Team BadRep were put on the spot again this month: in the wake of SDCC Batgirl igniting the gender-and-comics conversation loud ‘n’ proud, the team were asked to take a look at their favourite comic book titles and characters – some obvious choices, some less so… and next up, we have Steve.
There wasn’t a specific comic which made me look at the female lead and think “Girls can be heroes just as well as guys! I should be for equality, and stuff.” That doesn’t mean there weren’t loads of characters who fit the bill, only that I never looked on them that way. Which could be the whole point…
I got into comics pretty late, and mostly with UK releases instead of Marvel or DC. I think it started when an older friend had spent 2 straight hours laughing himself onto the floor at Alan Moore and Alan Davis’ “DR & Quinch“. (They STILL get asked to do more of that one.) I suppose that technically DR’s girlfriend Crazy Chrissie is an empowered and independent woman, but since she spends much of her time firing guns and/or throttling him, it’s hard to tell. It’s a great book though, especially the incredibly sensitive war poetry.
Judge Anderson says freeze, creep. Copyright 2000AD, image from http://judgedredd.wikia.com/.
2000 AD was (and still is) an important publication in the UK. It hurt like hell when I finally stopped buying it (around the age of 18 and at university, I think). It also produced a far more relevant female character for this post: Judge Anderson. I was mostly oblivious to Judge Dredd’s satire on future fascism, so all I knew was that Anderson was a determined, skilled woman who could do everything Dredd could (shout, kick doors, shoot things) but also more. She had the psi-powers side of it as well, and her storylines just seemed fuller to me. The telepathy element allowed for more of a detective story, and the others in Psi-Division such as Empaths brought in some very murky subtlety at times. There was no hint of her being less physically capable than a male Judge (although Dredd in particular is something of an unstoppable juggernaut) so my decision was completely based on which characters I got more from. (This priority of ‘story over gender’ was reflected in my affection for another 2000AD series, Pat Mills’ enjoyably bonkers Finn, which starred a male witch.) Anderson is still incredibly popular, and will feature in the new Judge Dredd movie currently in production.
In my all-time Top 10 individual graphic novels, Neil Gaiman’s Death: The High Cost of Living will always feature highly. Technically very few of the female characters in the Sandman tales are actually human, and those in the Endless family such as Death, Delirium and Despair certainly not, but it is a remarkable book. There’s no question that Death herself is where all the focus is, as she steals the show from her brother Dream even in the main Sandman storylines which are supposedly about him.
We recently linked to Greg Rucka and Rick Burchett’s “Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether” (starring LADY SKYSHIP PIRATES), but Rucka was on my radar long before. His series Queen and Country stars Tara Chace, who in my view is about as feminist a character as can exist (hard-drinking, flawed, MI6 operative in a man’s world) – we have a post about her here. It was another graphic novel which caught my attention though, when he took over a superhero who was originally arguably one of the least feminist-friendly ever: Elektra.
Elektra, somehow managing to show off her chest and rear. Again. Copyright Marvel comics, image from http://marvel.wikia.com/.
Seriously, even quite recently before Rucka’s volume Everything Old is New Again, she was aimed at a fanbase who wanted her to look like the image here. She’s the Sexy! Killer! Babe! In Red! So far, so very sex assassin, as we call it around here.
In Rucka’s storyline however, things get shaken up a bit. Elektra has got too used to the endless killing, and is almost at a point where she can’t recover psychologically. She meets a new sensei who is the other main character of the book… an older woman of colour. That’s right, the most dangerous warrior in this story – more capable and badass than the famously lethal assassin herself – is a non-white woman of advancing years, and she is also the one with all the intelligence and wisdom. The art (in the early episodes at least) is superb, with a fight between them showing convincing movement and how muscles actually work. It also heralded a change from CombatBarbie visuals. Rucka had just previously produced Elektra/Wolverine: The Redeemer with esteemed Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano, where the glorious full-page paintings showed a stylised Elektra with a body which was often much less objectified than typical comic fare. (Amano’s site doesn’t have my favourite pages from towards the end of the book, where Elektra is shown exhibiting the kind of power and savagery usually given to an avatar of an avenging death goddess, in some very powerful images.)
