Here she is:

V

VIRGIN

And your quaint honour turn to dust
And into ashes all my lust…

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress c.1640s

Virgin has a comparatively straightforward etymology: it derives from the Latin virgo (= ‘maiden’), whence the star-sign Virgo (apparently the sign of the shy, modest and meticulous, with a dash of perfectionism and anxiety). Its first sense (c.1200) is an ecclesiastical one: ‘an unmarried or chaste maiden or women, distinguished for piety or steadfastness in religion, and regarded as having a special place among the members of the Christian church on account of these merits.’

Like a virgin

Saint Lucy, with her eyes, as depicted in 1521

There are innumerable such virgins in Christian hagiography: Saint Ursula had an army of 11,000 virgin handmaids who all had their heads chopped off (in a bit of a pun-fail); Saint Cecilia (patron saint of music) managed not only to persuade her husband to forbear on their wedding night, but also to join the Christian cause along with his brother, and suffer death in consequence.

Saint Lucy consecrated her virginity to God, and, supposedly, tore her own eyes out and gave them to her husband (who had admired them) as a kind of macabre substitute for the marital debt. (Lesson: never admire your girlfriend’s essential organs).

And, of course, there is the arch-virgin much mentioned in these posts – the eponymous Mary, who gets a definition all to herself as virgin‘s fourth meaning.

Mary’s particular achievement – the Virgin Birth – is also considered of some importance in these definitions for virgin. It presumably lies behind the gloss ‘a female insect producing fertile eggs by pathenogenesis [without the input of a male insect]’ (1883), as well as virgin‘s simple equivalence with ‘pathenogenesis’ itself (1849) – a word with its origin in the Greek parthenos, also meaning ‘virgin’ and ‘genesis’ (= ‘creation’).

This – reproduction without fertilisation – though clearly associated with Mary in Christian tradition, is also arguably the origin of Adam, so it doesn’t have to be have an explicit cultural gender-association. Indeed, there is a Middle English citation for virgin that defines it as ‘a youth or man who has remained in a state of chastity’. But this is admittedly an unusual example among the definitions as a whole. 

A woman’s touch

A Vestal Virgin

If we go back to ancient Rome, we meet another sense the religious meaning of virgin can have: the very non-Christian Vestal Virgins, a group of highly respected women whose job it was to guard the ‘sacred fire’ and take care of the rituals and responsibilities that could not be dealt with by male priests.

They were so named because their duties were primarily to Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth and family, and, in consequence, the Vestal Virgins took on a role as kind of symbolic housewives to the whole of Rome.

Though they would be obliged to remain virginal throughout their time as priestesses, in the word’s second sense ‘a woman who is or remains in a state of inviolate chastity’, the vow only lasted thirty years, at the end of which they were free to marry (though most of them seem not to have been all that bothered).

This all said, while these saints and priestesses are all very much virgins in the most common sense of the word, the ecclesiastical meaning does not have to imply the sexual inexperience they normally connote, since ‘chastity’ simply means ‘clean, pure’ (from the Latin castus), and has no intrinsic connection with physical ‘intactness’, though it is frequently used as a synonym. In fact, the fourth definition for the second primary meaning of the word (where it can be used to describe things other than women) highlights ‘purity or freedom from stain’ and being ‘unsullied’.

If you cast your mind back to ‘M is for Marriage‘, you may remember that adultery means ‘pollution of the marriage bed’, suggesting by association that the marriage bed was a sacred – or indeed ‘pure’ – space. And indeed, marriage was widely considered invalid without consummation – something Henry VIII made much use of in his royal divorces – and, in consequence, the virtuous wife who dexterously trod the balance of Pure Marital Sex and Pollution of the Marriage Bed (whether by adultery as we conceive it, or by lusting after her husband) could be as much feted as the unmarried virgin (indeed, more so, if she proved herself skilled in housewifery and produced equally virtuous children).

The ‘sieve portrait’ of Elizabeth I, 1583

That said, a curious and related term first cited in 1644 was virgin widow, meaning a woman whose husband had died before the marriage could be consummated, and whose status was therefore ambiguously poised between virginity (in the sense of being unmarried) and widowhood (being left behind after the death of a husband).

This was Catherine of Aragon‘s position, as argued at her divorce hearing, during the painful period  after Prince Arthur’s death – languishing in a political and social limbo, waiting for something to happen, steadily running out of money and losing points on the marriage market.

Purity is a virtue of the soul

An excellent, though somewhat horrific, example of the noble wife trope is Lucretia, the virtuous spouse of Collatine, whose rape by the royal prince Tarquin so outraged Rome that it led directly to the establishment of the Roman republic. As a wife, Lucretia is not a technical virgin, but she is (as Shakespeare puts it in the oft-forgotten early poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594)) ‘Collatine’s fair love, Lucrece the chaste‘.

