temenuga:

In 1808, Napoleon, running out of scenic holiday destinations to invade, somehow totally forgot about his neighbor to the south, Spain. So that year he dispatched his troops, kicking off the Peninsular War.

Only 20 years old and working as a barmaid in the town of Valdepenas, Juana Galan was not expecting a surge of French soldiers to come storming through her village. But on June 6, that’s exactly what happened. At that time, most of the men were fighting Napoleon’s forces elsewhere in the nation. Juana, unfazed by things like rifles and Frenchmen and French riflemen, began organizing the women in her village to form a trap for the approaching army.

When the army arrived, Juana and her friends were ready. They dumped boiling water and oil on the French troops, which by all accounts will instantly take the fight out of pretty much anyone. Then Juana, armed with only a batan, beat back the heavily armed French cavalry with her squad of village women, almost none of whom were armed with guns.

The French retreated, giving up on capturing not just Juana’s town but the entire province of La Mancha, leading to ultimate Spanish victory. Today, she is seen in Spain as a national hero, a symbol of resistance, strength, patriotism, feminism and hitting shit with a stick.

(x) 

I received this email today, and I think it’s worth answering publicly. The simple answer is no, I am not a lesbian.

The long answer is, despite my caustic snark tendencies I think people should embrace who and what they are without shame or apologies or fear; I believe everyone has the right to be happy and enjoy any life they can manage to build for themselves without being judged for their race, sexuality, economic class, weight, accent, or heritage.

My Mimi told us growing up that it is hard enough in this world to be happy without someone telling you you’re the wrong colour or love the wrong person. While I have certainly talked enough trash to give everyone cause to not believe I truly agree with this statement, well, I truly believe this statement. You love who you love. You are who are.

Women who have advanced equal rights - whether for gays, women, slaves, immigrants, the underprivileged - should be celebrated and held up as fkn awesome chicks. Who they have sex with is simply noted as being part of who they are, not the sole reason I feature them.

I want all women of all races, classes, and sexual orientations to find a hero in these women I choose to write about here. Not because they are lesbians, or African American, or like math, but because they inspire us as women to attain our own potential as members of humanity, for the good of humanity.

Thanks for reading!

22 rejections from publishers did not stop Jane Rule from getting her groundbreaking novel Desert of the Heart into the hands of women desperately seeking a non-exploitive portrayal of lesbianism.

The six foot tall, dyslexic tomboy claimed she “suddenly discovered” she “was a freak” after reading the classic The Well of Loneliness. Determined to make sure others did not feel that way about themselves, Rule became a public figurehead for gay rights and acceptance, encouraging the “very unhappy, even desperate” women who wrote to her to love themselves and believe they deserved love and happiness.  

Rule’s own personal happiness was bound up in the person of Helen Sonthoff, her partner of almost 50 years. Despite fights, infidelities, and illness, the couple enjoyed each other’s company until Helen’s death in 2000, delighting in “travel, conversation, food, friendship and drinking and smoking”.

Despite her long lasting and loving relationship, Rule was outspoken in her beliefs that gay marriage should not be fought for. “To be forced back into the heterosexual cage of coupledom is not a step forward but a step back into state-imposed definitions of relationship. With all that we have learned, we should be helping our heterosexual brothers and sisters out of their state-defined prisons, not volunteering to join them there.”

In 2007, at the age of 76, after suffering from years of arthritis and being diagnosed with liver cancer, Rule refused further treatment. She instead waited for the end “with a bottle of Queen Anne whiskey and a bar of good chocolate on her bedside table” surrounded by hundreds of letters from friends and supporters, and died 6 weeks later. She was interred next to her beloved partner Helen.

Lucretia Mott is sometimes called “the first feminist” but she was much more. She was also an abolitionist, a teacher, a wife and a mother.

Her first noted “feminist” action occured while she was a teacher at the Nine Partners Quaker Boarding School. Mott found out that male teachers made three times as much as the female teachers. She felt this went against the Quaker teachings of gender equality.

Mott gained widespread recognition as a speaker for abolition. She was no ‘do as I say’, either; she not only travelled the country speaking at anti-slavery meetings, she refused to use sugar, cotton, or any other good produced by slavery, and sheltered runaway slaves in her home. She also founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, the first bi-racial meeting group and the first place the freed slaves were allowed to openly speak as equals.