Everything Old is New Again frequently surprised me, since earlier chapters of this character had basically been SexyNinja books (I knew Greg Rucka would be doing more with it though). I wasn’t thinking outwardly about feminism, I was just being pulled along by the adrenaline and drama of the story.
And that’s the secret. That’s why pop culture is such a great partner for feminism: we don’t notice that it’s happening. It’s why the first Matrix film is a classic, but no matter how many motifs and clever philosophies the sequels pack in, they still fail to inspire. They will never get people thinking to the same extent as the original did because the audience is bored (and disappointed, if you’re me). Grab your reader’s/viewer’s attention and you can push your message home very effectively.
I don’t have one particular comic or character which made me stop and think YEAH FEMINISM, but I suspect there are many which slipped in under my radar and connected strongly, which is a great thing too.
Tank Girl vs My Enemies
Team BadRep were put on the spot again this month: in the wake of SDCC Batgirl igniting the gender-and-comics conversation loud ‘n’ proud the team were asked to take a look at their favourite comic book titles and characters. First up, Sarah J with (for how could we not mention her) Tank Girl.
Reams have been written about whether Tank Girl is a legitimate feminist icon or not. My position is something along the lines of OMIGODILOVEHER which comes partly from a feminist place and partly from a place of profound 12 year old outsiderdom and rage.
Just to be clear I’m talking about what I think of as Tank Girl – the comics not the film (oh God not the film) and basically the first two volumes of the collected comic by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin. After that the stories go to an even weirder place, and I think the artwork goes downhill too (I’m fussy about artwork – reading Alan Moore’s superb Swamp Thing series despite the garish colour was a labour of love). But anyway: there’s a little chunk of my soul which belongs to early Tank Girl.
Where to start? She looks awesome. Yes, she’s often in a bra, and yes, she has a slightly implausible figure, but she’s a million miles away from traditional balloon breasted comic book heroines. She is rather androgynous, masculine without being butch, has actual facial expressions and a great philosophy about clothes. She is sexy, and sexual, but in a way which entirely rejects the idea of a performed sex appeal.
Then there’s her attitude. Irreverent and subversive to the very core of her being, she is linked in some of the stories with a demonic force, a sort of soul of chaos. There’s a great story where an aboriginal community summons a kind of mystical proto-Tank Girl (called Tanicha) to wreak bloody vengeance on the white men who are trying to steal their land and assault the women.1 Tanicha slaughters them gleefully, and in interestingly gendery ways. Tank Girl laughs at danger, power, pomp and duty in a thrilling and vicariously liberating way.
Tank Girl, Sub Girl and Jet Girl
But then there are a few moments in which she is breathtakingly, shockingly human, even vulnerable. In one story, she dreams that her friends and her lover have had their minds destroyed in a psychiatric institution, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest -stylee. She wakes up shaken and goes to sit outside her beloved tank to think. As the sun comes up, her lover brings her a mug of tea. He’s a mutant kangaroo called Booga, for anyone who doesn’t know, but that doesn’t make the moment any less touching.
Although many of the characters that accompany her on her adventures are men, her female relationships are surprisingly significant. Her two childhood friends Jet Girl and Sub Girl are introduced in a story about her birthday party (spoiled through a lack of decent beer) and one issue consists of a letter from Tank Girl to her mum. She also goes to England at one point to visit her sick grandmother.
And some of the best stories are where she gets one over on a series of macho tough guys, from a kangaroo gang leader to a bounty hunter who underestimates her special gift for total destruction. In one of my 
favourites her former sergeant becomes obsessed with her lack of respect and her lack of discipline, and sets out to annihilate her. In his dream he prepares to blow her apart with a rocket but she just laughs at him.
