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Channel: Rating: PG – Rejected Princesses

Cornelia Sorabji

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  1. It doesn’t seem like it’s something that even needs to be explained, but such are the times we live in: colonialism was bad. The idea of India remaining part of Britain was a bad one. It just was. I’ve covered numerous Indian women who fought against Britain — notably Rani Lakshmibai and Velu Nachiyar — so please, nobody see this as a “yay colonialism was great” take. Thanks!
  2. Also, on reflection, it’s probably a little strong to say she “hated” Gandhi – she debated the guy, she disliked him, and I think she distrusted him as a bit of a demagogue, but “hate” may be a bit much.
  3. Cornelia’s dad was from a prominent, well-respected Parsi family. He had gotten into trouble in school for talking back to a Brahmin, and was shocked when the principal of the school, a Christian man, didn’t get mad at him, instead espousing the idea of loving one’s enemies. This led her dad to get into Christianity, which shocked and infuriated his community. He was regularly invited to give speeches, or given false information about his mother’s health, to lure him into a trap of mob violence. The worst of these incidents involved him being tricked on board a fishing boat and then dumped into the Indian Ocean. He survived for 4 days until he was rescued by a Goan fisherman.
  4. The Sorabji children were basically raised in the same manner as Victorian English kids. They spoke English in the house from a young age (although they also spoke other Indian languages). They were encouraged to be independent, although the mission of empire was also heavily instilled in them.
  5. It’s worth noting that the primary organization they allied with was the Church Missionary Society, which exploited much of her sisters’ and mother’s labors, without recognition or remuneration.
  6. She went to undergrad for English literature in Pune, India – she was actually the first woman in western India to get a bachelor degree. She became a lecturer for classes of 300+ people after she graduated, at age 21. This was a terrifying experience for her, being surrounded by so many men, but it seemed like it went fine.
  7. Getting into Oxford was extremely difficult financially. As a woman, she wasn’t eligible for scholarships, so the only way that she could get there is by the community raising money for her.  Cornelia was interested in both literature and law, but eventually decided to focus on law.
  8. It’s worth noting — she was the first Indian person, male or female, at a British university, and the first woman of any ethnicity at Oxford law.
  9. This wasn’t the only sexism she suffered from this era. She wasn’t initially allowed to take her law tests with the men. This sort of stuff had a cumulative effect on her, and she had terrible self-esteem and a persistent case of Impostor Syndrome. The quote from the supportive guy on the previous page was actually in response to her bout of self doubt.
  10. After her return, she was financially hard-strapped some time. She worked as a legal clerk for a while, and then as a legal petitioner for Britain. She applied to practice in Bombay and Allahabad, and was shot down — repeatedly, in the case of the latter. She even learned Urdu and Persian script for the Allahabad application, and the people working there agreed she was qualified, but felt “it would be impertinent of an Indian High Court to admit women to its folks before England had given the lead.” After that, she determined she needed to change public opinion.
  11. She barely had any romantic relationships to speak of. The main was a brief dalliance with an married man named Falkner Blair, who, at 60, was nearly twice her age (she called him “Dads”). Their relationship was never consummated, and only lasted a short while. He died in her arms in 1907.
  12. The other one was with a dude named W.R. Gourley, a man who enjoyed playing the field and was never quite on the same wavelength as her. Notably, the two traveled to Scotland at the same time in 1911 — his mother had invited Cornelia to come visit. He informed Cornelia shortly beforehand that he was actually going to Scotland to get married… to someone else. Cornelia went to his parents’ house anyway. Gourlay then moved, along with his new wife, down the road from Cornelia in Calcutta, which was emotionally exhausting for all involved. Plus, his position in the government often put Cornelia and him at odds professionally. Cornelia couldn’t catch a break.
  13. I intentionally drew this with the same setup as the missionary teacher on page 2. She had to learn it from somewhere!
  14. Purdah is a concept that originated from Muslim communities in South Asia, and spread to Orthodox Hindu communities. Savitribai Phule, whom I cover in my second book, also did a lot of work for women who had been ill-treated by this. Given that Phule and Cornelia both lived in Pune at the same time, they may have even met each other.
  15. The amount of work she had to do to convince men that this was a problem was maddening. Men played down the problem, saying the numbers were insignificant and that there weren’t enough purdahnahshin cases to pay for someone to do her job. When she could convince men that it was a real problem, they countered that bringing up legal suits would just make these women more vulnerable to their now-angered “protectors.”