Equality for all was an abiding theme in her morality. After the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished, Mott turned her attention back to women’s rights, penning Discourse on Woman, and was elected as the first president of the American Equal Rights Association.

Through all the time-consuming activities of her life, Mott still managed the household for her husband James, raised their six children, and supported her husband’s own abolitionist activities. Valiant Friend summed up Lucretia Mott, the first feminist, this way: “She is proof that it is possible for a woman to widen her sphere without deserting it.”

Hatshepsut was so successful and revered that later male rulers tried to claim her achievements as their own. Part of it was no doubt male ego - she was more than just a female with power, she showed them that women could do anything a male ruler could do, and better.

She intended to rule like a man, indeed to outdo all her male predecessors with her reign. She demanded to be called PHAROAH in all official documents, and to be addressed as HIS majesty.

She founded the legendary wealth of the Eighteenth Dynasty (the period of Nefertiti, Tutankhamen, and Thutmosis) by establishing vital trade routes with other countries. During one of these trade missions she had a crew bring back 31 myrrh trees to be planted in her mortuary temple, thus making her responsible for the first recorded transplantation of live trees.

Her grand tomb, first to be built in the Valley of the Kings for a woman pharoah and the third tomb built by any pharoah, was so inspiring that later pharoahs also chose the Valley of the Kings as a burial site, “to associate their complexes with the grandeur of hers.” Thanks to her, archeaologists have a wealth of ancient burial information all in one convenient dig site.

So renowned for her beauty that she was considered a perfect model for a state statue of Aphrodite, Phryne of Greece was more than just a prostitute. She was a living legend.

She was so sought after that she actually adjusted her prices for customers depending upon how she felt about them. The King of Lydia requested her services; she demanded an outrageous sum, because the thought of sex with him disgusted her. (He finally raised the money by levying a special tax on his subjects.) For men like the philosopher Diogenes, her body was free - “because she admired his mind”.

At age 60, having become wonderfully wealthy from a lifetime of pleasing men, the staunchly patriotic Phryne offered to rebuild the walls of Thebes, which had been destroyed by Alexander the Great four years earlier - on condition that the words “destroyed by Alexander, restored by Phryne the courtesan”, were inscribed upon them.

The government politely declined her offer.

If you remember sleeping your way through a Home Economics class in school, you can thank Ellen Swallow Richards for those naps.

The first woman to attend MIT, Richards pioneered water safety studies which led to the establishment of water safety and sewage treatment standards. She also did experiments on the ingredients used in groceries which helped to force adherance to food and drug standards.

Richards stayed at MIT, founding a women’s chemistry lab, and is the woman responsible for creating the field of “home economics” - a field orginally intended to teach scientific methods of keeping homes sanitary and healthy.

She would probably hardly recognise the “home ec” classes available today.

Maria Mitchell was the first woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

When she was twelve her calculations perfectly predicted an eclipse. At age 29 she became the second woman to discover a comet.

At age 47 she was the first faculty member (male or female) hired by Matthew Vassar for his new university, becoming Vassar’s professor of astronomy and  Director of the Vassar College Observatory. When she learned five years later that despite her renown and obvious talent she was being paid less than the male faculty members, she went to Vassar and demanded a raise.

She got it.

In 1947 Edith Eyde, known under the pen name of Lisa Ben, began the earliest known publication created exclusively for lesbians in the United States.

“I was by myself, and I wanted to be able to meet others like me. I couldn’t go down the street saying ‘I’m looking for lesbian friends’…[Vice Versa] gave me a way of reaching out to other gay gals—a way of getting to know other gals….when I had something to hand out and when I tried to talk girls into writing for my magazine, I no longer had any trouble going up to new people.”

9 months later Eyde stopped publishing Vice Versa. According to her, she had “accomplished her goal of increasing her circle of friends, and she wanted to spend more time enjoying her new life rather than writing about it.”

She went on to write for The Ladder, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the United States. In 1997 she was honoured as a founder of the Los Angeles LGBT community.

Nancy Wechsler graduated top of her class in 1940 from Columbia Law School at a time when very few women were admitted. After becoming one of the first women admitted to the New York State bar, she went on to serve with Harry Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights.

In 1948 she joined the law firm representing Planned Parenthood, in an era when things such as contraception and abortion were essentially illegal. Wechsler later remarked about the first women attending law school, “We were really the specialists in the law of birth control.”

25 years later she filed one of the better regarded amicus briefs for the Roe vs. Wade case.