Sergeant: “Look at me when I’m going to kill you!”
Tank: “The male ego rides again… Should I faint or scream? Ha ha ha ha!”
Then her breasts transform into missiles. Which makes the point quite nicely, I feel.
Tank Girl is not a positive role model. She’s not a ‘strong female character’. Unlike, say, the similarly badass Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica reboot, she’s not particularly troubled, and she doesn’t experience remorse.
But when I was a geeky 12-year-old at school, powerless and furious, she was a lifeline. I’m sure my TG-inspired dreams of destruction saved me from turning my rage on someone in real life, when I finally gave up the fight to be quiet and pretty and clever and kind. When my peers were throwing sandwiches at me on the bus I’d just think, “What would Tank Girl do?” And I’d lean my head against the window and enjoy the carnage.
- This is a bit dodgy I guess as Hewlett and Martin patch in a bit of faux aboriginal culture as it suits them, but one of the main characters (Stevie) is an indigenous Australian and there’s nothing particularly mystical about him at least. [↩]
Unsung Heroes: Mae Jemison
At some point in their childhood, most people want to be astronauts when they grow up. A member of an elite few, taking huge risks in the name of science and getting to see a view of the Earth no one else will. A lot of children probably also want to grow up to be doctors; intelligent, prestigious, and well paid. Mae Jemison wasn’t content to just aspire to one or the other. Oh no. Mae Jemison grew up, as she was confident she would, to be a doctor in space. How much ass does that kick? All of it.
Born in Alabama in 1956, Jemison’s family moved to Chicago in 1959 to take advantage of the better educational opportunities there. Jemison took to the sciences with ease, doing well enough in her studies that she was able to enrol at Stanford University aged just 16.
In kindergarten, my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I told her a scientist. She said, ‘Don’t you mean a nurse?’ Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a nurse, but that’s not what I wanted to be.
Jemison faced barriers due to both racism and sexism at Stanford, particularly in the engineering department, a place that was (and unfortunately to some extent still is) the domain of well off white males. She describes, looking back, occasions where professors would ignore her input while congratulating her male classmates for the exact same comments, and credits her success in part to the youthful arrogance of a teen allowing her to push on through.
After getting her chemical engineering degree Jemison went on to study medicine at Cornell, graduating in 1981. She did extensive work abroad during her time there, ranging from Thailand to Kenya as a primary care provider, and eventually joining the Peace Corps in 1983. With the Peace Corps she served in Sierra Leone, acting both as a medical doctor and a writer of guidelines, care manuals, and research proposals.
So, we’ve established she’s pretty goddamn awesome as both a doctor and a scientist. But I promised you a doctor in space, and so far it’s all been ground bound1. So, onto her career with NASA.
Rejected on her first try, Jemison was accepted into the program in 1987, the first class of astronauts to be enrolled after the 1986 Challenger disaster. She worked in launch support at the Kennedy Space Centre while training for her launch, helping to send other shuttle flights up into orbit. Her own turn came in 1992, when she became the first black woman to go into space, flying aboard the shuttle Endeavour with the six other astronauts of STS-47.
I wouldn’t have cared less if 2,000 people had gone up before me … I would still have had my hand up, ‘I want to do this.’
– Mae Jemison, speaking to the Des Moines Register in 2008
For the next 190 hours Jemison would orbit the Earth, one of the select few to see the planet from above for themselves.2 She conducted a series of life science experiments on how living organisms responded to the microgravity of space. This included one of her own devising, to study the effects of orbital conditions on bone cells. On September 20th 1992, Jemison and the rest of the mission’s crew returned safely to Earth, having spent the last eight days being awesome enough to risk death in the name of science.
STS-47 was to be Jemison’s only space mission, as she retired from NASA shortly after her return. She wanted to focus on social issues surrounding technology, its impact in developing nations, and means of mitigating future-shock. To this end she founded two rather cool organisations. First up, doing applied research, there’s the Jemison Group, set up to develop technology for daily life, which has worked on projects including thermal energy generation for developing countries, and satellite communications for facilitating health care in West Africa.
