As everyone knows, men, their lives and achievements dominate our history books.
Of course, many men have done great and memorable things over the past several thousand years, but there were also many women responsible for all kinds of society-changing, revolution-starting, groundbreaking types of things. Women other than Queen Elizabeth and Joan of Arc. It's just that, well, historically, men have been in charge of dictating how things go. And that means they made sure we wouldn't forget them.
Luckily, there's a new book out to help those of us who spent our school years learning mainly about the men who've shaped our world. 100 Nasty Women of History by journalist Hannah Jewell gives us an alternative view of history and documents the women the textbooks accidentally forgot to cover. These "nasty" women are everything from pioneers in medicine, science and maths, to women who led armies and uprisings, to women who decided that getting drunk or having sex or speaking candidly when they were meant to sit in the house and be quiet would actually be a lot more fun. There's a whole section called "Women who punched Nazis".
Here, we've got five of the stories from 100 Nasty Women for your enjoyment. Click through the slideshow to read and pick up the book to see the rest.
100 Nasty Women of History by Hannah Jewell is available now, published by Hodder & Stoughton
Gladys Bentley
The piano-playing, white tuxedo-wearing queer entertainer who riled up the conservative killjoys of high society.
One day in 1934, the police came to Midtown Manhattan’s King’s Terrace nightclub to padlock its doors shut. Their aim was to protect the innocent public from the lewd musical offerings of one ‘masculine-garbed, smut-singing entertainer,’ Gladys Bentley. ‘The chief and filthiest offering of the evening,’ said the offended patron who lodged a formal complaint to the police, ‘is a personal tour of the tables by Miss Bentley. At each table she stopped to sing one or more verses of a seemingly endless song in which every word known to vulgar profanity is used.’
Imagine being the narc who complained to the police about that? It sounds amazing.
Here’s an example of a Gladys ditty from the scandalous musical revue which the police commissar deemed too ‘vile’ to go on. It’s called, ‘It’s a Helluva Situation Up at Yale’:
It’s a helluva situation up at Yale.
It’s a helluva situation up at Yale.
As a means of recreation,
They rely on masturbation.
It’s a helluva situation up at Yale.
Whether or not there was a helluva situation up at Yale is unclear. However, what is known is that Gladys Bentley, pianist, blues singer, and entertainer, was too much for Midtown to handle. She was a black working-class lesbian from Philadelphia who only wore men’s clothes. Up in Harlem, however, things were different. While plays on Broadway got censored, Harlem hosted drag balls and all-night parties and Gladys’s various inappropriate entertainments. She was a part of the fabric of the neighbourhood, drawing crowds of all races to experience her husky-voiced, innuendo-laden show.
Gladys Bentley got her start in the 1920s performing as a pianist at parties, then graduated to fancy nightclubs, and eventually toured the country with her one-of-a-kind performances. She’d wear a white tuxedo with her hair greased back, and sang with a group of dancing, effeminate men behind her. One picture shows her in front of six men dressed as sailors, kneeling behind her and captioned the ‘Favourites of the King’. Gladys would rewrite popular songs to be naughty, and get her audience to sing along with them. She was big and butch and could sing jazz and blues standards with a voice that switches between a gravelly tenor, a bird-like falsetto and scatting. She sang the classics, but she also wrote and recorded original songs. She could sing a ballad that would bring a room to tears, or make an audience laugh so hard with her dirty jokes that the police would be left with no choice but to have the whole place shut down.
A 1931 Harlem guidebook entry for the Clam House, where she performed regularly, called her a ‘pianist and torrid warbler’, noted the club was ‘best after 1am’, but warned the show was ‘not for the innocent young’. The poet Langston Hughes, being a poet, described her with more style, saying how she could play the piano ‘all night long, literally all night, without stopping ... from ten in the evening until dawn, with scarcely a break between the notes, sliding from one song to another.’ She was ‘a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard...’
Her show was hers, all hers, and her style unforgettable: Gladys Bentley invented the white tuxedo. In a time when queer women performers could only allude to their sexuality in order to protect themselves, Gladys leaned into it, and built a career upon it. She even married a white woman, whose identity is unknown, in a New Jersey civil ceremony. Gladys was a star who packed houses and was beloved by her audiences no matter how loudly the critics disparaged her and her fellow performers as ‘sexual perverts and double entendre jokes crackers’. She was the soundtrack to the Harlem Renaissance and all the poets and writers and composers who lived through it. Gladys was King.
The world isn’t guaranteed to grow more open-minded and tolerant with time. When Gladys moved to LA in the 40s and 50s, she found there a much more conservative society than Harlem in the 20s and 30s. One club where she hoped to perform had to get a special permit to allow her to wear trousers. Whether it was a personal shift, or a natural reaction to living through the years of McCarthyism and its attendant anti-gay hysteria, Gladys took to the press to disown her previous life, presenting instead a respectable image of 1950s womanhood, all pearls and flowery dresses.