Saint Augustine posits that ‘purity is a virtue of the soul‘, and since body and soul are (in this reading) distinct, Lucrece can consummate her marriage while still retaining her essential ‘bodily sanctity’ because she is free of polluting lust in the process.

Unfortunately, Collatine spends so much time bragging about his wife’s chastity to the bros in the camp that he invites trouble:

Haply that name of “chaste” unhapp’ly set
The bateless edge on [Tarquin’s] appetite

Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

Lucretia is so traumatised by Tarquin’s subsequent rape that she stabs herself rather than ‘live impure’, widely considered by the (male) world to be a Noble Decision. This led to her immortalisation in literature and philosophy as a perfect wife, but also prompted Augustine to engage in some terrible rape apologism in the service of his broader argument (‘If she was adulterous, why praise her? if chaste, why slay her?’).

Saints and sieves

It is presumably a version of this chastity-of-the-soul idea so beloved by Augustine that lies behind the story of Tuccia, the Vestal Virgin who proves her virginity by carrying water from the Tiber in a sieve without spilling a drop (here she is depicted in 1555 with the sieve itself, and wearing an outfit that leaves little to the imagination, chaste or otherwise).

I suppose the idea behind the sieve story is that something that would normally flow through the porous surface is maintained ‘intact’, perhaps representing the pure soul within a porous body. At any rate, it became a key symbol of virginity, most notably in the ‘Sieve Portrait’ of the ‘Virgin Queen‘ Elizabeth I, who is also cited in the Dictionary as a definition of virgin in herself.

The last citation given in the dictionary for virgin, with which we will end, is from 1780, as ‘a fortress or city that has never been taken or subdued’. This has an obvious resonance with Lucrece, and the ultimately martial tale her story becomes – another link between feminine ‘closedness’ and men’s military convenience.

It’s hard to find a way to re-appropriate any of these ideas in a positive way. But maybe this transferred definition or fortresses and cities should make us think about Elizabeth I, who at least made them work to her own military and political advantage.

I am on a quest for some plate armour for my LARP habit. It is proving difficult.

We can all agree that Women Fighters In Reasonable Armour is an almighty source of inspiration, but this Found Feminism goes a bit farther.

This is the ideal, let's be honest.

I worry constantly that she’s going to fall hard and it will crack her sternum, even with the padding. Note also that it seems almost perfectly designed to guide sword points and arrows into her heart.

I also really like Ryan’s “good armour / bad armour” parallels, and the very funny post he wrote later on about the mathematical relationship between female nakedness and armour protection in F&SF.

Having as I do firsthand experience of the impact of Thatcher’s thirteen years, her government’s break with prevailing consensus and bloody-minded devotion to neoliberal orthodoxies, an objective and rational evaluation of the woman is probably beyond me. That said, her presumably impending death – although I do have a longstanding appointment at a pub in King’s Cross to dutifully raise a glass – is something to which I’ll be largely indifferent. It won’t matter. Thatcher as a person has far less bearing on the current world than what she represents. The damage has been done, the battle lost, and much as I might appreciate a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the 1980s, Thatcher and her co-conspirators are by now too old and whiskey-soaked to be held to any meaningful account.

Efforts to humanise Thatcher, even when they enlist Meryl Streep, seem discomfiting and deeply bizarre. What she means has transcended what she was, is and will be. The purpose of this post, therefore, apart from being an exercise in detachment for me, is to look briefly at some aspects of Thatcher’s image in political and pop culture, and to consider the effect of her gender on her role as a woman in power. Quick, before the next bus goes past.

The Icon Lady

Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.

– Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens

Thatcher’s visual staying power in political and pop culture is as great as her impact on oppositional music. The face of Thatcher most often called to mind is that of what Angela Carter termed her ‘balefully iconic’ post-1983 premiership: encased in true-blue power suits, wielding a handbag, her hair lacquered into immobile submission, her earlier style solidified into a heavily stylized femininity bordering on drag. Paul Flynn, in a fairly tortured discussion of Thatcher’s status as a gay icon, put it down to her ‘ability to carry a strong, identifiable, signature look… an intrinsic and steely power to self-transform’, and a ‘camp, easily cartooned presence’. The startling evocative power of this look, its ability to summon up its host of contemporary social, cultural and political associations, is why I jump when Streep’s replication of it intrudes into my vision. It’s like being repeatedly sideswiped by the 1980s, which is something the last UK election had already made me thoroughly sick of.