Her second project was the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, named for her mother. The foundation runs international science camps for students in their teens, aimed at encouraging people to think globally about how technology can deal with problems. The group works to build critical thinking skills and scientific literacy, which is a pretty damn solid aim.
Oh, and a last point of geeky coolness (which obviously is the most important kind), Jemison appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation after LeVar Burton discovered she was a fan and invited her to take part. That makes her the first real life astronaut to have featured on the show. It’s a neat bit of circularity, given that Jemison cites Nichelle Nichols’s performance as Lt. Uhura as one of her motivations for joining NASA.
So, doctor, astronaut, advocate for science education, and she even got to hang out on the bridge of the Enterprise. That’s a pretty good definition for a badass life right there.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
- Well, excepting an incident in Sierra Leone where Jemison commandeered a hospital plane to evacuate a volunteer with meningitis and worked throughout the flight to keep them alive, racking up an eventual total of 56 hours solid work. [↩]
- As of today only around 500 people have been up there, depending on exactly what you define as “in space”. [↩]
One day whilst sat at the side of the racetrack, I asked a fellow motorsport aficionado why there were so few women racing drivers. Actually, I’d sort of thought that maybe the female competitors had their own events like women’s 100m or women’s football, which involved precisely the same conditions and effort, but with added frills on their flame-proof suits. This lasted until the first multi-car pile-up, and I noticed that one of the cars freshly turned into car-putty had a woman’s name emblazoned on the bodywork.
Vintage print by Rene Vincent, 'Women Join The Racing Driver Fraternity'
So, if women compete in the same events as men – and why not, given that it is just as much about the cars as it is about the drivers – why are there so few women racing drivers? After all, there’s an entire association out there promoting women in motorsport with handy lists of everything you’ll need to buy to get started, and it’s not like lack of body mass would be a disadvantage in what is essentially a test of lightness and speed. OK, at the top ends you’re going to need some neck muscles to prevent you being spontaneously decapitated by your own car as you hit maximum G, but no more so than a female bodybuilder needs to achieve, surely. So why the lack?
To the internet! The wonders of googling “female racing drivers” yielded this pertinent thread where I didn’t learn much other than the names of four female drivers in the history of the entire sport. Thanks, guys, that totally answers my question.
Anyway, I decided to do a little more research. How do you become a racing driver? Surely you can’t just turn up outside Ferrari’s headquarters and demand to join their team? (Why hasn’t anyone tried this?) Silverstone’s driver testimonials are unsurprisingly all by men. They do have one thing in common, though: they all started young. The official site for the Ginetta Challenge, one of the many races I’d watched that day, has a helpful flowchart showing what it takes to get to the top of the league, as well as a price list. The Independent interviewed a young Porsche driver and explained the top wage (£60k) and the likely costs (thousands of pounds if you don’t get sponsorship).
So, to summarise: this is a sport where you have to start investing hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds into a pre-teen child, shepherding them along and making them practise every waking hour until, in their mid-teens, they get signed up to a racing team that then commandeers their careers until they’re 35, at which point they’re expected to retire.
I WANT TO BE JUST LIKE DANICA PATRICK WHEN I GROW UP. Image courtesy of Hot Fresh Pics and numerous dodgy sites.
This is all well and good, and we can assume that no families on income support are ever going to produce the next Monaco GP winner. However, there is more to it than that. Starting that young, a child has to show a pretty strong preference for the sport, and the parents have to be supportive/pushy enough (delete as appropriate) to pour their savings into karting and rallying and fire extinguishers. They have to want it just as much as the child.
So there you are, eight years old, going up to mummy and daddy and saying, “I want to be a racing driver! Will you sign my permission slip?” And mummy and daddy look down on their precious little one and say, “Why don’t we buy you a new dolly instead?”