  16. The title she got was advisor to the Court of Wards. She primarily looked after the purdahnahshins, but also advocated against child marriage and for women’s education. As an advisor, she couldn’t actually order any changes, but she did write up a lot of recommendations, most of which were followed. She ended up saving the government far more than they paid her in wages.
  17. This was a woman she referred to as the Squirrel Lady (I believe because she often hung out with squirrels). She was very religious and mostly wanted a pittance of her money to go on pilgrimages. Cornelia describes her as looking practically bent in half the last time she saw her.
  18. Another example of a client: a beautiful young Maharani whose (male) doctor sexually harassed her, often “accidentally” walking in on her bathing. She was depressed for pretty obvious reasons, but her family pushed to diagnose her as a lunatic and have her put in asylum.
  19. Others included a woman who’d been forced to do sati (self-immolation after one’s husband dies) and survived; a woman who was forced into lifelong training to do sati by doing things like having to stir boiling soup with her bare hands.
  20. Much of Cornelia’s advocacy about purdahnahshins was about getting them out of seclusion and integrating them into a changing world. Much of her criticism towards Gandhi was that he didn’t see their plight or consider it a priority.
  21. She’d really wanted this position to open doors for women, and wanted it to be a permanent one — but the courts continually ruled it as temporary. When she finally did get a permanent position, she was put on a low salary and reduced-rate pension. Plus, her consulting work, which had brought in 8000 rupees a year, was eliminated, and replaced with a stipend of 1600 rupees. Her legal background was belittled and described as “wholly unnecessary” for her job.
  22. She stopped doing this government job in 1922, the same year the first woman was allowed to take the bar in England. She passed the bar herself in 1924, only the second Indian woman to ever do so.
  23. The last panel is from her own clerk suing her for non-payment – a tactic he was encouraged to do by her political enemies. She had trouble paying for help because of her low salary and because her colleagues continually spread rumors she didn’t want paying work. When she confronted the newspaper and they gave the above response, she fumed, “They only regard me as a woman when there is something which can be interpreted against me, I suppose.”
  24. There were a ton of other obstacles, big and small. One of the most pernicious ones was that she was given only limited access to a legal library she desperately needed in order to find legal precedents (and do her job). She eventually got in, after a lot of arguing, despite her gender. She had to pay out the nose for her own books because of her limited access, and lost many cases regardless. Of her eventual admittance to the library, she wrote, “I am giving the highway robber my purse but I do not admire his courtesy or honesty.”
  25. Part of the reason she wrote so many articles about purdahnahshins was to supplement her tiny income, since she couldn’t take outside work.
  26. Mayo’s book blamed Indian male sexuality for all of the country’s ills, and harped breathlessly about rape, homosexuality, prostitution, STIs, and other preoccupations of repressed Victorian society. Cornelia mostly responded to the parts about the mistreatment of women, girls, and animals. Her blind spot for the rest of it is… well, she was a flawed person.
  27. Gandhi, for his part, didn’t deny the broad outlines of Mayo’s critiques of Indian society, but pointed out she was functioning as a drain cleaner, only seeing the absolute worst of Indian society without representing any of its upsides.
  28. Cornelia had been doing a lot of work into starting social programs to help the downtrodden. Gandhi had been doing similarly with his own programs, but Cornelia was deeply suspicious of how he intermingled politics with it, considering it a form of near indoctrination. The irony of this criticism being brought by a devotee of missionaries never seemed to occur to her.
  29. Many of her critics seemingly didn’t even read Mother India or what she’d written about it, and just castigated her on principle. This was devastating and deeply infuriating for Cornelia.
  30. By this point, Cornelia’s eyesight had begun to suffer, and she moved to London. She lived there through World War II and all the bombings. In her old age, she began to suffer mild dementia and was placed in the care of her sister Alice, who was not a very kind caretaker.
  31. It’s worth noting that she also was against women’s suffrage and generally had pretty conservative views. As she got older, she even had one letter that borderline advocated for British authoritarianism in India — although I believe that was an anomaly in her writing borne out of frustration.
  32. She practically never wore the wig and robe (that was more an English courts than an Indian court thing, I think), but it’s such a striking image, I had to share it.