The iconic capacity of Thatcher’s image has been compared in articles and actual mash-ups with that of Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara. The artist Alison Jackson observes that all three ‘had what it takes to become a modern icon: big hair, high foreheads and a face that would allow you to project your own fears and desires on to it.’ Conversely, subsequent political leaders – including both Blair and Cameron – have had their own faces conflated with Thatcher’s, usually as part of left-wing critiques meant to signify the closeness of their policies to hers. Thatcher’s image is here used as an instantly recognisable political signifier, communicating a set of ideological ideas in a single package, as well as a self-contained political warning sign.

Although the kind of passive objectification associated with Monroe might seem at odds with the idea of Thatcher as a great historical actor with narrative agency in her own right, the images of both women are used in a cultural tradition in which the female figure in particular becomes a canvas for the expression of abstract ideas (think justice, liberty, victory). The abstract embodiment of multiple meanings, and the strategic performance of traditional ideas of femininity, constitute sources of power which Thatcher and her political and media allies exploited to the hilt in their harnessing of support for the policies she promoted.

Iron Maidens

Thatcher’s image, rather than appealing solely to a particular aspect of femininity, was a tense mixture of conflicting and mutually reinforcing signifiers. Angela Carter identified it as a composite of feminine archetypes, including Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington, Elizabeth I as Gloriana, Countess Dracula, and one of PG Wodehouse’s aunts – tropes sharing a certain type of burlesqued and grotesque dragon-femininity. The 1981 Falklands conflict allowed the discourse around Thatcher to reference the precedents of both Queen Victoria and Churchill, and she was photographed on a tank in an image that the Daily Telegraph described as ‘a cross between Isadora Duncan and Lawrence of Arabia’.

Justine Picardie, in a grimly fascinating read, roots Thatcher’s style in the rigid grooming of well-turned-out 1950s femininity in general and her sartorially plain Methodist upbringing in particular:

Interviewed by Dr Miriam Stoppard for Yorkshire Television in 1985, she gave a glimpse of a childhood desire for the luxury of colour, and shop-bought extravagance, whether a new dress or sofa cover: ‘that was a great expenditure and a great event. So you went out to choose them, and you chose something that looked really rather lovely, something light with flowers on it. My mother: “That’s not serviceable.” And how I longed for the time when I could buy things that were not serviceable.’

Even at the height of her political power, she chose to retain the ‘pretty’ and ‘softening’ effects of her trademark horrible bows. Alongside this tendency towards aspirational frivolity, she cultivated connotations of the provincial housewife – a ‘Housewife Superstar’ – wearing an apron while on the campaign trail and being shown washing dishes while contesting the party leadership.

Her ‘Iron Lady’ speech distinctly echoed the ‘body of a weak and feeble woman… heart and stomach of a king’ construction associated with Elizabeth I in its drawing on the tension between conflicting signifiers:

I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western World. A cold war warrior, an Amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter. Well, am I any of those things? Yes… Yes, I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke.

Not a Man to Match Her?

Thatcher’s courting of various feminine roles did not prevent the assigning of masculine attributes to her – notably in oppositional parodies and satire. Her iconic Spitting Image puppet was shown wearing a suit and tie and smoking a cigar, addressed as ‘Sir’, and given a more or less explicit emasculating effect upon male colleagues and political opponents:

Outside satire, the 1984 Miners’ Strike has been conceptualised both as a mass emasculation of ordinary male miners and an overt bout of cock-duelling between Thatcher and miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, each of whom were criticised for an absolutist and stubbornly Napoleonic approach to the conflict rather than a more ‘feminine’ openness to negotiation and compromise.

As Dawn Fowler notes in her consideration of dramatic treatments of the Falklands War, a problem with such portrayals of Thatcher is that she ‘can be represented as simply denying her true feminine self in favour of a crazed fascist agenda.’ The Comic Strip’s satirical take on Thatcher’s battles with Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Council presented her as the victim of alien or demonic possession, the ending of which left her soft and passive – restored to her presumably appropriate, natural form. Both applauding Thatcher for her ability to overcome ‘traditional’ feminine weakness and irrationality and behave symbolically as a man, and castigating her for her failure or suppression of a ‘true’ soft and accommodating female nature, are equally dubious in the qualities they seek to assign to ‘real’ women.

Thatcher was repeatedly likened to a female impersonator, a man in blue dresses. The reason for this is simple, and apparently shatterproof: we have so firmly linked power and masculinity that we think a powerful woman is a category error. Instead of changing our ideas about power, we change the sex of a powerful woman.

– Sarah Churchwell

No Job for a Lady?