She even tried her hand at heterosexual marriage, taking one or possibly two husbands in a row, but kept a picture of her mysterious wife on display in her home, and ended up divorced.
But even once she had reformed to a life of straight domesticity, Gladys would recollect with fondness her style from a bygone age: ‘tailor-made clothes, top hat and tails, with a cane to match each costume, stiff-bosomed shirt, wing collar tie and matching shoes’. Listen to Gladys’ ‘Worried Blues’ and imagine her whole body tapping out the rhythm at the piano, dressed as splendidly as that.
Zabel Yesayan
The fearless journalist who documented the Armenian massacre.
Zabel Yesayan is another example of a brilliant woman who lived in a time and place where to be intelligent and opinionated was the most dangerous thing to be. In fact, she managed to live in not one but two such places in the course of her short life.
Zabel was an Armenian born in 1878 in Istanbul, then the capital of the Ottoman Empire. She published her first poem in a weekly paper at age 16, and by 17, had decided to become a writer professionally. So she did. That was that. There was no decade of umming and erring, no grand proclamations about the novel she had ‘knocking about in her head’ – she just did it.
As Zabel set out on her path she received a warning from Sprouhi Dussap, the first female Armenian novelist. ‘When Madame Dussap learned that I wanted to enter the field of literature,’ Zabel recalled later, ‘she warned me that a woman’s path to become a writer had more thorns than laurels. She said that our society was still intolerant towards a woman who appeared in public and tried to find a place of her own. To overcome this, one had to surpass mediocrity. Success came easily to the man who merely got his education, but the stakes were much higher for the intellectual woman.’
Zabel went to France to study literature, and married a painter at age 19, as one does when one moves to France. She returned to Istanbul, however, without her husband and against his wishes in order to continue to build her reputation as a writer there. What she found when she returned was one of the first great tragedies Zabel would witness in her life: Armenian refugees fleeing massacres in Adana, in what is now southern Turkey, and arriving in Istanbul. Zabel decided to travel to Adana to see for herself what had happened there, turning her findings into a book called Among the Ruins. The utter destruction she witnessed in that city changed her, and it would not be the last time she documented Ottoman crimes against the Armenians.
As a prominent Armenian intellectual, particularly one who had publicly decried crimes against her people, Zabel knew she was in danger. In 1915, the first year of the Armenian genocide that would claim 1.5 million lives at the hands of the ruling Turkish party, the Committee of Union and Progress, she had a close call with Turkish officials. While exiting a building, an official asked her if she was Zabel Yesayan. ‘No,’ she replied coolly, ‘she is inside.’ She quickly made her escape and moved to safety in Bulgaria.
In Bulgaria and then back in France, Zabel found work with an Armenian newspaper and set about the grim task of documenting what was happening back at home, collecting testimonies of death marches, deportations and destruction from those Armenian refugees who had managed to escape. Zabel wrote under a male pseudonym, worried about the safety of her remaining family in Istanbul. She said in letters that the work nearly drove her to madness, yet without it, that history, however horrible, could have been lost. As it is, the Turkish government has to this day denied that the Armenian genocide took place, making such testimony all the more powerful.
In 1932, Zabel was invited to become a lecturer at Yerevan State University in Armenia, which had by then become part of the USSR. She had high hopes for life in Armenia but once again, the relentless awfulness of history caught up with her. In 1934, Moscow hosted the first Soviet Writers Congress, which gathered writers from across the USSR, for the unofficial purpose of allowing Stalin to work out who needed to have an eye kept on them. Zabel attended, and despite her initial enthusiasm for the Soviet project, ended up on Stalin’s shit list. A few years later, when Stalin began to actively persecute Armenian literary figures, arresting writers as well as their families, Zabel was in danger again.
Zabel was arrested and thrown in prison where she was not allowed to read books or newspapers or listen to the radio, and so instead she hosted prison literary salons in which she discussed French literature from memory, as you do. It is not known exactly when or where she died during her imprisonment, but she left behind her ten books, countless letters and articles, and of course the testimony she gathered of the genocide. For Zabel, writing was a deeply political act, and her novels dealt with women’s place in society among other injustices. ‘Literature is not an adornment or a pretty decoration,’ she explained, ‘but a mighty weapon or a means to struggle against all matters I consider unjust.’
Ching Shih
The feminist pirate who became known as the "terror of South China".
Listen. The most important thing you need to know about Ching Shih, or Zheng Shi, is that not only was she a pirate who fucked up vast stretches of sea in the 19th century but she was the most successful pirate in fucking history. She fucked up that glass ceiling that’s been holding lady pirates back too long. She commanded a goddamn fleet of motherfucking tens of thousands of pirate underlings.
