Dan Snow's History Hit - Formidable Heroines of History

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

From the notorious thief Mary Frith in the seventeenth century to industrialist and LGBT trailblazer Anne Lister in the nineteenth, these heroines redefined what a woman could be and what she could do in pre-twentieth-century Britain.Holly Kyte, author and literary critic, joins Dan to shine a light on some of the unsung heroines of British history who refused to play by the rules. They detail the histories of the formidable women whose grit, determination and radical unconventionality saw them defy the odds to forge their own paths.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Seyi AdaobiIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking about women on this podcast, Roaring Girls. We're looking at five essential feminists you may well never have heard of, but who changed the course of British and world history. You're going to love this podcast. It's with Holly Kite. She is an editor, she's a literary critic, she's a journalist, she's an author, and she's written a book called Roaring Girls, The Forgotten Feminists of British History. It's out now. It's brilliant. You've got to go and check it out. And we are going to look at women who fought, women who wrote, and women who broke down barriers. I think that we're living through a reckoning at the moment. And I think these women in a generation or two's time will be as famous or more than the typically male military or political or scientific heroes that my generation were brought up to study and admire.

It's exciting. We're living in exciting times. So from Mole Cutpurse, the 17th century kind of Robin Hood figure of London, right the way through to Anne Lister, business magnate, adventurer, and the first modern lesbian, you're going to get it all here. If you want to go and watch some documentaries as well as listen to history, you can go to History Hit TV. You simply follow the link in the description of this podcast. You click on that little link. That's all you've got to do. It's very simple. Just do it now with your thumb.

Look down at the phone. Don't worry. Look down at the phone. Just click on that link. It'll take you through. You get two weeks free if you sign up today. And let me tell you, we're getting great guns on there. Lots more coming up.

Hundreds and hundreds of documentaries on there, plus all the back episodes of this and the other History Hit podcast. You're going to love all that. And it's getting bigger all the time. That's not what Netflix is complaining about. Losing followers. We're smashing it. Excellent. So folks, head over and do that. But before you do, here is Holly Kite talking about Roaring Girls.

Enjoy. Holly, great to have you on the pod. How are you doing? I'm very well. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very glad to have you because I want to know what a roaring girl is because I feel I've got a few in my life. So what is a roaring girl? It's a really interesting historical term. It dates from the early 1600s.

And I'll give you the dictionary definition, which is a noisy, bawdy or riotous woman, especially one who takes on a masculine role. And obviously in the early 1600s this is a bit of a problem because that's the absolute opposite of what a woman was supposed to be. So I chose to write about eight women who all lived very broadly in the 300 years before feminism kicked off and became a sort of mobilised movement. And so they were living in a real rights vacuum. They were expected to get married and have babies, and that was the extent of their ambition that they were allowed to have. They weren't allowed to get a proper education, they weren't allowed

to take part in sort of public civic life, and the minute they got married they became a legal non-entity they literally became subsumed into the identity of their husbands which meant that they couldn't own their own property or earn their own money so they were completely infantilized and simply couldn't do anything and so the way that they were supposed to behave they were supposed to be pure and modest and obedient and if possible silent and so a roaring girl was the complete opposite of that it was a woman who I tried to sort of explain it succinctly in my book by saying a roaring girl was loud when she should be quiet disruptive when she should be submissive sexual when she should be pure masculine when she should be feminine and basically she was society's worst nightmare before feminism existed and the best thing about this term is that it originates from

a play written in 1611 called the roaring girl which was by thomas middleton and thomas decker contemporaries of shakespeare and it was about this character called Mole Cutpurse who was a cross-dressing, pipe-smoking, sword-wielding thief and the great thing about this character is that she is the heroine of this play and even better than that she is based on a real woman called Mary Frith who was likewise a cross-dressing, pipe-smoking, sword-wielding, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed thief in Jacobean London, who became a real kind of folk heroine. She was sort of a criminal, but everyone kind of loved her at the same time. So before we come on to Mary Frith, do you think the audiences, would it have been a recognisable