Maybe that’s not what happens to every little girl. Some undoubtedly come from racing families, and just as much effort is poured into their motorsport careers as would have been done for a male child. In some circles, with the right family emphasis, girls in motorsport can flourish. I’m guessing that this is about the same ratio as male ballet dancers.
To answer my own question, there are female racing drivers. Sabine Schmitz is queen of the Nurburgring. Danica Patrick rocks IndyCar and NASCAR. Amanda Whitaker won the National Formula Ford Championship. Wiki has a list of five – five! A veritable cornucopia of choice! – Formula 1 female drivers, including Desiré Wilson, the only female F1 driver to actually win anything in Formula 1. You can see an entire bevy of them in this poll listing the “10 Sexiest Women in Motoring and Motorsport“. Now not only am I armed with names, I also have cup-sizes. MY QUEST IS COMPLETE, GUYS.
I will leave you with the baffling sight of Top Gear – not precisely the bastion of political correctness – pointing out that this is insulting and patronising in the extreme:
Actually, I think it starts a lot earlier than that, but the sex kitten perception is unlikely to encourage any parent to finance his or her daughter’s racing dream.
My point is this: it takes a pretty determined kind of little girl to decide that she wants to go into motorsport when the whole world is insisting that she should be playing dress-up. And it takes a pretty supportive kind of family to encourage her, rather than simply buy her something frilly to shut her up. Maybe the tide is turning. Maybe the little girl with the need to go faster faster faster only needs to ask. But if it’s not turning fast enough, we will have an entire generation of little girls with no female motoring heroes to look to.
And I can promise you that no one ever tried to talk Jenson Button or Lewis Hamilton into playing with their dollies.
To be fair, I don't think the bikini shot is far off. Image (c) McLaren Sport
Inspirational fictional feminists: She-Ra
I make no apologies. I love She-Ra. Even just saying it makes me feel all empowered (come on, give me some “She Raaaargh!”). It’s like Riot Grrrl for pre-teens.
One of the main joys I had from the show was that it featured an awesome female hero in a world of other awesome women. All too often, as a girl, my female heroes were lonely, sore thumbs sticking out of a world populated only by men. Also known as The Smurf Problem. My other examples of female heroes were all Smurfs: Princess from the deeply confusing Battle of the Planets, Teela from the He-Man series, Cheetara from Thundercats and The Pink Girlie One in Transformers. Female fighters were the exception. They were The Girl. The pat-on-the-head for female viewers: “there, look, she’s joining in too!” Not so on Etheria.
To me, my Y Women!
Female-heavy shows were a rarity at the time – and are still (sadly) a rarity. But the ones that exist are inspirational.
Like an animated precursor of Xena (noted fact: warrior + princess + sword = kickass) She-Ra lives in a world of female fighters, bitches-getting-shit-done, lady-doers and action women.
Seriously – take a look at all of them (more to the point, take note of the fact that the only bare midriff on display is from Bow, one of the few male characters who aren’t boyfriends, brothers or fathers). Nice bit of gender-reversal there, Mattel.
Oh and did I mention they’re all freedom fighters? Female freedom fighters battling against the Patriarchy Evil Horde using epic and non-gender stereotypical super powers such as ass-kicking, laser beams, ice and um… being an intergalactic Space Bee. The best bit is that none of them appear to be suffering from Sex Assassin Syndrome (SAS). Except for maybe Bow. Who also sings, bless him.
The full backstory is over here on Off My Bird Chest, and some more stuff on Wiki which contains a huge amount of very cool She-Ra facts, but my main takeaways (and prime feminist inspiration fodder) as a child were:
- Women can be just as cool, if not better than men – Unlike many ‘girlification variants’ She-Ra is so much better than her brother He-Man (although now I have a mature and rich appreciation for the gay icon himself, including the epic levels of homoerotic implication that I completely failed to see as a small girl). Even in her ‘normal’ form as Princess Adora, she is an effective war leader as opposed to Prince Adam, who is basically Clark Kenting it. Also, her sword can do more stuff.