Inge Ginsberg

Mercadera

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  1. The conflict in question was the Aragonese Crusade – not to be confused with the Aragonese Conquest. The Crusade actually was tangentially related to the story of Isabella of France.
  2. “Mercadera” translates directly from Catalan to “merchant,” despite what Google Translate might tell you (the fiend!). The original calls her “Na Mercadera,” which indicates she was the town’s only female merchant, and is perhaps best translated as “The Merchant” or “Our Merchant.” Thanks to arigata-the-neko on Tumblr for the help!
  3. That’s based on a modern-day picture of Peralada, and it may not be accurate as to what buildings were built when. Sorry!
  4. The translation I got a friend to do from the original Catalan said he was in a stream running between different farm plots. There’s an English translation that says it was a bit of a ravine. I had trouble picturing how that a stream detain a soldier for long, so I portrayed it as him having trouble with a disobedient horse.
  5. Apparently she did come outside with a spear, shield, and sword, all of which are described in the source text.
  6. The story makes a point of saying how she obeyed the laws of chivalry in allowing him to surrender, and then additionally heaps praise on her for bandaging him up — making a note how she’d done both masculine (warrior) and feminine (healer) acts.
  7. I love the idea that they made the French guy just perform over and over. In all likelihood they just kept him locked up, but I like this visual better.

Bessie Stringfield

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(important update: there’s been a lot more to come out about Bessie Stringfield than when I first wrote this; that’s relayed at the end of this article, but for more info on Bessie, visit biographer Ann Ferrar’s website at http://www.bessiestringfieldbiography.com)

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IMPORTANT UPDATESince first putting this online, the New York Times did a 2018 obituary on Bessie in which they tracked down some of her surviving relatives, who basically said she was telling tall tales on a number of finer points – nobody is trustworthy, haha! They claimed she was never adopted by white parents, and was not from Jamaica. Many of the stories of Bessie related in this telling (and virtually every other article on her) come courtesy of her official biographer, Ann Ferrar, who knew Bessie in life and wrote a few pages on her in her 1996 book Hear Me Roar: Women, Motorcycles, and the Rapture of the Road (which I cite below, in the citations).  She is working on a longer biography of Bessie — you can find more info here: http://www.bessiestringfieldbiography.com

I’ll excerpt a bit from the New York Times obituary, explaining how these untruths came to dominate the dialog about Bessie:

Ferrar had passed on some of the misinformation of Stringfield’s early life, wanting to keep her legacy alive. Asked recently about these untruths, Ferrar wrote in an email, “Bessie’s running from her early past does not discount or in any way lessen her unusual achievements as an adult, and that is why Bessie continues to inspire new generations, and rightfully so.”

“She asked me to tell her truth as her friend,” Ferrar said in an interview.

  1. Her birth mother, according to most sources, was a Dutch maid who died in childbirth. Her dad was West Indian. Bessie was born as Betsy Ellis in Kingston, Jamaica. They moved to Boston when she was young, and her birth dad gave her up for adoption at age five — however, as noted in a 2018 New York Times obituary on her, this is almost certainly a latter-day invention by Bessie herself. Nobody is trustworthy!
  2. There are virtually no details on her foster parents, aside from them being Irish. In one interview, Bessie even said that she wasn’t allowed to use her foster mother’s name. Again, this is likely an invention on her part, and this New York Times obituary claims she did not have foster parents, and that her parents were named Maggie Cherry and James White.
  3. I do not want to put too fine a point on her “standing out” — that is more a convention of the story and her character than the role of her race in her childhood. According to her, she had a pretty decent childhood: “Back in those days in Boston nobody gave it a second thought that a white woman had a colored child. There wasn’t all the racial trouble there then.” And once more: she probably didn’t actually have adoptive parents, as per this New York Times obituary.
  4. A devout Catholic who gave much credit for her ability to “The Man Upstairs,” Bessie claimed that Jesus had actually taught her how to drive in a dream: “One night in my sleep, I saw myself shifting gears and riding around the block. When I got out on the street, that’s just what I did!”
  5. She’d replace the Indian Scout with a sixty-one Harley.
  6. This was starting in 1925. The highway system wouldn’t be proposed until 1956. She only started doing longer distance rides around 1930, though. She did eight long distance solo rides between the 1930s and 1940s. In so doing, she became the first black woman to ride a motorcycle in everyone of the 48 contiguous United States, and made trips to Brazil, Haiti, and parts of Europe.
  7. The green book there is the Negro Motorcyclist Green Book, a guide used by people of color to navigate the treacherous waters of American travel in the era of segregation. It first came out in 1936, and while this page depicts her travels starting in 1930 or so, I assume she probably used it — would not be surprised if she helped contribute to it.
  8. One guy even gave her a free tank of gas, he was so impressed by her fortitude. Of the near-death experiences she had, she merely characterized it as “ups and downs.”
  9. The trick portrayed at the top was called the Wall of Death, and was a pretty common thing to see back in those days.
  10. The exact quote given in numerous sources was “N****r women are not allowed to ride motorcycles in Miami.” This was in 1932.
  11. This was Captain Robert Jackson, whom Bessie would take to calling Captain Jack. She gave different accounts of the tricks he asked her to perform – everything from figure eights to hopping off her moving bike, catching it, and remounting it.
  12. Two of her children died in childbirth, and the third died at four years old, causes unknown. They were all with her first husband.
  13. The identity of her husbands isn’t available in any sources. I know she taught two to ride, and at least one was in the military (she’d ride from base to base to visit him). Her third husband’s surname was Stringfield, and he told her to keep it, as he was sure she’d become famous.
  14. Some sources quote her as saying only got legitimately married five times — while others say she got married six times. My guess is that one, she counted as less than legitimate. She seemed to brush off the idea that she’d been married a ton, saying of the era, “If you kissed, you got married.”
  15. The interviewer in question was Miami Herald reporter Bea Hines. Yes, that art is based on her appearance in the 80s – the article ran in 1981. I do as much research as I can.
  16. This was in the 1950s, after she’d put down stunt riding and become a cook, then a nurse. The gang who gave her trouble was the Outlaws Motorcycle Gang, who rode straight up to her door. When asked why they hadn’t been invited, she said, “Because you don’t belong to the Motorcycle Association of America.” Of their reaction, she said, “It didn’t set too well with them, but they didn’t harm me.”
  17. She also had her first and only accident at age 64 in 1975. She hurt her arm and couldn’t use it for four years.

