Mackenzi Lee - Bygone Badass Broads: 52 Forgotten Women Who Changed the World

Editor: Samantha Weiner
Designer: Diane Shaw
Production Manager: Rebecca Westall

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949397

ISBN: 978-1-4197-2925-6
eISBN: 978-1-68335-233-4

2018 Mackenzie Van Engelenhoven
Illustrations by Petra Eriksson
Cover 2018 Abrams

Published in 2018 by Abrams Image, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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FOR MOM
My Original Badass Broad

In college, I was a frustrated history major.

Having grown up on American Girl dolls, Where in Time Is Carmen San Diego?, and every historical fiction novel about a precocious young woman I could find, when I got to university, I discovered that, if I wanted to continue to study the stories of the women who had made me love history, I wouldnt find them in my survey classes. Women showed up when suffrage was discussed, and there was always cursory attention paid to Queen Elizabeth, Rosa Parks, Hellen Kellerall amazing women, but if I wanted to learn about nonwhite, nonwestern, not straight women, or any women beyond that token handful, I had to take a specialized course, the curriculum of which was usually overwhelmingly about white, straight, cisgender, non-disabled women.

Most people I talk to had the same experience with history classes throughout their schooling. According to these classes, it seemed that women were too busy being oppressed by the confines of their gender to make history.

When I started doing research on my own, I found the complete opposite was true. As long as there has been recorded history, there have been women in the narrativecomplex, ambitious, villainous, and virtuous women, who made remarkable contributions to the world long before Rosie the Riveter flexed on the poster. There were so many women who had left a huge impact on the world around them, and yet I had never heard about them in any of my history classes, even through public school and years of university. No one had ever talked about those ladies.

So I started talking about them.

As an author of historical fiction with a small twitter platform of people who generally seem to enjoy weird history as much as I do, I took to social media. Every week, I would tweet about a different woman from history I found fascinating, subversive, and who I had never heard about in my history classes. To my surprise and delight, the series took off, and each week, more and more people would tune in for the next installment of what I lovingly hashtagged #BygoneBadassBroads. The stories began inspiring art, school reports, bedtime stories, new hobbies, and hundreds of people to know their names and to do more research about these women.

And nowjoy of joys!these forgotten stories have been compiled in this book.

Many of the women I chose to highlight over the course of the Twitter series and in this book are morally complex. They are sometimes violent, ruthless, and downright criminal. When their actions are either illegal or unkind, their role as featured women in this book in no way condones the paths theyve chosen, but Bygone Badass Broads is my attempt to put women back into the historical narrative and to portray them as the complex, three-dimensional humans they were, rather than deny them both a seat at the table and the complexities of personhood we grant men. In order for women to achieve true equality in historical narratives, we have to talk about them in the same way we do menwarts and all.

This book is a collection of the stories of 52 of my favorite women from history. They span time, the globe, socioeconomic situations, sexual and gender identities, and races. They are queens, scientists, athletes, politicians, spies, warriors, peacemakers, criminals, and scoundrels. They are trendsetters, barrier breakers, innovators, and rebels. Each one of them has shown me an infinite number of ways to be a strong woman and a strong human being, and I hope you, dear reader, find in their stories strength and inspiration to be the next generation that changes the world.

2700-ISH BCE, CHINA

The story of Empress Xi Ling Shi is so wrapped up in legend its hard to know whats real and whats mythology. But no matter how much of her story is true in the strictest sense of the word, shes an important figure in Chinese history.

Also, wrapped up is a really great pun.

Keep readingyoull get it in a minute.

Xi Ling Shi, also known as Xilingshi, Lei Tsu, or Leizu, was the teenage bride of Emperor Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, who boasted an impressive resume that included founding the religion of Taoism, creating Chinese writing, and inventing the compass and the pottery wheel. Emperor Huangdi ruled China between 2697 and 2597 BCE, when cloth manufacturing was still a new and confusing process and the silk that put China on the international trade maps had not yet been discovered.

Until Empress Xi Ling Shi.

The story goes that the empress was sitting in her garden, drinking a cup of tea, when a cocooned bug dropped into her cup from the branches of the mulberry tree hanging over her. Defying feminine stereotypes, the Empress did not freak out over the buginstead, she fished it out of her tea and examined it. The heat of the tea had begun to separate the filament of the cocoon, and Xi Ling Shi began to unravel it.

From that one small cocoon came yards and yards and yards of bright, strong filament, encasing one of the tiny worms that had been making an all-you-can-eat buffet out of the leaves of the mulberry trees in the royal garden.