- Princesses do NOT sit in towers doing nothing – this is a very important lesson to learn as a young woman. There are umpteen tales of royal ladies hanging around turrets waiting to be rescued. Not so with She-Ra, who is basically too busy defeating evil, saving the planet (in both senses of the term, there’s a bit of eco-warrior going on here too) AND having romances with sexy sea pirates to even consider such vain idleness.
- There are other important female professions aside from Being Famous – whilst Maxie might have had “her own TV show” and Jem was “truly, truly, truly outrageous” ultimately their main goal in life was to be celebrities. Great. Not so She-Ra – in fact, keeping out of public view is generally a good idea for rebel leaders. Obviously, she had her followers and people who thought she was cool but she didn’t court the publicity… (for some reason I’m now thinking of her as Che Guevara, only in gold lame. Sorry for that image. But I’ve got it and now you have too).
- You do not have to save the world by yourself – harking back to my original point, but that’s because it’s a really important one for me to have learned. She-Ra fights her rebellion not just with her magical sword and cool flying horse, but because she creates the United Nations Of Kick Ass Women (and Men Who Wear Crop Tops). Most of the other female characters are leaders in their own right, of different realms and even planets. Take that, Barbie.
“Avatar: The Legend of Korra” – new trailer
What, Steve, ANOTHER post about the sequel to cartoon series Avatar: The Last Airbender? Why would you do such a thing?
Well, because given how good the original was, the sequel might just be the Most Feminist Thing On Your TV when it comes out next year.
Also several of team BadRep are raving fans already, so you’ll just have to put up with us jumping up and down every time they release new material. Which is exactly what happened when we saw this trailer, which just premiered at San Diego Comic Con!
Produced by Nickelodeon, Avatar: The Legend of Korra is a show with the female lead character in the title. This is actually incredibly important, and of course vanishingly rare in a series which then goes on to be mostly about fighting, growing up, choosing your own path, and not pre-packaged ‘girl content’ that some networks assume must follow from a female name on the poster. Korra is the Chosen One, not the sidekick, doing real-world martial-arts, with added fire. Buffy can claim to have done it, maybe Max in Dark Angel, but we’re still looking back for only a handful of shows in the past 20 years.
As for the trailer, we love that she’s the star, but a lot of our current excitement is based on how fair and equal the previous show was, while still remaining incredibly exciting and not at all preachy. If you don’t understand why the shots of statues and cities are AWESOME and IMPORTANT then that’s because you need to go and watch it!
We will update you when more Avatar: The Legend of Korra material shows up. (We’ll have to, because it’s the only way to get at least three of us to shut up about it.)
Unsung Heroes: Isabella Bird
It’s the middle of the 19th century, and you’re the daughter of an Anglican clergyman living in rural Northern England. You’ve spent most of your young life unwell (something described by one historian quoted, but not named on this site as “not uncommon among intelligent women of the period, who were thwarted by lack of formal education and oppressed by constrictive social conventions”), and you’ve just had a partially successful operation to remove a tumour from your spine, leaving you with insomnia and depression. The prospect of a life of quiet domesticity in the countryside bores you to tears. What do you do? If you’re Isabella Bird (1831-1904) you get a £100 allowance and set off to North America by yourself to do something more interesting.
Bird’s first journey abroad, in 1854, was not the most adventurous trip of her life: she travelled around the Eastern US and Canada, mostly staying with relatives for the several months she was in North America. However, the trip sparked off the two key interests that would come to define much of her adult life, travelling and writing. She composed daily journal entries throughout the duration of her journey which – along with letters written to her younger sister Henrietta – formed the basis for her first book, The Englishwoman in America.
Following her return to England and her father’s death in 1858, Bird moved to Edinburgh with her mother and sister. As well as several shorter trips to the Americas, Bird made several journeys to the Outer Hebrides during this period, writing articles on the plight of the crofters there. She used some of the royalties from these articles to help crofters emigrate to the US.
