Hannah Jewell - 100 Nasty Women of History: Brilliant, badass and completely fearless women everyone should know

Hannah Jewell is a pop culture host and editor at The Washington Post, and a former senior writer at BuzzFeed UK, where she became known for her humour writing about gender, her satire of British and American politics.

100 Nasty Women of History is her first book.

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright Hannah Jewell 2017

Poems in the chapter on Ulayya bint al-Mahdi have been reproduced from Classical Poems by Arab Women by Abdullah al-Udhari with permission of the Licensor through PLSClear.

The right of Hannah Jewell to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 473 67125 6

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 473 67126 3

eBook ISBN 978 1 473 67127 0

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

For my friend Sylvia Bingham, who was bold and brilliant and unlike anyone else.

Contents

I n the final debate of the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump leaned into the microphone as Hillary Clinton spoke about social security, twisted up his small, wrinkled mouth, and called his opponent such a nasty woman. The phrase has stuck around since he first uttered it. Its been whacked on T-shirts, its been put in Twitter bios, and its come to mean something more than either a smear of Hillary Clinton or a defiant rallying cry for her supporters. In this book, a nasty woman is one who has managed to piss off a man for not behaving as she was expected. Or for having unladylike ideas. Or for murdering him.

When dear Donald became president, it was hard to know what to do to feel better if you werent a Donald fan, beyond perhaps a cathartic scream, or drinking to oblivion. So heres a suggestion: what better time than the present to look back at the difficult women who came before us? What can we learn from them about how to live our nastiest lives?

Often when learning about history, when you get to hear about women at all, their lives are made to sound decidedly un-nasty. As if they spent their entire time on Earth casting woeful but beautiful glances directly into their glittering futures, calmly rebuking those that would stop them from achieving their goals.

But youre a woman! a powerful man says to the imagined Bold-Yet-Morally-Irreproachable Woman of History. Shh, I shall overcome this difficulty, she replies heroically, turning to face the audience. Because I am a strong, empowered woman, and I will never stop believing in the power of my dreams! Live, laugh, love.

Well, that isnt how life works, and it never has been. There are no unrelentingly noble people. When you hear the story of a woman who lived a life that was 100% pure and good, youre probably missing the best bits. The nasty bits.

Maybe she got her tits out. Maybe she slept around. Maybe she stole. Maybe she betrayed someone, or was betrayed. Maybe she was pure and good, but made mistakes. Maybe she fought against one injustice, but ignored another. Maybe she was shot by Nazis. Maybe she shot a Nazi, or perhaps a tsar, or some twat come to colonise her country.

These are the types of stories in this book. Please take these womens names and commit them to your brain. Clear away the likes of Jack the Ripper, who was literally just a murderer, and John Hancock, who, lets face it, is only famous for having a swirly signature, and make room for these names instead. Theyre better. Theyre lady names. Theyre the names of women too brave and too brilliant and too unconventional and too political and too poor and not ladylike enough and not white enough to be recognised by their shrivel-souled contemporaries.

Take these stories and tell them to your friends. Because these women shouldnt only be known by a few historians. They should be so well known that their names would make terrible passwords. So well known that Netflix commissions a miniseries about their lives. (Or at least we get a Channel 5 documentary.)

These women should be so well known that lazy eight-year-olds, when tasked with a history project about a famous person from history, say, I dont know, there are like eight books in the library about Phillis Wheatley, lets just copy from them and call it a fucking day.

So well known that people dress up as slutty versions of them for Halloween, and dont have to explain them. Oh, I get it, youre slutty Septimia Zenobia, warrior queen of 3rd-century Syria, your friends say when you enter the party. Didnt Jill come as that too? Awkward!

So well known that not one, but two members of your weekly pub quiz team will be able to instantly recall their names in the history round, despite being quite drunk.

So well known that people incorrectly assign great inventions and achievements and conquests to them, when really the story was more complicated than that, or actually she was only one of a group of people, who maybe even included a few forgotten men. So that the conversation goes like this:

Person A : Emmy Noether invented all of mathematics.

Person B : Yeah that sounds right, I remember learning something about her in school. Shes very well known.

Person A : Well that settles that, lets get tacos.

That well known.

Beyond fear and bewilderment, since Trumps election you may have found yourself in your day-to-day life as a 21st-century gal developing an overwhelming desire to climb into a womb. Any womb.

This book is my womb. I feel most warm and most foetal when sitting in a library, absorbing stories of long-dead women as if through an umbilical cord, having promise and possibility pumped into me like so much nutritious amniotic fluid. As a foetus floats in a womb and sets about growing fingers and toes and guts and eyeballs and a brain, I have been suspended in my book-womb growing these stories one at a time.

Reading about cool women from history just feels good. It feels like a relief. Sometimes it feels like coming up with the perfect retort for an argument you had many years ago. SEE, youll want to say. LOOK AT HER! THAT PROVES MY POINT! It can feel bittersweet which, by the way, was an emotion first expressed in history by a woman. Keep reading to find her. There will be a test.

I am not a historian. This isnt to talk myself down. I am, like all women, very clever and funny. I just dont have a PhD. Instead, think of me as a fangirl and a journalist, whos been travelling across space and time in search of women who may make you feel better for a moment, suspended in goodness, totally relaxed and exempt from lifes troubles, and most of all relieved to find that its really OK in fact, its encouraged to be nasty. Because the people who dont like nasty women, today and in the past, generally turn out to be the bad guys.