She fucked up the British. She fucked up the Portuguese. And the British and the Portuguese were some of the worst motherfuckers on the sea! She saw the Qing dynasty, she thought, ‘Why hello there’, and fucked it up too.
Ching Shih was born in 1775 in Guangdong, China, and started out as a sex-worker in a brothel. Does this matter? Fuck no. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you start from so long as you work hard and become the most fearsome pirate of all time.
She started her proper pirating after marrying her pirate boo, and together they joined in pirate activities. At some point, he fucking died. Men always let you down.
Ching Shih carried on commanding their fleet of ships and turned it into an even bigger one. Her fleet had it all. It had loot. It had men. It had big ass ships. It menaced the goddamn ocean. It was so rich and so successful that it ended up a fully fledged business empire, thriving off taxes from captured coastal towns. She taxed her pirate underlings on their booty (lol) and got really fucking rich. Ching Shih’s pirate empire had fucking laws. If you broke the laws, RIP you. If you captured a wife but weren’t faithful to her, RIP you. If you raped someone, you were dead. It was a very well oiled machine, and they called her ‘The Terror of South China’, which is pretty metal.
The Chinese government was so sick of her shit that they offered her and all her pirates amnesty if she would just stop fucking them all up for a second. They even let her keep her loot. She was such a fucking good pirate that she lived long enough to retire from piracy, and take up bingo or some shit instead. (She actually got married, had a kid, and opened a gambling house.)
Where are the lady pirates in our children’s stories? Where are the strong, empowered lady pirates who don’t need no man pirates?
We need more lady pirates.
We need to take to the seas.
GIRLS, STUDY YOUR NAVIGATION, IT IS TIME TO TAKE TO THE SEAS.
Why don’t we know that the most successful pirate in history was a woman? Why when we think of pirates do we dress up as goddamn Johnny ass Depp instead of ass-kicking, cool-ass bitch Ching Shih? I’m livid. These are questions someone must answer post-haste. That’s what you need to know about Ching Shih.
Lucy Hicks Anderson
A trans pioneer who refused to be defined by her biological gender and instead committed herself to having a damn good time.
Lucy Hicks Anderson was born in 1886 in Kentucky. When she was young, her parents took her to the doctor to find out why their child, who had been born a boy, had declared she was a girl called Lucy, and that she’d be wearing a dress to school. Her parents weren’t sure what to do, but the doctor simply told them to raise Lucy as a girl, and that was that – they did.
Or at least, that should have been that. Lucy made it to middle age before she had to deal with any BS for being trans. In the meantime, she lived her life, and what a life it was.
Lucy left school to work as a domestic servant at age 15, got married at 34, and moved to settle in Oxnard, California to live her best Californian life. Lucy would host elaborate dinner parties for dozens of people and was a famously exceptional cook. Her soirées would make the society pages, and Lucy won all sorts of competitions for her cooking. She held rallies for the Democratic Party and was an all-around star of Oxnard. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Lucy ran a ‘boarding house’, a place to get illegal booze and women in the midst of Prohibition. She got in trouble for her side-hustle a few times, and fortunately was once bailed out of jail by a wealthy banker who was desperate for her to cater his dinner party that evening. This is why everyone needs at least one rich friend.
Life was going just fine when one day in 1945, a doctor came to inspect the women of Lucy’s boarding house, where a venereal disease outbreak had been traced. Lucy was 59 years old and married to her second husband when the doctor insisted on examining her as well as the girls, resulting in a scandal that would embroil Lucy in court for perjury. Wait, what? Yes, Lucy was charged with ‘falsifying marriage documents’ (since two ‘men’ could not be married) and ‘defrauding the government’ (since she should therefore not be entitled to collect her husband’s GI benefits).
Imagine ‘defrauding the government’ with your genitals. Because it would be just horrible if the government didn’t know what your genitals looked like at all times.
And so Lucy went to court, the first trans person to have to do so to fight for her marriage. She argued that her gender identity had nothing to do with how she was born, and challenged the court:
I defy any doctor in the world to prove that I am not a woman. I have dressed and acted as just what I am: a woman.
Nevertheless, the jury found Lucy guilty of impersonation and fraud. Her marriage was voided, and in a twisted interpretation of justice, the only way that Lucy would be allowed out of jail was if she wore men’s clothing. There are so many cases in this book of women being the scandal of their times for wearing trousers. Lucy was scandalous because she didn’t – and this after decades of nobody knowing or giving a damn about her gender history, and only worrying about whether or not they could book the famous socialite to cater their parties.
Imagine being that afraid of who does or doesn’t wear trousers.