Mary Patten

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The first American woman to command a ship1 was a pregnant teenager. She did it while fighting off a mutiny, nursing an incapacitated husband, and braving gale-force winds.

She was 19.

Mary Ann Patten (nee Brown) was the type who would’ve volunteered for the distinction, had that been an option. She came from a family of mariners, and, at 16, married into one too. A year into her marriage, she insisted on joining her captain husband Joshua on his first time captaining the Neptune’s Car. Together, the two went from New York to San Francisco, China, and London, before returning to New York.

Although Western women crewing a ship was rare and generally seen as improper  — ah, the Victorian era! —  Mary determined to make herself useful. She spent her time plowing through the ship’s small library, teaching herself medicine and how to navigate using sextants, compasses, and charts.

This would come in handy.

The Neptune’s Car, you see, was cursed as hell. It had only made one voyage before Joshua Patten coming on board. Why the quick turnover in captains, you may ask? Well, on its maiden voyage, 23 crew members were worked so hard they mutinied. The commander, one Captain Forbes,  then threatened to kill all of them, saying “they’ll either work or face being shot”. Upon returning to port, everyone lawyered up and began suing each other. So there was an opening for a captain.

But that maiden voyage doesn’t even scratch the surface of how screwed this ship was. The voyages after Joshua’s tenure on board would feature such highlights as:

  • The third mate drunkenly killing a sailor before they even set sail, and the second mate getting arrested for covering for him;
  • Another sailor dying in a freak accident while loading the boat;
  • A cargo of munitions spilling on board, knocking the crew out with its acidic fumes;
  • The trip where the financiers tricked a crew of illiterate sailors into a journey twice as long as they’d signed up for;
  • And of course, pirates, hurricanes, and endless run-ins with the law. As you do.

And all of that still is NOTHING compared to Joshua and Mary’s second voyage on it.

The trouble started during the loading, when Joshua’s trusty first mate broke his leg. The financiers, Foster & Nickerson, eager to not lose time, replaced the first mate with an untested rando, William Keeler. The trouble continued when Joshua began feeling unwell, Foster & Nickerson ignored it, putting him to sea with Keeler and the now-pregnant Mary.

Much of the reason for the hurry is that the financiers had money riding on this, beyond just delivering cargo. The Neptune’s Car was still a relatively new ship, and they wanted to prove it could make good time. They laid down money against four other ships running the same route — New York to San Francisco, via the southern tip of South America —  that Neptune’s Car would beat them to port. In the grand tradition of rich douchebags everywhere, they were gambling the lives of their employees to one-up other rich douchebags.

It was not to be smooth sailing.

Keeler proved an incompetent shitheel in record time. His list of infractions are staggering: he’d sleep through half his shifts; he set course through reef beds; he had to be ordered to do simple tasks; and finally, he just outright refused to do some tasks, like putting out sails. About a month in, Joshua put him in chains and confined him to his cabin.

While he didn’t have many other options, this choice proved deadly for Joshua.  He’d relied on Keeler to keep the course while Joshua slept. But with Keeler gone, the ship facing constant gales of snow and sleet, and no other crew members able to handle navigation — the second mate was illiterate, the third an idiot — Joshua had to stay up all day and night.

