Rejected Princesses: Tales of History's Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics Read online

  The jeweled sword and the diamond choker are both historically accurate artifacts of hers. The choker, specifically, was one of the few things she kept to the end of her life, as it was a present from her husband. The moon symbol on her forehead is a mark she was known to use regularly. The symbol on her forehead clasp is Shiva’s third eye, as she was a Shiva devotee. She has no other jewelry, as she’d given most of it away.

  The horse handing her a coat of mail is her favorite horse, Sarangi, whom she befriended when she pulled a nail from his side.

  The background line of elephants (and the two “helping” with the planning) are a reference to a story from her childhood. As it goes, when denied an elephant ride, she proclaimed that she would one day own many elephants. She did—and one of them was actually trained to hold a chandelier at dinner functions.

  Tatya Tope can be seen in the background, walking off from the planning table while whistling idly. Ugh. He’s the worst.

  The flatbread on the table behind her is a reference to the Chapati Rebellion. Early in the Indian rebellions of 1857, Indians started passing out massive amounts of flatbread (chapati) throughout all of India. This completely freaked out the British, who were convinced it was a form of secret communication, and one that was faster and more efficient than any they had. The British seized every flatbread they could find, but never found any hidden messages. In the end, it may not have been a secret communication at all, but a superstitious effort to ward off cholera.

  The woman in the background dressed similarly to Lakshmibai is a woman named Jhalkaribai. When Lakshmibai fled Jhansi, Jhalkaribai posed as her, leading the English on a wild goose chase. She came from the lower castes (Dalit) and was raised as a boy—and has become a hero for modern-day Dalits.

  The city of Gwalior, site of Lakshmibai’s last stand, was where Phoolan Devi would be imprisoned many years later.

  Mariya Oktyabrskaya

  (1905–1944, RUSSIA)

  The Tank-Driving Widow

  When the stars are all burned out and human beings are but fairy tales told by robots, somewhere there will be a list of the toughest women who ever lived. And near the top will be Sergeant Mariya Oktyabrskaya, the first woman to win the Hero of the Soviet Union Award, and her tank, Fighting Girlfriend.

  During World War II, Mariya’s husband, Ilya, an army officer, was killed in action. Mariya mourned his loss in traditional fashion—by selling all of their belongings to buy a tank. She then wrote Stalin the following letter: “My husband was killed in action defending the motherland. I want revenge on the fascist dogs for his death and for the death of Soviet people tortured by the fascist barbarians. For this purpose I’ve deposited all my personal savings—50,000 rubles—to the National Bank in order to build a tank. I kindly ask to name the tank ‘Fighting Girlfriend’ and to send me to the frontline as a driver of said tank.”

  Stalin wrote back quickly and said yes.

  Initially, the army was skeptical of Mariya’s ability to handle a tank. However, in training she quickly proved that she could drive, shoot, and throw grenades with the best of them—skills she’d picked up from her late husband, with whom she’d presumably had some interesting dates.*

  On her first outing in the tank, she outmaneuvered a group of German soldiers, killing 30 of them and taking out an anti-tank gun. When her opponents shelled her tank, immobilizing Fighting Girlfriend, she got out—in the middle of a firefight—and repaired the damn thing. She then got back in and proceeded to kill more Germans.

  During all this combat, she wrote a letter to her sister describing her time in the war: “I’ve had my baptism by fire. I beat the bastards. Sometimes I’m so angry I can’t even breathe.”

  In the end, she was felled by a mortar round when she climbed out of her tank in the middle of yet another firefight to repair Fighting Girlfriend. She was awarded the highest honor in the Soviet military and is buried in one of the nation’s most sacred cemeteries. Her likeness was reproduced on stamps, cards, and newsreels to promote the war effort.

  • ART NOTES •

  The vehicle depicted is a T-34 tank, the actual model of Fighting Girlfriend.

  The Fighting Girlfriend logo was on the side of the turret, just out of the cropping of this picture.

  The German soldiers used many different color tracer rounds, but red was among them.

  The planes in the background are PE-8 Petlyakov Soviet bombers.

  Yael

  (C. 13TH CENTURY BCE, KINGDOM OF ISRAEL)

  Hammer Time

  Let’s jump back to biblical times. Like, early Bible. Old Testament. Some of the earliest material to make it into the Old Testament, in fact: the story of Yael.

  To set the stage: The Israelites had been having some tough times due to, you guessed it, another bad guy.* The villain of this story was a general named Sisera, who’d been a capital-D Douchebag to the Israelites for 20-odd years. According to some sources, he could yell loudly enough to kill wildlife and had a beard so manly he could use it to catch fish. While he’d clearly made some odd choices from the superpowers list, he was nevertheless no one to mess around with.

  And yet, messing around with him is exactly what happened! A judge named Deborah, leader of the Israelites, decided to take Sisera on, and rounded up a general* to take him out. But as she departed with the army to take out Sisera, she warned the general: “The honor will not be yours, for the Lord will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman.” The general likely thought Deborah meant herself. She did not.