While Thatcher’s election to Prime Minister was of course a landmark for women in politics, her much-vaunted ‘grocer’s daughter’ outsider status was mediated through an Oxford education and marriage into wealth. The number of prominent women serving as MPs and Cabinet ministers prior to or alongside Thatcher – Nancy Astor, Margaret Bondfield, Betty Harvie Anderson, Jenny Lee, Barbara Castle to name a few – make her ascension exceptional but not unique. Nor should Thatcher’s progress in the male-dominated world of British politics obscure how little she actually did for women once in office: the lack of women appointed to ministerial positions; her disparaging of ‘strident Women’s Libbers’; her invariably male ideological protégés. Historian Helen Castor, discussing the ‘extraordinary’ parallels between the iconography of Thatcher and that of Elizabeth I, points out that both women emphasised themselves as the exception to a rule:

…what those two women both did was not say, Women can rule, women can hold power. They both said, Yes, OK, most women are pretty feeble, but I am a special woman.

At a point where Thatcher’s chosen ideology is resulting in falling standards of living for women – and men – across Britain; where the dim and insubstantial Louise Mensch can manage to position herself as a rising star, and where the Home Secretary’s political decisions make fewer headlines than her choice of shoe, I’m relieved to see that attempts to rehabilitate Thatcher as any kind of feminist icon are largely being resisted. It remains to be seen whether The Iron Lady, and its fallout in the form of frankly offensive Thatcher-inspired fashion shoots, means that her image is now undergoing a further transcendence into the realms of irony and kitsch (as has happened with both Marilyn and Che), or whether this is part of a conscious revival of the political associations her image originally carried and to which we are being returned – conditions profoundly unfriendly to female independence and agency despite the women occasionally employed as their shock troops.

She sez:

• “‘Twas a few days before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring… except some fabulous feminist finger puppets. What are they up to now, the little scallywags? (Left to right: Good Queen Bess, Sojourner Truth, Virginia Woolf and Frida Kahlo) I got them as a gift, but they’re available from The Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild!
• On the floor beside my stocking (which was made for me by one of my mum’s friends I believe, when I was a tiny one) is the second volume of Linda Medley‘s Castle Waiting, a graphic novel series I urgently commend to any feminist fairytale enthusiasts. It’s explicitly feminist, gentle and genuinely original, with some affectionate jokes at the expense of the fantasy genre, and cracking female characters. Don’t come expecting Angela Carter style sex ‘n’ death fairytale reclamation though. While there is danger lurking, the eponymous castle is a safe haven for the misfit characters.
• In the stocking itself is another extremely well-judged gift, a copy of Love of Worker Bees by Alexandra Kollontai, published in Russia in 1923. One of the Party faithful, Kollontai explores the tensions between her protagonist’s dedication to the cause of Socialism and her need for personal autonomy, love and sexual fulfilment. One of the most interesting (and moving) aspects of it is her struggle to reconcile the vision of freedom she passionately believes in with the realities of being a woman after the October Revolution. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that some are more equal than others.
• Next is my trusty copy of Misogynies by Joan Smith, a collection of superb essays on cultural texts which expose the thread of misogyny which runs through the fabric of western culture. A kind of response to Roland Barthes’ famed Mythologies, Smith’s book still has the power to shock, and serves as an excellent eye-opener for those who think it probably isn’t that bad really. The texts in question may be getting on a bit, but sadly things haven’t changed all that much.”

Not long now ’til Christmas! Feel free to share what would be in your own feminist Christmas stocking, and have a very BadRep Christmas…

QUEEN

To sour your happiness, I must report
The queen is dead.

Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1611) V.5.3400

Queen is one of the few Alphabet words with a firmly British origin, but it makes up for its lack of Latinate pedigree by being extremely complicated. So this is the part where the rap breaks down – it comes from the Old English cwen, the proto-Germanic kwoeniz, and (follow it back far enough) the proto-Indo-European gwen (= ‘woman, wife’). Proto-awesome, man. In this form it coincides rather nicely with the Greek gyne, meaning ‘woman, wife’ (thus gynecology, misoGYNy, gynophobia, and indeed gynocentric), and a whole host of other languages that I don’t think we need all up in our grill just now.

My Family and Other Animals

The interesting thing about these origins is their relation to another word: quean, originally a variant form of queen, meaning then ‘woman, female’ but now mostly an ‘effeminate homosexual man’ (cf., er, queen). Its etymology is similar, but with more emphasis on the insults: thus, quean‘s forebears include the Middle Dutch quene (= ‘older woman’), the Dutch kween (= ‘hussy’) and the Middle Low German quene (= ‘woman, wife, old woman’). It eventually gives us ‘a promiscuous woman’ sometime around the sixteenth century.

