abigail did it without hearing a word for months.
And Eleanor. Such an amazing woman. The marriage might not have been all that, but the life! The travels, the causes, that god awful voice that sought to inspire people to their better natures. There was no back down in that woman.
Noor Inayat Khan: She was a Muslim-Indian princess raised in Britain who wrote children’s books before joining the SOE and becoming a wireless operator in occupied France.
Antonia Fraser does some great biographies, particularly Mary Queen of Scots and Marie Antoinette. I also love her ‘The Weaker Vessel’ about women in 17th century England. On the American side, Laurel Thachter Ulrich has ‘Good Wives’ and ‘A Midwife’s Tale’.
‘Betsy Ross and the Making of America’ by Marla Miller gives good insight into women’s lives around the time of the Revolution. Also, you’ll learn a lot about making a mattress 🙂
On the Abigail Adams front, I LOVE the mystery series by Barbara Hamilton (who is also Barbara Hambly).
I love Abigail Adams, as she’s from my hometown. Field trips to her house happened just about every year.
Jane Digby Ellenborough: no romance writer could write such an adventorous life. To me she is the godmother of regency heroines.
Also, E.S. Drower. One of the first romance novelists for Mills and Boon AND when her husband got transferred to Iraq, she became a cultural anthropologist and became one of the modern West’s early experts on the Mandaeans of Iraq and the Yazidis. I kind of want to BE her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._S._Drower
Elizabeth I had a great influence on me – we were even born on the same day!
I’ve always respected the sheer intestinal fortitude of the women who came to this country with their families (usually without a choice) and made their own lives here. Growing up I heard about the pioneers as both sides of my family, strong women who held their families together while carving out a life in the west and had long-lived daughters to tell their stories to great-grand daughters.
Mercy Otis Warren gets my vote for most unjustly erased woman of the Revolutionary era. She was a correspondent and adviser to Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and John Adams. Her seditious pamphlet plays got her on a British hanging list. Every school child in America should know her name, but she isn’t in most textbooks. Here’s why.
She wrote one of the earliest histories of the Revolution, and she portrayed some of the leading political figures of the day, including her longtime friend John Adams, in a less than glowing light, prompting him to write that “history is not the province of the ladies.” Adams and others did their best to discredit her and push her off the stage of history. We should demand her back.
I’m on the planning committee for an event to introduce girls to careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. I found a couple of new she-roes this month while planning a game for the budding STEMettes. Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet George Lord Byron and his wife, Lady Wentworth. She was a mathematician and is considered the first computer programmer for her work on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. A favorite quote by the Countess of Lovelace: “That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.”
Radia Perlman, who invented the spanning-tree network protocol not too very long ago, is called the Mother of the Internet as her development allowed the development of large networks. She doesn’t like to be called the Mother of the Internet, BTW, but she is also known for teaching young children how to program. I appreciate the efforts of both these pioneering ladies as my technology career allows me to afford my many book binges on Amazon and AllRomance.
@ Kate – I also admire Eleanor of Aquitane. Learning about her Court of Love and studying early romantic poetry *almost* turned me into a Medievalist in college.
Not to be pedantic, Elyse, but the proper names for the books that you recommended are:
The rival queens : Catherine de’ Medici, her daughter Marguerite De Valois, and the betrayal that . . . / Nancy Goldstone.
Sister queens : [the noble, tragic lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile] / Julia Fox.
Both sounded fabulous, and thanks to your recommendation, I’ve reserved them at the library.
Lucretia Mott
Nellie Bly. If at the end of my life I can say my words made even a fraction of the difference as Bly made with hers, then I’ll consider mine a life well lived.
I also attended an all woman’s college and I keep realizing how much of a difference it made for me. Sadly its coed now, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College but when I went it was great.
In terms of women who inspire me; Jane Austen, Nichelle Nichols, Elizabeth 1. I know there are more but I’m sick and blanking and love what everyone else has listed.
Bessie Smith, the highest paid black entertainer of her time, with an absolutely phenomenal voice, and a dick of a husband who used the money she earned to buy things for his mistress and showed that he disapproved of Bessie’s excessive drinking by beating her up. But she took that and turned it into fantastic music.
And also to most of my great-grandmothers or to their mothers who left Sweden and Germany in cramped third-class accommodations, with food you preferred to eat in the dark so you didn’t see the bugs, to move to America where they didn’t speak the language and in most cases were never able to go back and see the families they left behind. And who bore many children and raised them well, even if the recipes they passed down leave things to be wanted in terms of specificity (what spices for the brine for pickled watermelons? What is the “right consistency” for rose petal jam? How much is 10 cents worth of 1920 Hirschhorn salz ammonium carbonate? Have mercy on your descendants, Great Aunt Clara, you wrote the recipes out in 1982!)