Increasingly, he relied on Mary to help confirm the position, course, and speed. He recognized she was a better mathematician than he was, even when he wasn’t out of his mind from staying up all day and night.

But by the eighth day of staying up, it became clear Joshua was out of his mind from more than that. After navigating to the Le Maire Strait, he collapsed. He’d developed pneumonia, which only exacerbated the undiagnosed ailment he’d started the voyage with: Tuberculosis meningitis.

Mary took control and, with the second mate’s help, parked the ship south of the deadly storms that had been rocking their boat. There she began looking after her husband. His situation was dire: the infection had reached his brain, and on top of being delirious, he’d become blind and partially deaf.

Compounding matters, Keeler began acting up. Hearing word of the captain’s failing health, he wrote Mary a letter, reminding her how perilous the coast was, and what great responsibility she shouldered. He graciously offered to rid her of the burden, and take control himself. She responded by informing him that since he’d had such trouble being first mate, she couldn’t possibly burden him with an even higher command.

When he heard this, Keeler tried striking up a mutiny to oust Mary from her command. It’s a testament to her ability and to the crew’s general good sense that they stood by her.

With Josh still out of commission, Mary steered the ship through the perilous waters south of the Cape, dodging inclement weather, collapsing glaciers, and mountains of ice. Finally, as they neared the Chilean city of Valparaiso, Joshua’s fever broke and he once again became lucid. However, he was evidently still suffering from brain ailments, as he soon made the executive decision to give command to Keeler.

This is what we in the business call a “boneheaded move.”

If anyone doubted Keeler was mutinous scum, he wasted no time in setting them straight. Refusing to let Mary on deck to take navigation  measurements, Keeler began secretly steering the boat to port at Valparaiso, despite explicit orders to head straight to San Francisco. However, Keeler did not reckon on Mary’s overabundance of competence — despite being largely confined to quarters, she still realized they were going off course. And to prove it? She Macguyvered up her own compass in the captain’s room. Nobody messes with Mary Patten.

And that was it for Keeler. Joshua had him demoted once and for all. He was clapped in chains and kept below deck.

Unfortunately, soon after that, Joshua relapsed, and he suffered 25 days of total blindness and deafness. Mary, by this point six months pregnant, was not about to waste any more time on modesty. She took full control of the ship and steered it straight to San Francisco, without further incident.

On November 15, 1856 — 137 days after they’d set sail — the Neptune’s Car pulled into port in San Francisco. The 19-year-old Mary had captained the boat for 56 of those days, through some of the most severe weather the region had seen. She had not changed clothes in nearly two months prior to arrival.

And she still beat three out of four boats to port.

As for Keeler? He cozied up to one of the ship’s mates, who helped free him once they pulled into the bay. He then jumped overboard at the earliest opportunity, escaping arrest. I am unsure what happened to his treasonous ass afterwards.

Upon arrival in San Francisco, Mary became a national sensation, with newspaper after newspaper interviewing her (and usually getting a fair number of basic facts wrong). But despite the media attention, she struggled to pay for Joshua’s care — Foster & Nickerson refused to pay out his wages (in the end, they never would). It was only after public outcry for the insurance company to award Mary $5,000 that the Atlantic Mutual Insurance Company showed their magnanimity by sending Mary $1,000. The cargo she’d saved was worth $350,000.

And because she was a class act, she wrote to sincerely thank them and ask they also give credit to the other sailors2.

Unfortunately, the Patten’s situation never improved. By February 1857, Mary and Joshua made it back to their home in Boston — but Joshua’s condition had only worsened. Shortly after giving birth to their son, Joshua Jr., Mary had Joshua committed to an asylum. By July, her husband was dead. Shortly thereafter, Mary’s father, a sailor himself, was lost at sea. By 1860, Mary herself had contracted tuberculosis, and on March 17 of the following year, she died, just shy of her 24th birthday. She was buried next to Joshua, with nary a mention of her groundbreaking work on her headstone.

However, her deeds are not forgotten. A century after her fateful voyage, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, NY opened a hospital. They named it Patten Hospital, in memory of the “Florence Nightingale of the Ocean,” the woman whose courage and grace they would always seek to emulate.

  1. So this is a little bit of a murky claim. It’s certain that she’s the first woman who pilot a commercial ship, but I’m only mostly sure she was the first female American boat commander, period. The only other women I could find to rival this claim were river pirate Sadie the Goat — who would have been a decade or so later, and is possibly fictional — and Rachel Wall, who was a pirate alongside her husband, but did not, I believe, ever command a ship herself. Harriet Tubman helped lead a boat-based raid on plantations in 1859, three years after Mary’s voyage. It’s possible there were women in disguise as naval commanders, but I’m unaware of any who predate Mary Patten.
  2. And because she was a Victorian, she downplayed her own role, saying it was “only the plain duty of a wife towards a good husband.”