person? Would there have been lots of roaring girls about the place? person. Would there have been lots of roaring girls about the place? It's interesting because the play is the first sort of recorded usage of the term but the beginning of the play, the sort of prologue, makes clear that the audience will know what a roaring girl is and a roaring boy had existed for decades beforehand as a sort of stock character in the theatre. So it was something that the audience would recognise and the playwrights are definitely playing on that and sort of saying you're expecting this roaring girl to be a complete nightmare and a disruptive dreadful woman but actually we're going to show you a roaring girl who's pretty great and you're going to love her by the end of

this because they completely overturn everybody's expectations of what they're expecting of roaring girl. What did you find out about Mary Frith, the woman who it's based on? Well, so yeah, she was genuinely a thief. Her nickname was Mall Cut Purse. So she went around snipping people's purses off. She got arrested several times in her youth for thieving, but she was clearly quite good at wriggling out of trouble because she always, I mean, this was a hanging offence at the time, theft. So it was a dangerous occupation. She always managed to wriggle out of trouble and she basically kind of rose through the ranks of the criminal underworld and became a kind of sort of Fagin-like character where she was in

charge of a coterie of thieves where basically they went out and did her dirty work for her. She received the stolen goods and she set up what she called a lost property office where people could then reclaim their stolen goods for a bit of money so she had a very cushy scenario going on where her thieves would look after her she would look after them and she was sort of the queen of misrule they called her so she was in a pretty powerful considering she was from the low lives of london she was quite a powerful figure. And even the authorities kind of used her to kind of entrap other thieves and sort of help them with their inquiries and stuff. But she shot a very fine line between being safe and not being safe. And the really interesting thing is that at some point she started cross dressing and also became a sort of street

entertainer. So she would distract the crowds by sort of doing a little skit in the street in her crazy clothes, while her pickpockets would go around nicking everybody's purses and this turned her into an entertainment of folk heroine people loved her so much that she became the subject of a play and was the heroine of that play so it's quite an unusual trajectory but she did get in trouble eventually because she was clearly complicit in this play. And at one point, soon after it had started running, she appeared at the end of the play, did a sort of musical piece at the end of the play. And of course, this was when women were not allowed on the stage. So she promptly got arrested for that. And in her trial record,

there's a hilarious list of her misdemeanors. Obviously, she'd been on stage as a woman, which was completely illegal. She was dressing as a man the whole time. She'd been in ale houses and tobacco houses, and she'd been swearing, and wherever she went, everyone got their purses stolen. So she eventually ended up, as her punishment, she was thrown into the Bridewell House of Correction several times, and then eventually she was made to do public penance in a white sheet,

which was exactly that. She had to wear a white sheet and go to St Paul's Cross and listen to a very boring sermon about why she'd sinned and she did not care she did not care to the point where she was blind drunk throughout the whole thing she sounds like an absolute legend and 1600 London I think it's like 200,000 population so kind of similar I guess to York today the city of York, people have been there. So she would have been a bit famous, right? People kind of probably would have known her and seen her about. Absolutely. I think in Jacobean London, she really was famous. I mean, there's an eyewitness account of her public penance.

And not only does he observe that she was drunk throughout it, but he also says that basically the crowd were only there to see her. They didn't really care about the punishment element throughout it. But he also says that basically the crowd were only there to see her. They didn't really care about the punishment element of it. They certainly didn't care about the priest's sermon, which they found incredibly boring. And most of them wandered off halfway through. The ones who did stay, he very categorically says, they stayed to hear what she had to say because she was so famous. And she was famous enough to be immortalised in a play.

So... Big time. Let's keep going through your list of roaring women. I'm really interested in Mary Astle because I'd never heard of her to my great shame. Yeah, she's just not known at all. And in a sense, she's the least roaring of my roaring girls because she was actually very conservative in many ways,

which I think is possibly why she's been so forgotten. She was a kind of impoverished gentlewoman and she was very much trapped in the gentlewoman's situation whereby she didn't have any actual money but because she was a gentlewoman it was frowned upon for her to get a job or work and so she was completely stuck and for most women in that situation the solution was that she got married and her husband then provided for her. But Mary Estelle clearly had no interest in marrying men whatsoever it's very likely that she was gay and she had a fierce fierce intellect and so she had an uncle