1868 saw the death of Bird’s mother, and her sister’s settling on the Isle of Mull. Loathing the quiet domestic lifestyle there, and finding it brought back her childhood illnesses, Bird planned a longer series of voyages. She set out first for Australia, and then in 1872 to Hawaii. There she climbed an active volcano and penned her next book. The money from that funded her travels on to Colorado, the most recent state to have joined the US. Her time in Colorado prompted another book, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, perhaps her best known work. Her adventures there were rather awesome, reading like the treatment for a movie. She befriended a charismatic one-eyed outlaw, Jim Nugent, a fan of poetry and casual violence. With his help she climbed Long’s Peak and explored the Rockies. Bird caused some controversy by dressing in a sensible manner for her travels here, and riding astride instead of side-saddle, which ultimately lead to her threatening to sue the Times for accusing her of dressing ‘like a man’.
Her return to England after the trip followed the same pattern as before. Horrified by the idea of a quiet home life, and with an offer of marriage from Edinburgh-based doctor John Bishop, she once again arranged for a journey abroad. This time she voyaged around East Asia, writing about her experiences in Japan and Malaysia amongst others. Her trip was cut short by the loss of her sister to typhoid in 1880, leaving Bird devastated. She agreed to marry Bishop but found the experience miserable, and began travelling again when he died in 1886.
This time around, Bird decided she needed to do some good on her travels, and chose to travel to India as a missionary. Aged almost 60, she studied medicine, and arrived on the sub-continent in 1889. She roamed the area, visiting Tibet, Persia and Baghdad, taking with her a medicine chest and a revolver. (After all, you never know when it might be necessary to heal someone or shoot them.) She also established not one but two hospitals; the Henrietta Bird Hospital in Amritsar and the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in Srinigar. This is two more hospitals than most people ever get round to founding, and a pretty brilliant achievement.
Chilling out on a horse in Tibet, as you do.
Her journeys and writing had earned Bird a deal of fame in England, and in 1892 she became the first woman to be granted a fellowship with the prestigious Royal Geographic Society (presided over at the time by the fantastically named Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff). She met with Prime Minister William Gladstone and addressed a parliamentary committee to discuss the atrocities being committed against Armenian people in the Middle East at the time. Of course, this wasn’t enough to sate her desire for travel and shortly afterwards she once again set off around the world.
She travelled to East Asia again, seeing the Yokohama region of Japan and much of Korea, leaving only when forced to by the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war. Rather than return home, she moved on to China. There, in addition to travelling up the Yangtze River and writing more, she was attacked by a mob and trapped in the top floor of a building that was then set on fire. Later she was stoned and left unconscious in the street. That’s the sort of thing that might put a lot of people off travelling, but when she died in 1904 Bird had been in the middle of planning another trip to China, due to set off just after her 73rd birthday in October. Because no one as awesome as Bird lets a little mob violence deter them from going where they want to go.
By the time of her death, Bird had circumnavigated the globe three times over, written over a dozen books and countless articles, and established herself as one of the most daring and best known travellers of the era. Many of her works can be found on Project Gutenberg here, all of them excellent reads. Pat Barr provides a detailed biography of her in A Curious Life for a Lady.
“Her work was both intimate and informative, combining personal insight and scientific knowledge of her destinations to provide the reader with an engaging, educational account of her travels. Among other themes, [Bird] wrote to challenge Western stereotypes of Eastern cultures, to critique the treatment of women in lower classes.”