Millie Veasey

Anne Farquharson-Mackintosh

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I don’t understand the song lyrics much more than you do.

  1. So the broad outlines are confirmed in a lot of places – the finer details I had to get from Jean Mackintosh Goldstrom’s Colonel Anne Mackintosh: Scotland’s Beautiful Rebel. That is a self-published book and I’m really wary of using it as a main source, but I didn’t have a lot else to go on. The author is clearly not impartial on the topic, but they cite a lot of works at the end, and various people they contacted, none of which I can personally access. I couldn’t find anything flat-out wrong in it, although there’s some stuff omitted.
  2. Regarding the first panel: I’m kidding, Scottish people (well, mostly). Anne did have an education growing up, which was unusual for European women in general, but not that uncommon for Scottish women.
  3. Angus joined the Black Watch, an English-run militia of Highlanders, which they employed against the Jacobites (the people who were for Stuart rule).
  4. The Farquharsons and Mackintoshes were both part of a larger umbrella clan, Clan Chattan (whose symbol is a cat). The Mackintoshes were the main house of Chattan, and Angus was thus head honcho for a lot of stuff. All the Chattan folk had fought in previous Jacobite uprisings, particularly in 1715 (30 years earlier).
  5. Charles was also known as “Bonnie Prince Charlie” or “The Young Pretender.” This was the last of a series of attempts to place the Stuarts on the throne, starting in the late 1600s. I believe there were 5 or 6 armed attempts, and a couple more planned out but never implemented. For more on this fight over succession, look up James II of England (VII of Scotland).
  6. Charles was a bit of a prat when he first landed – and really, kind of throughout. A couple different clan chiefs came out to meet him but were a little reticent to support him. He told Lochiel of the Cameron Clan that if he didn’t join his forces, “You can stay home and read about it in the newspapers.” It took a month or two for them to decide on it, but a lot of the clans did throw in behind him anyway – despite him being an unproven 23-year-old who’d lived much of his life in Italy.
  7. I was unable to verify the bits about his boat sinking or his initial meeting with Lochiel and the lot in anything aside from the aforementioned book.
  8. This is January of 1745 that Anne goes out recruiting – she’s 22 or so at the time. Estimates of how many men she gets range from 200 to 800.
  9. Charles won in the Battle of Prestonpans and the Battle of Falkirk, and his army had swollen to upwards of 9000 men at this point. When he came back to Moy Hall, he did so with only about 50 men, though.
  10. That man depicted up top is the Earl of Loudon, who was overseeing much of the English effort at Inverness. Angus and the Black Watch worked under him.
  11. I have no idea if she served them pig. I just thought it was a funny visual.
  12.  So I’m leaving out some details here. Multiple sources relayed that the info came from Angus’s mother, the Dowager Lady Mackintosh, who lived in Inverness. She relayed it to a guy named Lachlan Mackintosh, who snuck past the guards and hightailed it to Anne. How the Dowager came to know about Loudon’s plans is unknown, but Jean Mackintosh Goldstrom theorizes it was from Angus, who would have likely known. It seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion, honestly.
  13. Sources differ as to whether Anne roused the visiting king and crew, or whether they slept through all this.
  14. Estimates of how many men went range from 5-7. The one who is mentioned in every telling as being there was the blacksmith, Donald Fraser.
  15. Several sources indicated that the 1500 were mostly from the MacLeod clan, and they lost heart after their bagpiper was shot (the only fatality from this incident, I believe).
  16. When Charles went to Inverness, he stayed with the Dowager Lady Mackintosh, who had a swanky pad.
  17. The dialogue here is repeated verbatim in multiple tellings.
  18. The top panel references the Battle of Culloden, where Prince Charles displayed some truly awful tactics that got a huge chunk of his forces killed. He fled to Europe 5 months later.
  19. The Mackintosh Goldstrom book relays some stories about Anne being hyperbolically poorly treated by the English, which sounded to me like passed-down propaganda, so I’m omitting them. There’s also some stories about her attempting to help some soldiers in hiding – read the Goldstrom book if you’re curious, it’s like a buck on Amazon.
  20. The “Anne slept with everyone” bit comes from Geoffrey Plank’s Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire. He cites sources I couldn’t access, indicating that Loudon himself had a crush on Anne and spent a ton of time around her – and that she had a reputation as a temptress. I find this all somewhat unlikely, but if you’ve been reading this site for any period of time at all, you know how my Occam’s Razor is situated.
  21. This was a ball held in London in 1747 by the Earl of Cumberland — the English king’s second son, who’d defeated Charles at the Battle of Culloden, and reportedly employed some pretty cruel tactics (and people). Anne had been working hard in the meantime to bridge gaps and generally reintegrate the Jacobites into British society.
  22. This song is “The Auld Stuarts are Back Again,” a song they sang on the front lines fairly regularly.
  23. Angus died in 1770, and Anne died 17 years after that, in Leith. They only had one child, a daughter, who died in infancy. Wikipedia currently lists her death year as 1784 but I believe that is incorrect.