Anne, later Queen Anne, at the time of her marriage, 1683.

As is often the case, plenty of forebears inevitably only leads to plenty of embarrassing cousins, and many of these roots (cwen and the Greek gyne in particular) have also been claimed as parents to cunt ( =  ‘the vulva or vagina’), spelled quaint and sometimes queynt by Chaucer, just to illustrate the fluidity of ‘cw’, ‘qu’ and ‘cu’. When you know that portcwene ( = literally ‘a public woman’) means ‘prostitute’, the association of quean / quean and cunt may perhaps become somewhat clearer: it’s what you might call synecdoche. This may also throw some light on quean/queen‘s gay associations: inevitably, words that suggest penetration of the female (pussy, bitch) are eventually seized upon to denigrate an ‘effeminate’ man. Queen as ‘a flamboyant homosexual’ is from the 1920s (as is queer, which originally means ‘oblique, off centre’), thus coinciding with a modicum more gay visibility than its sixteenth century usage.

But it’s not all doom, gloom and back to the Unmentionables: let’s talk thrones. English is unusual in giving a queen her own word, and not simply feminizing king (= ‘of noble birth’) – compare the French roi and reine, from the Latin rex and regina. Nonetheless, the first definition of a queen in the dictionary is as ‘a king’s wife or consort; a lady who is wife to a king’ but the second sense, as ‘a woman who is the chief ruler of a state, having the same rank and position as a king’, is Old English itself, so the two definitions are likely to be essentially simultaneous.

The English the English the English are best.

Yes, over here on Albion’s chalk-ringed shores, we’ve had no less than seven reigning queens. By contrast, even pre-1789, the hated French would never let Ringo have a go – lol Salic law – and all their famous female royals were lowly consorts (Margaret de Valois, Catherine de Medici, Marie Antoinette…), although Henri IV was several degrees more awesome than any English king, ever. Look at how pleased with himself he is! But I digress.

However positive the existence of historical female monarchs on this royal throne of kings, this sceptr’d isle, the residual physicality of queen in relation to cunt is still lurking around, and the body of the queen has always carried a significance that goes beyond everyday concerns about legitimacy (although those are there too). Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves, queens to Henry VIII, were both publicly subjected to a series of intimate questions (and threatened physical examination) about their wedding-bed virginity, genital health and sexual history, and that’s before you get into discussions down the pub throughout history about When The King Is A Queen (thus Edward II roundly condemned for A Weak King and put to an ‘ironic’ death), and the reigning queen‘s menstrual cycle and likelihood of producing a royal heir.

This last was an issue that clearly dogged even those English queens ruling in their own right: in 1554, Mary I was declared to be with child, triggering thanksgiving services and country-wide celebration, until over a year later her belly decreased in size and the ‘pregnancy’ was revealed to be a humiliating ‘phantom’ (pseudocyesis), caused by her intense desire for an heir. After a second false pregnancy two years later, she died (possibly from a uterine tumour) in 1558.

Elizabeth I carrying a sieve, the traditional accessory of the Vestal Virgins. c.1583

A couple of hundred years later, amid some of the most spectacular changes in British history, Mary ‘Williamanmary’ II and her sister, Anne, were competing to be the first to bear a child, and, in consequence, were rarely on speaking terms. Mary had an early miscarriage which may have permanently impaired her ability to have a baby, while Anne (despite being fairly definitely gay herself) had six children who died, eight still-births and four miscarriages. Meanwhile, a few Georges and a William later, Victoria‘s famous fruitfulness was widely seen as a positive statement about British greatness in an imperial age: the truly maternal monarch, whose offspring gave England royal relations in Hesse, Prussia (though post-1914 we didn’t talk about that), and Russia (oops).

Queen Of My Heart.

But, of course, we (along with everyone else, ho ho) have not touched on Elizabeth I, the ‘Virgin Queen’, Gloriana, etc who managed to make a virtue of childlessness by representing the immaculate body of the queen as the symbol of a healthy nation. Bang on cue, queen‘s third meaning is ‘a female whose rank or pre-eminence is comparable to that of a queen; applied, for example, to the Virgin Mary, to the goddesses of ancient religions or mythologies, or to a woman as a term of endearment or honour’. This is the sense it has in Twelfth Night when Viola is ‘Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen‘, in which context it has something of lady about it, just ramped up to full throttle: someone who is also the ‘chief  ruler of a state’ is indeed a mistress par excellence.