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
Amy Winehouse, for all the typically Machiavellian marketing behind her early development and signing, was an atypical star to launch, even before the drink, drugs, bisexuality, tattoos and self-harm and sprawling domestic disharmony on the streets of Camden set in. 2003 was a year of slickly manufactured, crowdpleasing pop anthems spawned by reality tv or established industry hit machines: Britney, Christina, Avril, Beyoncé, Sugababes, Rachel Stevens, Girls Aloud. In this climate, Winehouse’s debut Frank, an engagingly personal and subtly powerful blend of jazz, soul, dub and heavy drinking, stood out as an album of grit among gloss, accomplished and ambitious, recalling the eclectic and impeccably imperious style of Dinah Washington and Nina Simone.
Equally, despite her status as a product of the Sylvia Young and Brit stage schools, Winehouse was hardly manufactured, having been a genuinely talented singer, guitarist and songwriter from a young age. The lyrics she produced and her delivery of them were cool, critical and cynical – ‘Fuck Me Pumps’ is a punchily sung and scathing dismissal of the dominant gold-digging paradigm. Her definitive, self-mythologising single ‘Rehab’, despite its refrain’s predictable propensity to generate tasteless jokes and mawkish headlines in the wake of her death, is a staggering song of self-awareness, wiped clean of messy emoting or self-pity and resolutely swerving any courting of sorrow or sympathy. Its protagonist does not bewail her fate in the clasp of addiction but makes her refusal to be pathologised an active and empowering choice – ‘no, no, no’ means no. Like much of Winehouse’s material, the song addresses and analyses addiction, dependency, depression and the complexities of female independence with a wry, arch, clear-eyed and mocking wit that could have leavened the weight of many a confessional memoir.
To evaluate Winehouse’s career as a story of potential unfulfilled, as many obituaries are doing, is to ignore the quality of second album Back to Black, with its clutch of BRITs, Grammys and Ivor Novellos, as well as the sheer depth of its influence. Winehouse’s international success began a scramble by record companies to scrounge up similar eclectic and experimental female artists. It is perhaps unfortunate that all this process actually got us was an indistinguishable female-centred quirk-quake comprised of Little Pixie Roux and the Machine for Lashes, as well as current favourites Adele and Duffy – both well-behaved, clean and immaculately blue-eyed biters of a vintage musical style which Winehouse had almost singlehandedly reinvigorated. For all their undoubted technical ability, such singers purvey blandly perfect reproductions of retro soul, whereas Winehouse was able to inhabit past musical modes like she wore her Ronettes-inspired beehive, investing them with something contemporary and compelling through that awesome, syrupy, rolling contralto. Her aesthetic – glamorously grubby, leonine and Cleopatra-eyed – was similarly inimitable and atypical. Even Lady Gaga credited Winehouse with smoothing the path to mainstream success for other ‘strange girls’.
The tributes to Amy Winehouse clotting the front pages this past weekend reflect the other aspect of her fame: the purpose she served as media cipher. The narrative into which she was coralled – discovered, lauded, rewarded, exploited, drug-ravaged and wrung dry by the cynics and sycophants around her – is a traditional trajectory for women in the public eye, from Marilyn to Britney. Mixed in with the clichés of the demon-driven artist, Winehouse’s dedication to the life of a good-time girl provided an obvious temptation for the press to shoehorn the shapeless and slippery business of living into a rigid mould of Meaning, to make her a signifier of the plagues afflicting modern womanhood – not all of modern womanhood, of course, just those of us susceptible to the lure of urban independence and its giddy, glittering thrills.
There is an obvious irony in the fact that the media’s very concentration on her as a reliably scandalous page-filler embedded her in public consciousness as not an artist but a cautionary tale of misjudged relationships and worse-judged substance indulgence, eliciting a weird and volatile mixture of compassion and contempt. There was, too, a ghoulish and lascivious edge to public concern over Winehouse – as there was, back in the day, over Courtney Love and, latterly, Britney Spears – which is seldom present in attitudes to their male counterparts. The same organs which engorged themselves with pictures of Winehouse in her various stages of decline, distress and debauchery are continuing to objectify and sensationalise her as, inevitably, a ‘brilliant but troubled’ combination of tragic loss and dreadful warning. She deserves a better class of memorialist.
*
Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.