Alakhai Beki

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  1. First off: yes, George Lucas ripped off Mongolian fashion for Princess Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
  2. The missing section has to do with inheritance, and started with “let us reward our female offspring.” It’s unclear as to whether it was just left out by someone who was copying the original text – if it was an accident, or what – but it sure is frustrating. For more on that, I highly recommend Jack Weatherford’s The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, which opened with that exact same point as well. We don’t even know how many in-wedlock daughters Genghis had,  or their names.
  3. “Alakhai” probably means either Siberian Marmot or “Palm of the Hand” — which would be a likely reference to a story about Genghis’s birth, where he came out holding a blood clot. This apparently was held up as a symbol of his importance. The whole story, though, is almost certainly a latter-day invention for PR purposes. “Beki” means princess.
  4. The sources I read couldn’t really agree on who she was engaged to. Most seemed to indicate she was betrothed to Alaqush, leader of the Ongud, but some say she was betrothed to his son, Bai Sibu/Buyan-Shuiban. In any event, she’d end up married to Alaqush, then Bai Sibu, and eventually both of Alaqush’s other sons at one point or another.
  5. The Ongud were located well to help stage additional raids. The Gobi Desert made for a harsh journey of several days – any Mongol army sent across it would be easy pickings for a defending force by the time they came out the other side.
  6. Other dadly advice from Genghis: “Life is short, but fame is everlasting! No friend is better tha nyour own wise heart. No ferocious enemy is worse than a resentful and wicked heart… Although many people can be your helper, no one should be closer to you than your own consciousness.”
  7. Genghis did this sort of thing for all his (known) daughters – they were an advance force to give him a beachhead abroad when he went a-conquerin’.
  8. The Mongols referred to the Ongud as the People of the Wall, for their fortified cities (not, it would seem, for the Great Wall. They were a part of what is now northern China, and were a very old people indeed, far older than the Mongols. They’d weathered the rise and fall of many empires by making friends with the right people.
  9. This happened in 1211 – Genghis went to war against the Jurchen, and the Ongud overthrew Alaqush, killed Bai Sibu, and turned on Alakhai. This was a dangerous position to be in – he was overextended and now potentially had an enemy at his rear as well as his front.
  10. The two kids are Zhenguo and Boyaoha, her stepsons – both of whom she’d marry in successiosn after this (Zhenguo died young). She was queen regent while they came of age.
  11. Most of that stuff, it seems likely Genghis did – but the “burning down a city with alley cats” bit is suspect. It’s supposedly a tactic he employed while sacking Volohai, using cats, swallows, and/or pigs. Suspiciously, this is almost verbatim the same tactic ostensibly employed by Olga of Kiev around a century earlier. Olga’s story is almost certain apocryphal, and on that basis, I must suspect Genghis’s tactics at Volohai are too.
  12. The Ongud survived as their own nation after rebelling – something no other tribe was ever able to do under Genghis.
  13. Pictured here: Genghis’s sons Ogedei (green), Tolui (red), and his grandson Kublai (background),who used Alakhai’s work as a template for their own work.
  14. Alakhai didn’t just run the Ongud. Then Genghis conquered the Jurchen, their leaders unexpectedly just picked up and moved further south – so he gave the duty of administration to Alakhai.
  15. It’s unknown how long she ruled – probably twenty years or so? – or when/how she died. Around 1253, her lands were taken by her nephew Mongke, who later gave it to his younger brother Kublai.

Esther Morris

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The Western territory made history in 1869 by giving women the right to vote. When Esther Morris became justice of the peace a few months later, she made history as well.

Fifty years before women got the federal right to vote, Esther Morris became America’s first female justice of the peace. A contemporary newspaper called her “the terror of all rogues” and said she offered “infinite delight to all lovers of peace and virtue.”

Sarah Biffin

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Thanks to Cygnata for writing in and suggesting I cover Sarah!