  Deborah and the gang busted Sisera’s army so bad he turned tail and ran—which is where our heroine Yael comes into the picture. Sisera fled to the neighboring Kenites, who weren’t interested in taking sides in this whole Sisera-Israel business. Specifically, he went to the tent of Heber and his wife, Yael. She, being a hospitable sort, invited him right in and offered him some milk, a blanket, and seven successive rounds of passionate sex to tire him out.

  That last part is an interpretation of the phrase “falling down at her feet” as an old-school sexual euphemism. At least one scholar even takes it to read as Sisera trying to rape Yael, so take any mention of sexy times in this story with extreme suspicion.

  As soon as Sisera fell asleep, Yael cemented her reputation as a world-class host by grabbing a mallet and driving a tent spike through his skull. Some interpretations have her doing so while he was still awake and on his feet. In any event, Yael was less than chummy.

  Afterwards, things went swimmingly! Peace reigned for 40 years, and Yael was hailed as the most blessed woman of all the tent-dwellers—beating out any number of more conventionally mannered contenders for the title. All in all, not bad work.

  Wallada bint al-Mustakfi

  (C. 1000–1091, SPAIN [ANDALUSIA])

  The Princess Who Put the Slam into Slam Poetry

  In the medieval Islamic world, one of the quickest routes to fame was poetry. Considered an elegant way to meditate on the nature of divinity and the universe, Islamic religious poetry elevated the discourse of every conversation it touched, raising even the most mundane subjects to lofty heights.

  And then there was all the other poetry. The love poems. The battle poems. The poems that were more roast than reverence. And here’s where we meet our heroine.

  Princess Wallada bint al-Mustakfi was the toast of Cordoba. Witty, charming, skilled in both song and verse, she delighted everyone with her intellectual salons and poetry competitions.

  Her intelligence was matched only by her boldness. She chose her own lovers, refused to wear a veil, and spoke her mind freely. When a judge accused her of being overly loose with her affections, she not only wrote a poem telling him to mind his own business, but she had it embroidered onto her dress:

  I am fit for high positions, by God!*

  And I am going my way, with pride!

  I allow my lover to touch my cheek

  And bestow my kiss on he who craves it.

  Her most infamous writing, howev
er, stemmed from her turbulent love affair with court poet Ibn Zaydun. They composed poems that were the literary equivalent of making out in public. They became the “it couple” of Cordoba, attracting both admirers and detractors. One, vizier Ibn Abdus, was so jealous of their relationship that he set about trying to destroy it—and succeeded when he caught Zaydun cheating on Wallada with Wallada’s favorite slave.

  What followed was some truly scorched-earth poetry. Wallada wrote that “you know I am the clear, shining moon of the heavens, but, to my sorrow, you chose instead a dark and shadowy planet.” Zaydun, seeing Wallada now in the arms of Abdus, responded, “You were to me nothing but a sweetmeat that I took a bite of and then tossed away the crust, leaving it to be gnawed on by a rat.” She, suitably outraged, ended the feud by outing him as bisexual in one of her most famous pieces:

  Because of his love for the rods in the trousers, Ibn Zaydun,

  In spite of his excellence,

  If penises were palm trees

  He would become a woodpecker.

  Now, it’s worth examining her sometimes-peculiar invective. If one can set aside the homophobia and racism of the era (which is quite a big if—seriously, Wallada, you were doing so well there for a second), one can find a surprisingly clever literary reference. In evoking the image of phallic palm trees, she’s referencing popular works of the time, such as Ibn Sina’s “Hayy ibn Yaqzan”—in which two men retire to the utopian paradise of al-Waqwaq, where naked women with exposed genitalia grow on trees.

  No, really. Look it up.

  The rancor between Wallada and Zaydun eventually grew so out of control that her father imprisoned and banished Zaydun—in part due to pressure from Abdus, who later claimed all of Zaydun’s belongings, and in part due to the accusations of homosexual activity, which was a crime at the time, although one rarely punished. Zaydun eventually returned and rekindled a romance with the princess, albeit short-lived. Then he moved to Seville, never to return.

  As for Wallada? She lived with Ibn Abdus the rest of her life, although they never married. She died in 1091, having taught poetry and run her salon for many years. Nine of her poems survive, of which eight are related to Zaydun, five being less than flattering.

  • ART NOTES AND TRIVIA •

  Wallada was famously described as blond-haired and blue-eyed, which was considered quite exotic. Her ethnicity is somewhat indeterminate: one source claimed her mother was an Ethiopian servant of her father.

  Her defiant poem is embroidered onto her sleeves, in Arabic.

  Ada Lovelace

  (1815–1852, ENGLAND)

  Enchantress of Numbers

  Imagine your crazy uncle tells you about a machine he’s building out of Legos. No, he hasn’t finished (or even started) it yet, but it is going to be great! Pump in some steam and a couple index cards and it will solve any math problem in the world. The only thing is, he wants you to write a user’s manual for it. Even though it doesn’t exist. But he’d be happy to describe it to you!

  Welcome to the life of Ada Lovelace.