It was this tradition that Elizabeth milked till it had no more to give, presenting herself as the adored lady at the centre of a courtly cult of virginity, an age which produced Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Walter Raleigh’s The Ocean To Cynthia, as well as hundreds of portraits depicting Queen Elizabeth as immaculate goddess and virgin. Her fleshlessness was only exacerbated after 1592, when the elderly queen stopped sitting for portraits at all, forcing artists to work from earlier templates of her face, creating an eternal ‘Mask of Youth’.

So queen is a word that fuses sexuality and a microscopic focus on the body (where more so than in its use to attack people for what they like to do in the bedroom?) with a kind of awestruck ‘Glorianian’ respect. Those who sit on this lexical pedestal are perhaps a little wonky: it is unfortunate that queenly success seems attainable only for those rulers who have produced litters of miniature monarchs and the one who maintained a virginal ice-princess sort of deal. But then, looking back over England’s history (and, of course, its present), it is cheering to see that Women Have At Least Done It. Now if we could just fix that male primogeniture business…

NEXT WEEK: R is for Rake

Sea Queens

I’d barely heard of any ladies who swashed, let alone buckled, until Sarah J lent me this book, a 280 page lesson in “just because you ain’t heard of them, doesn’t mean they didn’t exist”. So, you may have heard of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, because they’re in the rather tabloidy A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, published in 1724 and written by probably-Daniel-Defoe-with-a-pseudonym. But it didn’t start and end with them!

LADIES ON BOATS: got up to more than this lass, it turns out.

Now, I’ll try not to glorify the murderating tendencies and obvious criminality of historical ladypirates just because they were ladies. But it did surprise me at Halloween to find a fair few fellow party-punters believing no women pirates existed at all. Isn’t Elizabeth Swann’s turn as the Pirate King, they asked, in That Obviously Very Historically Accurate Movie Franchise, a total wishful? A lady pirate king; that just takes the disbelief-suspension cake, right?

Wrong! Lady pirates, though rare in history, are one of the few things in those films whose historical accuracy should not be in dispute. (Jury’s out on Governor Swann’s periwig.)

Lives and Legends

It should be noted before we go any further that “lives” and “legends” are difficult to separate, and this is arguably even more the case for the women than for the dudes, simply because more has been written, in general, on the dudes, who were greater in number. That book, that started me on my research? You can’t easily get a new copy of that in England any more right now, unfortunately (keep watching Amazon though), and there aren’t all that many books in print that aren’t 50% retellings of the myths we have. So these posts will have to be as concerned with fun storytelling and legend-sharing as anything else.

I’m going to start with a woman who lived in a castle¹ during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, headed up a family of notorious pillagers, and was pushing 70 at her most notorious. Her name was Lady Killigrew.

Killiwho?

Um. Actually, there are at least two pirate Lady Killigrews in the Killigrew Family Tree. Based in Falmouth, Cornwall, the family were sufficiently piratical that more than one Lady Killigrew was active within the same fifty years – Mary first, then Elizabeth. Hearsay has tangled them together so that their deeds are difficult to separate without writing a book. I’ll treat the legend here as one woman.

It’s important to understand that being uproariously criminal at sea didn’t necessarily make the Killigrew family, who were aristocrats, wanted criminals all over England; quite the opposite. Many of them received Letters of Marque from Elizabeth I; licence to go ahead and pillage, as long as it’s the pesky Spanish, in short. (Francis Drake? Arguably a hero of this sort of patriotic piracy, commonly referred to as “privateering”). Lady Killigrew’s husband was a big shot in the Navy with precisely this sort of Season Pass for pirating on foreign ships himself.

Guys, Nobody Wore Thigh High Stilettos In 1582

So, historians aren’t certain on all the details of the lives of the Killigrew women. Nor is anyone on DeviantArt (WHO IS SURPRISED) which houses a few ‘artist’s impression’ jobs, a couple of which have blown through the internet on an ill wind, originating, I presume, from somewhere on the cutting room floor for Dead Or Alive: Buccaneer Babes Edition.

What we do know for definite is that Lady (probably E) Killigrew had a long career hoarding the profits of a full-on smuggling racket at the family home, until she ended up on trial for an Incident in her mid-sixties (setting an indefatigable example to all angry older women that makes me think Moira Stewart should sail up the Thames in a galleon, storm the BBC and steal her job back.)