  1. Her name is often spelled “Biffen” – even on Wikipedia – but she herself spelled it Biffin. I’m unsure as to the reasoning behind the posthumous spelling change.
  2. This characterization of her parents is based on a short autobiography that she wrote – which unfortunately is not widely available, although parts of it have been reprinted. In it, she states that “at the age of eight years I was very desirous of acquiring the use of my needle; but my Parents discouraged the idea, thinking it wholly impracticable. I was not, however, intimidated, and whenever my father and mother were absent, I was continually practising every invention, till at length I could, with my mouth — thread a needle — tie a knot — do fancy work, — cut out and make my own dresses.”
  3. Some internet sources include some stuff about her being an unwanted “pixie child” and mistreated by her family. I couldn’t find any source material for that claim, though.
  4. Her father was a shoemaker (hence him dropping shoes). She had four siblings: John (who likely died as a baby), Richard, Johanna, and Betty.
  5. From her aforementioned autobiography: “At the age of 12 my desire to work with the needle having worked so far, gave place to my inclination to write: and in a short time I was enabled to correspond with distant friends.”
  6. Little is known of Dukes outside of his relationship with Biffin. It seems likely that the contract he had her sign was worded (or explained) in such a way as to make her think that she was indebted to him indefinitely – more on that later. Martin Hesp, who’s given talks on Sarah, describes Dukes as “a keen man of business for an artist — and perhaps not altogether the most altruistic of people either.” She lived with him and his wife for the next sixteen years. I’m uncertain how that affected her relationship to her family.
  7. Initially he just presented her as able to do various household chores – the painting came later. She would also cut out silhouettes of people and sell them. Her painting was primarily landscapes and then miniature portraits on bits of ivory.
  8. The 1804 on her Artist Alley booth is an indicator on the year that she started doing this.
  9. It’s hard to translate currency from the past to modern day, but this website estimates that 5 guineas (where 1 guinea = 1.05 pounds) would be around 500 pounds, or 600-ish dollars.
  10. This is the 16th Earl of Morton, George Douglas. The teacher arranged for her was William Craig, best miniaturist of the day.
  11. Morton even tried buying out her contract but Dukes wouldn’t go for it. There’s evidence that he tried to get her to leave for quite some time but she thought she was contractually obligated to stay with Dukes in perpetuity. Even late in life, likely fully aware of how badly he’d cheated her, she described Dukes charitably: “During the whole of this time (her years with Dukes -ed.) she resided with Mr. and Mrs. Dukes as one of their family, and was treated by them with uniform kindness.”
  12. The Ada Lovelace connection is mildly dubious. In searching for Sarah’s art online, I came across this listing of one of her pieces, which says it’s of Ada Lovelace, but I’m unsure if that’s accurate.
  13. She made her way to Brussels in 1821, where her work was heralded to the king by the Prince of Orange.
  14. It’s unclear if Dickens ever met with her (if  he did, it was likely in 1837, near the end of her life). Dickens mentioned her by name in in Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Little Dorrit. Notably, he declined to help out with her late-life money issues.
  15. This self-portrait was given to her patron Princess Augusta, but prints were made and sold – the image displayed is one of the prints. Her short autobiography was attached to the prints as a bonus item.
  16. So her marriage is a bit of a question mark. They separated within a year, and rumors had it that they didn’t even sleep together. It’s uncertain whether he actually did run off with her money (and how much she had at the beginning of the marriage). She defended him to the end, saying he provided for her 40 pounds a year as long as he was able. This is, according to the website listed earlier, about 4,300 pounds ($5,700) in modern currency. For reference, she also got an annual pension of 12 pounds from the Civil List.
  17. She had a number of hustles, not all of which I enumerate here. One letter of hers describes how she taught classes. Another indicated she was planning a trip to America that never happened. She moved a number of times in her final years, often living in large households with a number of people. In 1841 she moved to Liverpool.
  18. The patron in question was named Richard Rathbone, who enlisted a number of wealthy patrons as “subscribers” to her in order to create an annuity. This is very similar to how Patreon functions nowadays.
  19. This whole situation was a tricky thing to address: my supposition, off the little data available, was that Dukes and her husband were basically abusive to her. They took her money and kept her under their thumbs. There’s not enough textual evidence to support that conclusively, but it’s not a stretch. It’s my read that she defended them both way more than they deserved, and that she’d likely internalized a lot of feelings of unworthiness. I didn’t want to dwell on that, nor did I want to omit it. It’s the central paradox of her story, and it’s an uncomfortable one. I presented this to a number of friends with disabilities for comment, and I hope I threaded the needle well enough.




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