Weetamoo, the Squaw of Sachem of Pocasset, lived in the area of what is now Tiverton, Rhode Island, from 1650 for a quarter-century of legendary awesomeness. She commanded an army of 300 women warriors and stunned all who encountered her with her incredible beauty and charisma. She was a good tactician and courageous in battle. When her husband, Wamsutta, was poisoned by the English, Weetamoo went native in a big way and decided to try to eradicate the white invaders from her land. She joined her brother-in-law Metacom and their armies fought side-by-side against the English in King Phillip’s War. During the Great Swamp fight of 1675, she drowned in the Tetcut River while being chased by Brits. The Redcoats fished her body out of the flood-swollen river, cut off her head, and put it on display.
Bowdash was an Indian woman who acted as a guide for white men explorers. Born to the Kutenai tribe in Montana, she was a folk shero in her part of the west, celebrated for being a peacemaker, prophet, messenger, and warrior in song and story, passed down orally through generations. Her story is both gory and glorious. According to Kutenai legend, when she was being killed by her enemies by their knives, her wounds magically sealed up.
Elizabeth Custer was the very independent wife of the famous Major General George A. Custer who traveled west after the Civil War. “Libbie” rode with the Seventh Cavalry beside her husband and other notables such as Wild Bill Hickok and Medicine Bill Comstock. She was an extraordinary horsewoman, able to ride forty miles a day easily. Her overprotective (to say the least!) husband instructed his regiment to kill her themselves rather than let her fall into enemy hands. This never happened, because she and her sister missed out on the Battle of Little Big Horn when they left the fort for some horseback adventures of their own. Libbie also traveled to India and rode a horse through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. She lived to the ripe old age of ninety-two and was buried in West Point’s military cemetery beside George.
Pauline Cushman was a gypsy woman of great beauty who fought in the Civil War and gained the rank of major for her courage in fighting behind enemy lines in Tennessee. Her life was incredibly colorful—after the war, she went out west and gave speeches in full Union uniform. She also acted, amazing audiences, favoring the role and costume of an Amazon. For a time, she settled in Arizona where she ran a hotel and kept the peace with her trusty Colt 45. Upon moving to the Wild West outpost of San Francisco, she took the law into her own hand again and bullwhipped a man in public for libeling her. No doubt, people thought twice before speaking ill of gypsy soldier gal Pauline Cushman after that!
Poker Alice Ivers was one of the special breed of “Wild West Amazons” who ran a casino, smoked cigars, and sported a six-shooter she used with skill. In the 1880s, she ran across a card dealer in Pecos who cheated; she waited and watched until the pot was worth taking, held her gun to his head and then made off with the $5,000 prize, shouting, “I don’t mind a cheat, it’s a clumsy cheat that I can’t stand.”
Belle Starr fought for the Yankees as an underground guerilla on the other side of the Mason Dixon Line. Unfortunately for her and a few hundred others, these guerilla groups were outlawed and Belle was on the lam, unable to go home. Forced to a life of crime as an accidental fugitive, Belle showed a flair for stickups and cattle rustlings, and generally supported her bad self as a gun-for-hire. Belle has gotten a bum rap as a colorful criminal; she and the others from the underground were patriots who served their country well in extreme danger only to have the rug (or flag, as it were) pulled out from under them.
Calamity Jane was born in 1852 and remains a household name for her skill as a sharpshooter, muleskinner, midwife, gambler, and horseback scout. Her real name was Martha Jane Canary, and she died a pauper in 1903, even though she herself would give the shirt off her back to the needy or sick. She also wouldn’t think twice about shooting the hat off any man who disrespected her!
Woman Chief, the “Absaroka Amazon,” was a Gros Ventre girl raised by the Crow tribe who captured her in a hunt shortly after her birth, estimated to have been in 1806. Like Shoshone Sacajawea, without whom Lewis and Clark would have made the Donner Party look like a walk in the park, Woman Chief was a highly skilled hunter, guide, negotiator, and translator, who specialized in buffalo hunting, horse thieving, and close-range battle. Her reputation swelled to mythic proportion when she killed and wounded several men in her first skirmish. Her fellow warriors sang songs in her honor, and she made for hot fireside chat. As a hunter, she was reputed as “capable of killing five buffalo during a hunt and then butchering them and loading them on to packhorses singlehandedly.” Her sleight-of-hand style of horse trading won her a place on the Council of Chiefs and the title of Woman Chief. She was murdered by a Gros Ventre warrior in the middle of negotiations for peace she was undertaking between the Crows and her native tribe.
Her courage and glory is celebrated in Zapata’s revolutionary song, “Adelita.” However, Adelita was very much a real person, not just a romantic notion in a popular song. She was a gaucha at the turn of the twentieth century in Zapata’s, and later Pancho Villa’s army. There were many women soldiers in the peasant armies of the revolution called “soldederas” who started following the army as cooks, water-bearers, and camp followers helping the cause by helping the men. They eventually evolved into their own organization, divided up into ranks of their own design, and they carried pistols, rifles, and knives, becoming “warriors as fierce as the men.”
And then there were more modern women warrior-aviatrixes, like the “Night Witches” of World War II, and Eileen Collins, who, far from being a space cadet, was a space commander… and Lotfia ElNadi, who defied Egyptian patriarchal culture to become a pilot in 1933.
Lotfia ElNadi : Flying in the Face of Tradition
Lotfia ElNadi was the first Middle Eastern woman as well as the first African woman to become an aviator. And as if that is not enough, she was actually the first female pilot in the world. Born in 1907 to a middle class family in Cairo, Egypt, she was expected to complete primary school and then become a housewife. Her mother encouraged her to go to the American College, which had a modernized curriculum and taught languages. ElNadi saw an article about a newly opened local flying school, and decided to find a way to study flying there, despite her father’s belief that higher education was a waste of time for a daughter. She tried asking a journalist to help her, but when that didn’t work out, she daringly made a direct approach to the director of the EgyptAir airline to see if he would assist her. He recognized the PR potential for EgyptAir of an Egyptian female airplane pilot and agreed to help, and she started aviation school as the only woman in a class of men, telling her father that she was going to a study group to conceal her aviation ambitions. Since ElNadi had no money to pay the tuition, she worked in trade as the school’s secretary and telephone operator.
In September of 1933, she earned her pilot’s license after only sixty-seven days of study; her achievement made headlines worldwide. At first her father was angry when he found out, but once he saw the positive press she was getting, he agreed to let her fly him on a trip over the pyramids. Three months later, ElNadi flew in the international race between Cairo and Alexandria at velocities averaging over 100 mph; she would have won if not for missing a mark but was disqualified on the technicality. However, she still received a prize of 200 Egyptian pounds and the congratulations of King Fuad for her stab at it. Feminist leader Huda Sha’arawi then raised funds to buy ElNadi a plane of her own. ElNadi served as secretary general for the Egyptian Aviation Club and flew for around five more years until her