These elaborate tortures pointed to one simple fact: that the potential power women had – be it sexual, intellectual, even supernatural – scared the living daylights out of the patriarchy. In response, it did everything it could to suppress that power and preserve its own supremacy: it kept them ignorant, incapacitated, voiceless and dependent.
By the dawn of the seventeenth century, this sorry template for gender relations had prevailed largely unchallenged for millennia. It’s a model so deeply entrenched in Western culture that it can be traced right back to the Ancients, who set the gold standard for excluding and silencing women, not only in their social and political structures but in their art and culture, too.[12] Its justification was based on one disastrously wrong-headed assumption: that women were fundamentally inferior to men. And for that we can blame both bad science and perverse theological doctrine.
Even today, we cling to the myth that men and women’s brains are somehow wired differently – an idea that modern science is rapidly disproving.[13] But in 1600, the belief that gender differences were every bit as biological as sex differences was absolute. Ever since the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle hypothesised that women were a reproductive mistake – physically defective versions of men – it had been persistently argued in Western debate that they were mentally, morally and emotionally defective, too. It didn’t help that seventeenth-century medicine had also inherited from the Ancient Greeks the nonsense theory that the body was governed by the ‘four humours’ – blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile – which in turn were thought to be linked to the four elements: earth, fire, water and air. The belief was that a woman was comprised of cold, wet elements, while a man was hot and dry – a crucial difference that supposedly rendered her brain softer than his and her body more unstable. The catastrophic conclusion was that women had only a limited capacity for rational thought. It was no use educating them; their feeble brains couldn’t bear the strain of rigorous intellectual study. They could not be trusted to think and act for themselves, which was why they required domination. And their bodies and behaviour had to be constantly policed, because women were famously susceptible to both sexual voracity and madness – which frequently went hand in hand and were often indistinguishable.
These pernicious, ancient ideas were only reinforced by Christian doctrine. The creation myth made it abundantly clear that Eve, the first woman and mother, who had been fashioned from Adam’s rib for his comfort and pleasure, was the cause of original sin and the source of man’s woe, while early Christian writers spelled it out to the masses that it was a wife’s religious duty to bow to her husband’s authority, because ‘the head of the woman is man’[14] and to submit to him was to submit to God. By the seventeenth century, the damage had set in like rot. The message had been parroted and propagated by nearly every father, husband, preacher, politician, philosopher and pamphleteer across the land for thousands of years, until almost everyone – even women – believed it.
THE OLD RADICALS
With so many barriers in her way, so many erasures to contend with, it’s a wonder that any woman ever made it into the history books. To dismantle such deeply embedded foundations is a monumental task – so much so that we’re still working on it today. In Britain, we have at least made progress enough for this to seem an unbearable world to live in – the Gilead of our nightmares. So how did any woman cope with it? How did any woman even begin to challenge it?
The truth is, the majority didn’t even try. Browbeaten by continual put-downs and a lack of opportunity, they grimaced and bore it, most of them too poor, too ill-educated, too legally and financially dependent on men to have a means of protesting. Power and influence were not within the average woman’s grasp, and if she were anything other than white, she faced almost insurmountable odds – the lives of black and brown women in Britain are particularly absent from the historical records, though they were certainly not absent from the country.
Faced with this dead end, some women chose to take pride in their domestic roles and make the best of their lot; others were so inured to misogyny that they accepted it as normal, even became complicit in it, conned into believing that they could somehow profit from playing nicely in this twisted game.[15]
But there have always been women who refused to play by rules that had so obviously been written by men, for men. Women who couldn’t just keep quiet and carry on. Who didn’t fit the narrow criteria of what a woman ought to be, and felt instinctively that they were as valuable as any man. How did these women – the clever, the curious, the talented; those who preferred women to men, who preferred sword-fighting to child-rearing, who preferred breeches to petticoats, learning to laundry, discussion to silence, independence to marriage; who yearned for the open seas, not the scullery, and dreamed of fame, not obscurity – how did these women negotiate the hostile world around them and find the outlets they needed for all their complexities?
There was only one way: they would have to rile, unnerve, disobey and question. They would have to forfeit the title of ‘good girl’ and become a Roaring Girl instead.
This book explores how just a few of them managed it. Together, the eight Roaring Girls collected here span the full spectrum of the social hierarchy, from a duchess to a slave, and encompass a rainbow of personalities: in these pages you’ll find poets and adventurers, scientists and philosophers, actors and activists, writers and entrepreneurs, thieves and soldiers, ladies and lowlifes, wives and spinsters, mothers and mistresses, flamboyant dressers, plain dressers and cross-dressers, of every sexual preference – in short, all kinds of womanhood. Their roaring ways took various forms. Some of them used words, others action; some broke the law, others changed the law; some used their femininity, others threw it off entirely and appropriated the ways, manners and dress of men instead. All of them were playing with fire, and inevitably they sometimes got burned. For every admirer who cheered them on during their lifetimes, there were plenty more who denounced them as monsters, lunatics, freaks, devils, whores and old maids, and quickly forgot them once they were dead.
Indeed, to their contemporaries, their achievements might not have seemed particularly worth remembering. After all, they didn’t conspicuously change the world – not one of them ruled a nation, wrote a classic novel, made a pioneering discovery or led a revolution. Yet progress can come in small, surprising packages, too. That the historical records took note of these women at all suggests that they were the exceptions, not the rule, living extraordinary, not ordinary, lives, and in the pre-twentieth-century world that was quite enough to get society in a tizz. By living differently, truthfully, loudly and unashamedly, these Roaring Girls were challenging the system, and – whether they knew it or not – making a difference. The imprint they made on history may have been faint, but it’s there to be seen if we take the trouble to look. These women helped change our culture, however incrementally, and together they give a tantalising glimpse of the breadth, boldness and sheer brilliance of the legions of women who have fallen through the cracks over the centuries and tumbled headlong into the ‘Dustbin of History’.[16]
IS THIS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE?
The urge to label such extraordinary women from history as ‘feminists’ is almost irresistible. Naturally, we want to ‘think back through our mothers’, as Virginia Woolf phrased it,[17] and find inspiring heroines to admire; it’s our way of trying to bridge the gap between us, so we can all be on the same team. But to foist modern values and paradigms onto women who lived hundreds of years ago is to set ourselves a trap. If we take the dictionary definition of a feminist as one who supports ‘the advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes’,[18] the majority of the women in this book don’t qualify. Most would never have spared a thought for whether women should be granted equal rights with men