I started writing this in 2020, but all that matters is that I got it up, right?
Marsha, at 23, was among the vanguard during the Stonewall Riots. She’s often credited with throwing the “shot glass heard around the world,” but she said she didn’t even get to Stonewall until “the place was already on fire….The riots had already started.”
Continue reading “Marsha P. Johnson [1946–1992]”Hookay, it’s been a while since I sat down and did this, but here we go! This might contain a little bit more profanity than usual because the further I got in writing this the more outraged I got.
Ya’ll have heard of the atomic bomb (I hope), and some of you have probably even hard of Otto Hahn—he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944 for the discovery of nuclear fission (but he didn’t get it until 1945). Does it surprise anyone that he should have shared that award with a woman, but her involvement in it was buried until years later? No? Good. You all know what this blog is about, then.
Before we get into the nitty gritty (dirt band) of Tomoe Gozen, who will cut off your head, let’s all sit down for a very quick history lesson, delivered in my best impression of my high school history teacher. (Except probably not, because all of this knowledge comes from Google and hers came from actual study.)
The first thing you need to know is that Tomoe lived through a civil war in Japan that marked the end of the Heian period (794–1185) and ushered in the beginning of the age of the samurai. This civil war was basically a family feud in which the refined and Kyoto-based Taira clan faced off against the rough and provincial-based Minamoto clan (these guys probably unironically listened to country music).
Continue reading “Tomoe Gozen [c. 1157–1184/1247]”On this International Women’s Day (which snuck up on me, honestly), I’m taking the opportunity to continue my Womxn I Should Have Been Taught About in History Class posts, featuring Sybil Ludington, the (arguable) winner of my Twitter poll. She was tied with Alice Paul at 40%, but I think Sybil was leading most of the time, so she got the write-up. Irena Sendlerowa came in third with 20% of the vote, and poor Katherine Johnson had 0%. Reminder, I pick people from my list at random, and the poll will be up on my Twitter not long after this goes live.
All right, friends, I’m still slogging my way through Written by Herself (which, for the record, is a great collection of autobiographies, but takes a long, long time to read), so I figured I’d give everyone another installment of Womxn I Should Have Been Taught About in History Class with another choice from my Twitter poll: Artemisia I of Caria.
Before we begin, this will be a bit of a shorter post than normal, because most of what we know about her comes from Herodotus, but she’s still probably my second favorite woman I’ve written about so far.
Continue reading “Artemisia I of Caria [c. 500 BCE]”My endeavor to write about Josephine Baker the French Resistance agent has been sidelined yet again, this time by a Twitter poll in which I asked people if they’d rather I write about RBG (29%), Eleanor of Aquitaine (19%), Josephine Baker (14%), or Nancy Wake (43%). I’d literally just Googled something like “awesome women I should know about” and pulled Nancy’s name off a list. I knew nothing about her.
Turns out I still got a French Resistance agent, she’s just also part Maori, part French, and part British and credited with saving hundreds of Allied soldiers and airmen by escorting them through France and into Spain. She was the Allies’ most-decorated servicewoman of WWII and the Gestapo’s most-wanted person. She literally Judo chopped a man to death.
Welcome to the much-delayed second installment of Womxn I Should Have Been Taught About in History Class. It’s like I decided after writing about Queen Nzinga that I’d done enough and I was going to wait for the world to get really awful again.
Spoiler alert, it did!
I was writing a blog post for a friend’s podcast Plead the Belly and several of my sources mentioned S. Josephine Baker. I’d read about her in the book my aunt gave me (review tk far in the future, because I set it aside to get some fiction in my life again) and was surprised to see her mentioned.
First things first: This is not Josephine Baker the French Resistance agent (this Josephine Baker was always amused when she was confused for the other Josephine Baker), although she is absolutely on my list of people to write about. This is Dr. Sara Josephine Baker.
Continue reading “Dr. S. Josephine Baker [1837–1945]”Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeod-cyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Wait, sorry.
That’s the opening lines of Beowulf. But in keeping with starting things with hwæt:
So, listen. There’s some shit going down right now, and my social media feed is full of how awful everything is (and everything is awful). I was listening to something or reading something and I realized that history is both full of awful things and full of amazing women (some of whom did some not-so-great things) who I should have been taught about in history class.
I present to you the first Womxn I Should Have Been Taught About in History Class: Queen Nzinga.
Continue reading “Queen Nzinga Mbande [1583–1661/63]”
midwest sensibility 