The legend of the Incident, attributed to both Ladies E and M Killigrew in different accounts I’ve read (though records show Lady E definitely went on trial for something piratical), goes something like:

1. A horrendous storm rocked Falmouth to its very foundations. A Spanish trade ship struggled into dock. Bedraggled sailors made their way to the castle.
2. This was their first mistake, for old Lady K saw them coming. And stocked up on pastries.
3. The lure of a crackling fire, tankards of ale, and the friendly jurisdiction of a respectable old lady was strong. The sailors spilled the beans about what was on their 144-tonne ship (a lucrative lot of cloth cargo). Lady K advised them to stick around until the weather was fair, even going out of her way to set them up at a guesthouse in Penryn, further up the coast. The ship was left entirely under Lady Killigrew’s watch. The sailors left Castle Killigrew praising their good fortune – the Lady was married to the guy in charge of stamping out piracy, so leaving their ship under her watch was surely safe.
4. Except for the part where Lady Killigrew up and stole the boat.
   The whole boat.

   Had it towed clean out of the bay.

5. On the dark night of 6th January 1582, the stormclouds hadn’t cleared. The story goes that she actually had herself rowed out to where the ship was docked and personally presided over the seizure. Guards were jumped and done in, booty was loaded into rowboats, and the entire ship towed up the coast by her dedicated staff of heavies.
6. The sailors returned to Falmouth in the morning. “Ship?” said Lady K’s doormen. “What ship?” Bingo: GRAND THEFT BOATO.

… there are a number of versions of this story. In some, like I say, it’s Mary Killigrew in charge, rather than Elizabeth. In some, Lady K takes up arms and leads a gang of armed privateers onto the ship to ransack it while the majority of the sailors are in Penryn. In some, a small-scale battle takes place in the harbour. In others, she simply empties the ship of its cargo, leaving an empty boat for the sailors.

But I like the version where she steals the boat best. You can’t begrudge me that. (BOAT!, as Kate Beaton would say.)

“Who’s Queen?”

Elizabeth I is famed in TV-spot history shorthand for her knack for staking out and maintaining middle ground. Whatever the detailed truth of that, she managed the ecclesiastical schisms that plagued England at the time bloody well by the, er, bloody standards, and seems to have clocked with reliable diplomatic intuition just when, how, and how far to take out the trash.

Unfortunately, this Fun With Boats was a bridge too far, and Lizzie, under pressure from some irate Spanish ambassadors, duly stuck Lady Killigrew on trial for piracy. However, the Queen clearly wasn’t wildly bothered – or at least, privateering was probably still politically useful to her – so within weeks she’d issued a pardon, and Lady K headed home to live out her days merrily fencing stolen goods in that basement ’til she died. She has a snazzy tombstone, complete with brass etching, at… a place. The freewheeling anarchist press that published my book haven’t actually captioned the picture with a location. This is irksome for trivia-thirsty feminerds like me, and begs the question: when are we going to get a big-guns mainstream-academic book about these women? At this rate I’ll have to write it and pay the rest of Team BadRep in rum to edit out my overuse of the capslock key and the word “AWESOME”.

To balance out the boobtacular hi-jinks on DeviantArt, here’s an illustration with historically plausible costuming.

"Heh, park the boat round the back, boys! ... anyone for scones?"

Next time you hear a sexist joke at work about how women just aren’t dog-eat-dog enough to be the CEO, imagine Lady Killigrew, and do her proud. (But don’t shanghai your boss’s BMW out the car park. Age of CCTV, and all that.)

• Which lesser-known sea-queen shall I do next? Grace O’Malley, maybe. Never heard of her? STICK AROUND. HISTORY IS AWESOME.

1. EDIT: or at least, her family occupied one part-time as caretakers-to-the-crown, as one of  our commenters has helpfully pointed out below.

CRINOLINE

In the 1956 version of The King and I, there’s a bit where Anna Leonowens (Deborah Kerr) is surrounded by an army of small children trying to lift her skirt up. Understandably disturbed (her background is, after all, in the mores of Victoriana), she seeks an explanation from the eponymous King’s ‘head wife’, who replies placidly that they think she is dressed like that because she’s “shaped like that”.

“Well, I certainly am NOT,” she replies, lifting up her crinoline to reveal a neat little pair of ankle-length bloomers.

Deborah Kerr: A Crinoline Made of Children

The King and I was one of my mother’s army of VHS tapes recorded off 1990s TV to keep her offspring pacified of a Saturday night, and I always watched Deborah Kerr sailing around the orientalist palace with a confusion similar to that expressed by the child army. Why did these women wear clothes that made them look like a different species from their male counterparts? It’s apparently illogical, one of fashion’s many confusing mistakes, yet the big skirt trend was one that dominated female fashion for at least three centuries, and continued to have iconic moments long after the Victorians. In fact, it’s a true constant, from Madame de Pompadour and Elizabeth the First to Dior’s New Look, Marilyn Monroe’s subway moment, Grease (where Sandy rejecting it in favour of spray-on wet look leggings always feels troubling), and, relatively more recently, the designs of Vivienne Westwood.