  Ada’s life got off to an off-kilter start when her mother, deathly afraid Ada might become a debauched poet, began schooling her in mathematics. Her mother’s characteristically histrionic fears were not totally unfounded: Ada’s father was the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” poet Lord Byron, who had years earlier rocked English polite society with a series of scandals. Fearing his degenerate love of wordplay might be genetic, the divorced Lady Byron (referred to by Lord Byron as the “Princess of Parallelograms” in their courtship) early on began steering her daughter toward a life of virtuous calculus.

  Although Lady Byron did inspire quite the interest in math, she could not fully temper Ada’s innate hooliganery. Ada refused to sleep in beds, argued with every adult she met (one described an encounter with Ada as “conversational litigation”), declined to learn basic etiquette, and wrote long, funny, sarcastic letters. At age 12, she laid out extensive designs to build a steam-powered flying machine and only abandoned her plans when Lady Byron guilt-tripped her into stopping: Lady Byron claimed it would disturb her own precarious health.

  And here we find the first major obstacle to Ada’s ascension to math goddess: her hypochondriac mother. From reading Lady Byron’s letters, one gets the impression that Ada’s mother was almost constantly bedridden for around 30 years. Her medical “treatments” rotated between leeches, cupping, and eating ludicrous quantities of meat—which she would then vomit, usually over the side of a boat, so as to protect her feminine modesty. Lady Byron’s writing (of which there is no shortage) is a nonstop stream of health reports, breathless gossip, and complaints about Lord Byron, even decades after his death.

  The responsibility of caring for her mother hampered some of Ada’s desires, but it was hardly the only family-related impediment. At age 22, she married William King-Noel (better known as Lord Lovelace). Her husband was a kind man who fully encouraged her interest in mathematics, but being a public figure whose work demanded Ada’s high-society involvement, he made serious demands on her schedule. Moreover, they eventually had three children together, so that also took up just a little bit of time.

  However, even the intense social pressures of high-society England never kept Ada restrained for long. In her late twenties, she began regularly abdicating her maternal and wifely duties in order to associate with rogue intellectuals—and no contemporary was more of a rogue than Charles Babbage.

  Babbage, the “crazy uncle” of the introductory analogy, was an infamously eccentric inventor with one of the shortest attention spans on record. His primary claim to fame was the Difference Engine, a complex machine with about half the functionality of a modern-day calculator. Despite receiving a great deal of attention and funding for the device, he never finished it, because he got distracted by a newer idea: the Analytic Engine, essentially history’s first computer.

  In spite of Babbage’s excited talk and hand-waving, not many people understood the thinking behind the Analytic Engine—except for Ada. She took to the idea quickly and began translating mathematical treatises with the aim of helping Babbage develop the machine. In addition, she wrote a long document, the “Notes,” on how to program for it. She referred to this document as her “child”—which should give you a sense of where her head was.

  But in fairness, by this point her head was all over the place. Partly because of her own illnesses and partly because of her mother’s histrionic nature, at this point Ada’s diet primarily consisted of laudanum, wine, and opiates. Her writing from this period reflects this regimen: one week she’s sensibly describing algorithms, and in the next she’s describing herself as a fairy or a prophet charged by God with unveiling the secrets of the universe using math.

  Yes, she went full mad scientist.

  Her final years saw her life spinning more wildly out of control. Even as she wrote prophecies of the computing revolution (many of which would come to pass, albeit over a century after her death), she was also regularly abandoning her family and using her mathematical prowess to unsuccessfully gamble on horse races. Eventually, the health problems that had clouded her life for years caught up to her and she became confined to bed. She spent her last months making peace with her loved ones before passing away from cancer at the age of 36.

  It is tempting to think of the contributions she could have made had she been born in a different time, or if she’d had a better support network, or if she had lived longer. Although later historians have questioned how much impact her writing had on Babbage, her genius is beyond question. She programmed for a machine that didn’t exist, and never would. Think about that—she successfully envisioned an entirely theoretical machine and wrote history’s first software program, all in her head. The mental acuity required to do that beggars belief.

  Thankfully, she is remembered in the present day. One of the first programming languages ever created was named ADA in her honor. Modern-day technology companies such as Adafruit and Ladyad
a bear tribute to her in their names. And every October millions celebrate intellectual women on Ada Lovelace Day.

  • ART NOTES •

  Ada’s mother, Lady Byron, can be seen here fainting into the arms of Ada’s long-suffering husband, Lord Lovelace.

  Ada has her hand on a copy of the Difference Engine, although none were completed in her lifetime.

  Entering in the doorway is Charles Babbage. A lockpicking enthusiast, he is eyeing the door as a challenge. In fact, Babbage was so avid a lockpicker that he at one point interviewed the famous French thief Eugene Vidocq on the subject. Babbage came away unimpressed, remarking, “To my great disappointment, I found him not at all strong upon that question.”

  Laskarina Bouboulina

  (1771–1825, GREECE)

  Heroine of the Greek War of Independence

  If you will, take a second to run through the standard list of adjectives you might use to describe babies. Chances are you’re thinking of “cute,” “sweet.” Maybe “cuddly”? Possibly even “loud” or “stinky.” Whatever words come to mind, it’s unlikely the word “badass” is one of them. This is understandable, as few babies can really lay claim to being badass. “Badass” should be reserved for truly extreme infants, like those born in prison.