who had been to Oxford and educated her and so by the time she was in her 20s she started writing incredible feminist I think she's probably the only woman in the book who we can legitimately call an early feminist. So she writes in 1694, a pamphlet called A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, which is basically a treatise on how women are men's intellectual equal and how they absolutely have every right to be as educated as they are and to have all the opportunities that they have. So she's writing 100 years before mary wollstonecraft but basically arguing the same thing and it was such an impressive pamphlet it's full of complete zingers her writing is amazing it's got beautiful sound bites everywhere and it's such a persuasive rational argument and this was what was so unusual there had been defenses of women before that for a long time before that but they were usually quite reactionary

and the sort of sole argument was yeah but there's been loads of great women like look at her and her and her and her whereas mary estelle put forward a real rational logical argument that kind of galvanized the whole thing and put it all into one perfect parcel and then she went on a few years later in 1700 to write another pamphlet called Some Reflections Upon Marriage, where she basically told women that marriage should not be their ultimate goal. It should not be their only ambition. She really wanted women to understand what marriage meant for women, the legal invisibility that it created, the fact that they were then bound to obey their husbands, regardless of how their husband treated them. They could have married somebody violent somebody drunk a philanderer they still had to obey their husbands

and she found this intolerable and she's saying something so radical at the time she was attacking basically the foundation of the whole patriarchal system i mean the whole sort of christian society was based on marriage and the patriarchal system was based upon marriage. It was a dynastic way of sort of funnelling money and ensuring lineage and all this kind of stuff. And she was basically telling women, you can do better than this. This doesn't have to be your sole ambition in life. And if you are going to do it, please understand what you're getting yourself into. So despite being a very ascetic, religious, conservative, Tory woman, she was actually, in her feminist views, incredibly radical. So she's a very interesting

contradiction in that sense. Is this an example of where you and a new generation of scholars are finding, rediscovering things like a serious proposal to the ladies? And these might become canonical. I mean, in a generation time, our kids might be studying these as my generation studied Rudyard Kipling's If about how to be a man. This is really exciting. It is really exciting. And I really hope that they do become

part of the canonical feminist works because they really should. I mean, Mary Estelle, like I said, her writing is very accessible given how early she was writing. And it goes further back than that, like Christine de Pizan was writing The City of the Book of Ladies in 1405. These incredible works that I hadn't heard of until a few years ago. And they really should, it's so

encouraging to find these things like little treasures that you discover in the past, where you're like, oh, these women have always felt like this. They've always felt the frustration, and they've always tried to fight against it. But for some reason it's been ignored and it's been buried under the deeds of men in the study of history. And it is really exciting that we're unearthing it all. This is Downsdale's History.

We're talking roaring girls. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. Let's go to a very different kind of remarkable woman next which is Hannah Snell who is someone who have come across quite a lot during 18th century military history and she's sort of shrouded in mystery isn't she so what have you decided about Hannah Snell tell me who she is and

what have you made out about her life yes she's a really tricky one so mid-18th century she is a woman who according to her biography that was written at the time she started off trying to do the sort of conventional female thing she got married and had a baby but her husband left her and her baby died and so after that she apparently raided her brother-in-law's wardrobe took a suit of his clothes and strolled off and joined the marines and went to fight in the first carnatic war in the siege of pondicherry which was basically a fight between the british and the french over indian territory and fought as a man took the name james gray and apparently according to her was not discovered managed to

get away with it even when she was injured in the groin and had to pull out the musket ball herself apparently and when she came back she did the big reveal and was like hey everyone I'm actually a woman and she became a huge celebrity and her biography like a publisher very quickly leapt on her and wrote her story up for her and then she had her own stage show where she would do sort of military maneuvers and all this kind of stuff and for a very short period of time she was a real celebrity. It didn't last very long but the trouble is is that there's a lot of conflicting stuff, a lot of details of the biography don't quite fit the actual dates and places and battles that she was supposed to have been involved in and so it is a real minefield for historians trying

to figure out what might be true and what possibly isn't true, what they've embellished to try and make her more of a celebrity and make people more interested in her story. And I think I came to the conclusion that there were definitely embellishments, definitely a few shifts here and there where they change stuff, but I think there's no real reason to not believe the essence of her story because she was not the only one who did it there are loads and loads of other women there was a huge trend for women cross-dressing in general and quite a lot of them ended up going off to war in some form or other and most of them didn't get discovered until they decided to reveal it

and most of them even though it was not an easy life it was not a pleasant life and you kind you kind of think, well, why would women do this? Why would they keep on doing it when, you know, if they're being threatened with a flogging for something, why didn't they just say, actually, no, I'm a woman, don't, you know, they could get out of it very, very easily. And they don't. And it's obviously because their new life of freedom and adventure is so precious to them that they will not give it up at all. And there's enough factual evidence in the records, I think, to prove that she essentially was what she said she was. I mean, she was given a pension by the Royal Hospital Chelsea, so they obviously believed her.