Joining in the love for Abigail Adams and Elizabeth I. I wrote a term paper about Abigail when I was a sophomore in high school; it was really an excuse to read every book about her available at the public library. The correspondence between Abigail and John is available online through the Massachusetts Historical Society (masshist.org)
Mary Seacole – Jamaican nurse who cared for wounded soldiers during the Crimean War. Her memoirs are a great read.
As an Australian, and a former member of the parliament of the State of Victoria, I have to mention Vida Goldstein, an Australian suffragette and campaigner for womens rights. When the campaign for women’s suffrage was successful, In 1903 Goldstein was the first woman in the British Empire to stand for election to a national parliament (although she was not successful).
In Australia we name our federal electoral districts after notable people, and I am fortunate to live in the electorate of Goldstein.
Ida B Wells-Barnett (she hyphenated her name with her husband’s) FTW! Anti-lynching campaigner, journalist, politician, suffragist…she did it all. And raised six children, including traveling around the country giving speeches with a nursing baby! (And her husband Ferdinand Wells was super supportive.) Read her autobiography “Crusade for Justice”. It’s amazing.
Have to say that I am NOT a fan of Isabel of Castile. Her short sighted bigotry ultimately cost her country very dearly, as well as causing untold human suffering, so I’m lukewarm on her daughters, tragic otherwise. (Part of being a feminist is not giving women who are stupid and/or evil a pass just BECAUSE they’re women.)
I love Marlene Dietrich. She was a superstar in her day, as a singer and actress, but was not shy about expressing her political opinions. She raised a lot of money to help Jews and other enemies of the Nazis to escape Germany in the 1930’s, toured incessantly for the USO during World War II, even going to the front lines(Billy Wilder said she was at the front lines more than Eisenhower), raised money for War Bonds, and advocated for and financially supported refugees after the war. She received a Medal of Freedom from the U.S. and the LĂ©gion d’honneur from the French government for her wartime work. She was a style icon, and could rock any outfit from an evening gown to army fatigues, and make them look sexy. Madonna and Lady Gaga are but pale imitations. She was bisexual, and often performed in men’s clothing, but found the time to have affairs with everyone from Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart, to George Bernard Shaw and John Wayne. However throughout her life, she continued to financially support her husband(who she had married when she was quite young) and they remained friends. A girl kissing a girl is still considered controversial, but she did it in a movie, “Morocco”, back in 1930! She was hated by many Germans, for denouncing the Nazis and abandoning the land of her birth to become an American citizen. But, she gave zero fucks. Her early films with Josef von Sternberg were her most famous, but my favorite performances of hers are in “A Foreign Affair” and “Witness for the Prosecution”.
I want to live in the electorate of Goldstein!!!
@Karin: Diddo all you said about Dietrich. And now I’m realizing that I need to rectify having not watched many of her movies. From that era, I really like Myrna Loy, who along with being a great actress in everything I’ve seen her in, was a civil rights advocate, and awesome enough to be hated by the Nazis. And there’s Barbara Stanwyck who was known for being generous with up-and-coming actors and actresses, and was liked by all her directors for being professional and going above and beyond her peers. She is also great in everything I’ve seen her in. I particularly like Stanwyck because she could play tough and vulnerable sometimes in the same role.
Seconding Mary Seacole! Also Nanny of the Maroons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanny_of_the_Maroons
She escaped from slavery, founded a free community of escaped slaves, fought the British colonial army to a standstill and forced them to negotiate with her and sign a treaty.
So hard to choose just one person.
Growing up, Madame Marie Curie, Elizabeth Blackwell and Ste. Jeanne d’Arc. I read biographies of Marie Curie and Elizabeth Blackwell in elementary school and became a fan for life, even though I did not end up becoming a scientist or a doctor. I still love biographies and research. Ste. Jeanne d’Arc because I was raised Catholic and my dad’s family is also from Lorraine, France. When I was 10, I was fascinated by the possibility that my ancestors might have known Jeanne d’Arc. Also, at 10 or 11, I was amazed by a 19 year old girl leading an army.
As a young woman, Susan B. Anthony because of her work as an abolitionist and suffragist and because she was instrumental in getting women admitted to the University of Rochester (my alma mater) in 1900. I know that there are controversies about some of her actions and positions on various issues, but I find her courage and conviction admirable, even though I may not always agree with positions that she took or things that she did or said.
More recently as I’ve been digging into my own family history, I’ve come to appreciate the courage of the unsung (and often unidentified) women who helped to build this country. I want to mention a recently discovered 10th great grandmother named Frances Latham Dungan Clarke, who actually is a known historical figure. She had 11 children — 4 with her first husband and 7 with her second. She came to what is now part of Rhode Island in around 1637/8. She is known as the “Mother of Governors” because she is the direct ancestor of at least 10 governors and related by marriage to several others (sons and grandsons-in-law).
I look forward to Carrie’s monthly posts and hope that this is a feature that you’ll continue.
Josephine Butler was incredible brave in her fight to change some very misogynistic laws in England. I loved her chapter in “Significant Sisters’ by Margaret Forster. The whole book is worth reading, by the way.