Hedy Lamarr
The glamorous movie star who depicted the female orgasm on screen and invented the basis for Wi-Fi.
Girls can either be pretty, or they can be smart. Any overlap between the two traits would be far too confusing for society to accept. If a woman is both, how are you supposed to know whether to get a boner or just to get angry? Being beautiful as well as intelligent has therefore been rightfully banned. Hedy Lamarr, though, was a brazen rule-breaker who was both a glamorous movie star and an inventor, the dangerous harlot!
Hedy was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. In the 1930s she was a stage actress in Vienna who came to be known as ‘the most beautiful girl in the world’, a title now held by my friend Gena. She starred in her first film in 1931, Ecstasy, which was as scandalous as it sounds, featuring naked running, naked swimming, and simulated sex. It was banned in Germany, not because it was too scandalous, but because its cast and crew included many Jewish people, including Hedy, though she was brought up Catholic. Even the Pope condemned the film for depicting a simulated female orgasm, which as we all know is an invention of the Devil.
Hedy’s first marriage was to an abusive bastard, a wealthy weapons-mogul who sold arms to all the biggest bastards of the day. He loved fascism, for Europe as well as in his home, and cut off Hedy’s finances and controlled her every move. She later described herself at 19 as living ‘in a prison of gold’. When Hedy’s scandalous film was submitted to US censors for a possible release there, he bought and burned all copies of the film he could get his hands on.
Hedy knew she had to escape if she wanted to survive and continue her acting career. ‘I was like a doll,’ she said. ‘I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded – and imprisoned – having no mind, no life of its own.’ She made her escape, she said later, by disguising herself as a maid and fleeing to Paris, where her husband tried and failed to pursue her. She then went to London and managed to arrange a meeting with the president of MGM, Louis B. Mayer. He thought her work far too risqué for an American audience, though, telling her she would ‘never get away with that stuff in Hollywood’ and that ‘a woman’s ass is for her husband’. (Actually, Louis, a woman’s ass is for sitting, pooping, shaking to Shakira songs, and marching women to courtrooms to divorce their rich husbands and milk them for all they’re worth.) He did offer an entry-level contract for MGM if she paid her own route to get to Hollywood, but Hedy wanted much, much more for herself. So she snuck onto his ship, pretending to be the governess of a boy on board, to continue their negotiations on the way to America. By the time they arrived in the United States, she had a contract to be one of MGM’s new stars, and the stage name Hedy Lamarr.
Hedy’s breakout role was in the film Algiers in 1938, in which she played a mysterious hot woman, who didn’t speak much, as Hedy was still working on her English and playing down her Austrian accent. The film was a huge hit, and Hedy a new star, as women sought to imitate her black wavy hair parted down the middle and her sensible skirt suits.
But Hedy didn’t put much stock in her celebrity as a beautiful woman. ‘Any girl can be glamorous,’ she said. ‘All she has to do is to stand still and look stupid.’ They don’t give you that advice in women’s mags, do they? Hedy was also not one to go out and party with the Hollywood elite. Instead, she preferred to stay home and sketch out inventions at a drafting table.
Her most important invention was something called frequency-hopping. She had recalled from her days married to her first bastard weapons-mogul husband that a problem of torpedoes was that their radio guidance could be jammed and hijacked by enemies. And so Hedy and her friend George Anthiel developed frequency-hopping, a technology vital to wireless communications, which prevented this problem. The pair were granted a patent in 1942, but it would be a few more decades before the US military would begin to make use of it.
Today, this frequency-hopping technology is the basis of Wi-Fi and mobile phones, things that nowadays people literally die if they are left without for more than a couple of hours. Who knows how many teenagers have been saved by Hedy’s invention?
Because Hollywood values its boners more than its people, as Hedy began to age, the roles began to dry up. In WWII, Hedy wanted to move to DC and join the Inventor’s Council to help the war effort with her inventing skills, but she was told she’d be of more use as a movie star touring the country selling war bonds. She raised $25 million this way, and also worked entertaining soldiers. During the war, at the Hollywood Canteen, a club which saw off soldiers about to go overseas, Fridays were Hedy’s night. She would try to dance with every single one of the thousands of soldiers who gained free entry with their uniforms.
She spent her later years enjoying those classic old people pastimes of shoplifting, suing people, and moving to Florida. In her life, she married and divorced six men. She was never one to stick around if something wasn’t working. Once, unbothered about attending her own divorce hearing, Hedy sent her old Hollywood stand-in in her place.
Before she died in 2000, Hedy finally gained recognition for the many technologies spawned from her frequency-hopping patent, as well as residuals. Girls: make sure you get paid what you’re worth, no matter who you have to sue. It’s what Hedy would have wanted.
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