The Duke of Cumberland, didn't she? She managed to stop in the street and he agreed that she'd done a major. Yes, she did. I love that. Her rang Tim in person, yeah. Yeah, she was an extraordinary story. I love that. Mary Prince, amazing.

So first woman of colour, first black woman to publish her memoirs in Britain. she was an extraordinary story I love that Mary Prince amazing so first woman of colour first black woman to publish her memoirs in Britain that's an extraordinary thing yes I mean she of all the eight women in my book obviously they were dealing with the repression of being a woman Mary Prince had to deal with that and the repression of being a black woman and so of course she was born into slavery in Bermuda she then was moved to Antigua and then in 1828 she arrived in London with her master and she was in a kind of weird legal loophole the minute she stepped on British soil because it had been established in law that a slave couldn't exist on English soil so technically she was free the minute she stepped on English soil

but if she decided to go home she would instantly become a slave again so she was in a complete catch-22 and she had a husband back in Antigua she didn't want to be in England she wanted to go home so she could be free in England but without any of her family or her husband or she could be a slave back in Antigua and she obviously desperately did not want to be a slave and so she went to the anti-slavery society and found sort of sympathetic ears with them and she decided basically that she had to tell her story to try and do something to try and sort this out this was in 1828 the abolition campaign had been going for decades already it was kind of building to its crescendo so the timing was right and so she told her story

to a man called thomas pringle who was the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, and it was written down by a woman called Susanna Strickland. And there's various issues about how they might have changed her words slightly and left certain things out to make it more palatable, but it's, like all slave narratives, it's a horrific read of just pure brutality. And it did incredibly well with the public. I mean, I think it really shocked people, I mean they'd heard slave narratives before but this was the first one to come from a woman and it obviously really hit a nerve with people. It did very very well, it went through several

editions but it also interestingly people's first reaction was to not believe her and so there were for example she had to go through a couple of really humiliating physical examinations people who wanted to see the physical scars they were like okay she says she's been flogged this many times but i want to see if she's actually got the scars and she did have scars all over her back but she had to prove it and then there was a libel case from her owner saying that everything she was saying was not true so she ended up having to testify in court to the truth her story. So there was a real sort of dual thing going on where it was really connecting with the public. But there was also the scepticism of just not believing a black woman, which is pretty upsetting for her and for us. But who knows how you can quantify the effect it had.

But obviously, abolition came just a few years afterwards. So it obviously came at the right time and really helped galvanize the whole thing yeah there's part of us well so much of her story is horrific but part of it is when she and her sisters are sold separately to different slave traders it's just harrowing you know as children yeah i mean she's 12 years old and they're just ripped apart and separated and it was absolutely standard it was kind of deliberate because it helped to destabilize the black community it like pulled them apart so that they couldn't have that solidarity together so it made them weaker it was a deliberate thing that they did let's come to

ann lister who i knew nothing about tell me all about ann lister well i mean where does one start with ann lister so people will probably know her now from the BBC period drama Gentleman Jack. But a few years before that, she was relatively unsung. So she was a force of nature, a real force of nature. She kind of sucked every drop out of life. She was a landowner, an industrialist, a mountaineer, a scholar. and she was also a lesbian who wrote very candidly in an immense diary of five million words across her lifetime in detail about her sexual liaisons with women. But what's fabulous is that because this was a sort of unspeakable thing in the early 1800s, which is when we're talking about, she devised a secret code of her own making which was bits of greek and algebra and punctuation marks and stuff and sort of wrote in her own

code about her relationships with women and obviously for over 150 years nobody knew about this they were kind of like oh what were these coded passages about and when they were finally decoded i mean for a long time they were originally decoded in the sort of late 19th century and they were so horrified that they put her diaries into a cupboard and hid them away for 40 years. Even in the 1960s, they were sort of like, no, there's nothing of interest here. And then finally, in the 1980s, they were properly decoded and published. And it was just an incredible moment in LGBTQ plus history, where suddenly you have an incredibly detailed and honest account of what it was like to

be a lesbian woman in the early 19th century. She's extraordinary anyway, even without that, but with that, it's really quite something. So it's great that she's finally got her own TV show, because she's always been destined for that, frankly. She's got her own show. And she was a mad adventurer as well. Very modern in that respect. The kind of person that we'd all be following on Instagram now. Oh, absolutely. She would be huge if she was around. And she'd be so delighted that she was famous because she really did understand that she was unusual.