There is an obvious explanation for its attractiveness which can be seen simply by looking at the silhouette: in algebraic terms, massive hips = lots of lovely womb space to let. In the case of the twentieth century’s most famous blonde, the explanation reaches new realms of subtlety (big skirt + wind + camera = £££). But this precludes their frequent favour with the women themselves: Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette were, as Westwood is, fashion leaders, not followers, and it cannot be denied that there is a certain something about a skirt with a big twirl factor that feels inoffensively joyful. And looking back to Elizabeth ‘Heart and Stomach of a Man’ The First, it seems unlikely that the Ditchley Portrait is trying to convey nothing more than Hey Boys, Check Out My Womb.

Hair of the Dog

So what is a ‘crinoline’? It’s actually something very specific; in its original sense specific enough to be a brand name, referring to ‘a stiff fabric made of horse-hair and cotton or linen thread’. The brand name in question uses crinoline‘s literal meaning, ‘hair-thread’ to allude to its composition from horse hair, but later on, crinoline comes to refer to other materials, such as ‘whalebone or iron hoops’, which serve to expand petticoats. The dictionary gives as a second definition the crucial word ‘hoop-petticoat’, which it glosses as something ‘worn under the skirt of a woman’s dress in order to support or distend it’.

The much-touted Ditchley Portrait. Check out the womb.

This ‘hoop-petticoat’ was the eighteenth century term for the big skirt, and here it took the form of an architectural arrangement of side-panniers so wide that doorways frequently had to be expanded to accommodate their wearers. But it was not something new: on the contrary, the hoop bore no small resemblance to earlier innovations, most notably the sixteenth-century (Ditchley Portrait) ‘farthingale’, supposedly so named in reference to the wooden structure that gave it its shape – which was, ironically enough, a sort of wooden cage. Conversely, the crinoline, a nineteenth century invention, reached new heights of freedom, since for the first time the skirt could move independently of its owner, a phenomenon that may have led to the Victorian preoccupation with ankles, but which certainly created a new erotic focus for men walking through the park on a windy day. Previous to this, women hankering after widened hips had to wear many layers of heavy under-petticoats in addition to the cage-structure, which not only hindered their movement but also hampered the skirt’s possible circumference, so once the light and airy crinoline-cage appeared, a side-effect was the virtually limitless expansion of the skirt’s width – reaching its nexus in Anna Leonowens’ ridiculous garments, whose recreation in 1956 combined the excesses of the New Look silhouette with the historical extravagance of the Victorian empire.

Indeed, it is perhaps here that the crinoline shows its teeth: the well-known Getting To Know You sequence shows a maternal, wide-hipped Anna Leonowens sitting among her Gentle Savage pupils and breezing about the palace with an ease denied to the stiffly clad king’s wives, making the big skirt somehow emblematic of the West’s superior treatment of women, and the ‘enlightened ideas’ of the British Empire, while its unstoppable expansion may itself have something to do with the ever-increasing size of colonial ambition.

Her crinoline defences

Perhaps, then, with all these sartorial possibilities, it was to be expected that the term should gradually itself expand, to encompass transferred meanings: a piece of diving equipment allowing the diver to ‘breathe more freely’ – of course, everyone knows about whalebone’s famous facilitation of easy breathing – and, for ships, a ‘defence against torpedoes’. I particularly enjoy the use of traditional pronouns in the last citation the dictionary gives, from 1885: ‘Her crinoline defences against torpedoes’, because it returns to one of the petticoat’s primary social significations, mooted in The Spectator way back circa 1711:

‘Our sex has of late years been very saucy, and [so] the Hoop-Petticoat is made use of to keep us at a distance’.
The Spectator, 1711

Another journal commented that the hoop’s ‘compass’ keeps ‘men at a decent distance, and appropriates to every lady a spacious verge sacred to herself’. It is interesting to note the strength words in this context – from the whalebone ‘supporting and distending’ the skirt, steel hoops and all the way to the initial definition of the word as a ‘stiff lining’. The suggestion here could be that the structures underneath a woman’s clothes must either lend strength to something fundamentally flimsy (that old ‘body of a weak and feeble woman’ chesnut), or, conversely, that this is a type of armour, the armour worn by, as Elizabeth I would probably have put it, a ‘king, and a king of England too’. In the queen’s case, I’m sure there’s something going on with metaphorical hip-circumferance fertility: the virgin mother of the nation, but one whose regal power gives her a strength akin to a sacrificed Christ, a mother who will fight tooth and nail to protect her child-country. Less maternal, more martial?

NEXT WEEK: D is for Doll