She understood that she was sort of a genius, basically, that she could sort of turn her hand to anything and that she was very indomitable. And, you know, she was a great businesswoman and she would stride around. She didn't cross dress as such, but she dressed in a very masculine way. So she would wear sort of a masculine riding habit and a top hat and a big great coat and things like that. So she looked very different, very deliberately. She looked very different. She would always wear black. That was a conscious decision. She saw herself more, I think, as a man than a woman. She didn't like the sort of trapping. She hated her petticoats. She didn't like being

reminded of anything to do with being a woman. She was an absolute extraordinary woman who I think would be extraordinary even now. It's extraordinary. That's an interesting word, isn't it? Like every time I get someone like you on the podcast who's just absolutely bringing this overlooked history to a wide audience. I always ask like what should we think about these women? Are they outliers? Are they so unusual? Is that why we've stumbled across them? Or are they just representatives of huge numbers of women throughout history that have been doing all sorts of interesting things but have been denied memoirs and biographers and in knighthoods and sort of statues.

Like, how have you come to think about women? It's a really interesting point. The fact that they have even come down to us in the historical record means that in some way they are extraordinary because a completely ordinary woman who never sort of disrupted things usually would make absolutely no imprint on the historical record at all and we simply wouldn't know about them so in that sense they are extraordinary and as you say kind of outliers and not behaving in the way that women would normally behave but i think they're also indicative of a wider trend in that they can't possibly be the only women who felt like this as with today

there have always been women who have been intellectually curious, who have been more comfortable in breeches than in a dress, you know, these women have always existed. And I think there's, it's bound to be a sort of grayscale of how they managed to indulge that. And that was kind of what I was interested in exploring, sort of how these women negotiated the world in a time when it wasn't acceptable to be like that. So my last question is, when I share books like yours with my daughter, I always ask her, how does it make you feel to know that women had these gigantic legal and cultural impediments, chains placed around them? And so are books like yours hopeful? Is this work hopeful because it gives brilliant women a history that they thought they'd been denied until now?

Or is it depressing that women have been treated so awfully through history? How should we use your history? It's a bit of both. It's one of those annoying questions where it's a bit of both. I think certainly when I was writing it, you do constantly feel angry

because you're constantly just like, how is this ever allowed? How is this ever possible? It's so obvious to us that women are men's intellectual equal and that we shouldn't be repressed in this way. interest at the moment in rediscovering these women is because the longer feminism goes on, the more the goalposts shift. And we realise that we haven't made quite as much progress as we thought we had. And I think at the moment, we're very conscious of the gender pay gap and the fact that two women a week are killed by domestic violence, and the fact that 1% of rape accusations end in convictions and things like that. And those things are depressing for women. And it feels like such a huge structural change still needs to happen. But there is a sense of hope when I think you read about women in history like this, because you think, my God, they had so much more to overcome than we do now. We have come a long

way. And if they were able to deal with the scale of the issue then, and it must have felt completely overwhelming to them, they were dealing with the absolute basics of, I want an education, I want to be able to be legally visible, I want to be able to wear what I want to wear. Absolute basic stuff, and they were still able to fight it. And so I think you have to take that from it, that the scale of the task, no matter how big it is, we have to rise to it. Well, thank you very much indeed. That was great. What's the book called? It's called Roaring Girls, The Extraordinary Lives of History's

Unsung Heroines. Brilliant. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you for having me. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us i know it's a pain but we'd really really be grateful and if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever increasing stable don't forget we've got suzanne lipscomb with not just the tudors that's flying high in the charts we've got our medieval podcast gone medieval the brilliant matt lewis and cat jarman we've got the ancients with our very own tristan hughes and we've got warfare as well dealing with

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