One of three children, Theodora was the daughter of an actress and a bear trainer of the Green faction¹. Following her father’s death she was presented to the Blue faction and became a supporter of theirs. Being a supporter of the Blue faction would prove to be significant later in her life.

The details of her time as an actress or prostitute are somewhat unclear, with a lack of reliable resources on the topic. Procopius spends a lot of his Anekdota providing snippets of a sordid past, and John of Ephesus calls her “Theodora ek tou porneiou”, or “Theodora from the brothel.” Historian Lynda Garland, however, argues that there’s little reason to believe Theodora worked in what we’d recognise as a modern brothel. Instead, she claimed, it was more like a stage-house in which the acting involved lewd displays and off-stage sexual activities with clients were standard. Either way, it was definitely a low status job.

Sarah Bernhardt in Victorien Sardou's play 'Théodora', 1882.

Around about 516 AD, Theodora leaves the theatre/brothel and travels to North Africa. By the time she returns to Constantinople four years later she’ll have made the acquaintance of several high ranking officials throughout the Empire, converted to Monophysite Christianity, and decided to take up a career as a wool spinner. Well, possibly. It’s also possible that the ‘wool spinning’ was a detail added to her life by writers in the 11th century. It was seen as a more virtuous career, one that would partially forgive the ‘sins’ of her earlier life, and thus may have been fabricated to give her respectability.

Whether she was a wool spinner or not, it was around the time of her return to Constantinople that she became associated with the young Justinian, the adopted heir of Justin I. It’s unclear quite how they met, but quite likely it was through a dancer, Macedonia, a member of the Blue faction and informer to Justinian who was himself a Blue faction supporter.

Marriage between Theodora and Justinian was initially problematic. Byzantine laws prevented the heir from marrying an actress, and Emperor Justin’s wife Euphemia would not grant Justinian permission to pursue this. Following her death however the Emperor, being fond of both Justinian and Theodora, changed the law, allowing an actress to repent her past and be considered a clean slate of virtue. Thus the pair were married, and in 527 ascended to the position of Emperor and Empress.

Of course, just becoming the Empress of the Byzantine Empire, though undeniably one hell of an achievement, does not automatically make a person awesome. Theodora gets awesome because of what she did while she was in power. For one thing, she was by all accounts Justinian’s intellectual equal, taking a hand in the forming of Byzantine policy. They may have gotten together because of basic lust, but a sharp mind kept her respected and on the throne (despite being a follower of the Monophysite heresy).

The Blue and Green factions mentioned earlier? About five years into the reign of Justinian and Theodora, they caused trouble in something halfway between a political uprising and a football riot (though with chariot racing instead of football). An event known as the Nika Riots (which is one of history’s most fascinating incidents) saw half of Constantinople burned to the ground, and thousands killed. Justinian and his officials were on the brink of abandoning the city and fleeing for safety when Theodora, so the sources claim, made a stand.

Those who have worn the crown should never survive its loss. Never will I see the day when I am not saluted as empress. Royalty makes a fine burial shroud.

– Attributed to Empress Theodora

Spurred into action by Theodora, Justinian rallied his forces, the riots were put down, and order restored. Over the following years Theodora and Justinian would engage in a large scale public works programme to rebuild the city, including rebuilding the Hagia Sophia in its current form as one of the architectural wonders of the world.
When not putting down rebellions, Theodora was instrumental in passing laws aimed at increasing the rights of many women in the Byzantine Empire. This included the institution of the death penalty for rape, the increasing of property rights and the rights to guardianship of children, and the closing of brothels followed by the opening of a convent to support former sex workers.

Theodora died of unknown causes in 548 AD. Afterwards Emperor Justinian worked to keep the peace and protect her small community of Monophysites, despite being a Chalcedonian Christian himself. Both of them were eventually canonised by the Eastern Orthodox Church.

So there’s Theodora. Given to a sports team as a child, grew up in the sleazy Byzantine entertainment industry, ended up one of the most powerful women in the world and eventually a saint. How’s that for an achievement?

For further reading there’s the expensive but well researched Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium, AD 527-1204 by Lynda Garland, and the more affordable The Empress Theodora: Partner of Justinian by James Evans. There’s also the works of Procopius, but those are skewed by the political issues of the time.

• 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]!

1. These factions will be important later. They were somewhere between a sports team and a political affiliation, and pretty important in Byzantine society. There were four teams, named for the colours of their uniforms, though by the time of Theodora only the Blues and Greens were particularly influential.

Juana in 1666, aged 15, looking super knowledgable

Juana demonstrated her latent awesome from an early age. Sneaking away from family gatherings to read her grandfather’s books, she’d picked up Greek, Latin and Nahuatl by her teens, composing poetry and teaching younger children. If you want to keep some a scorecard of achievements here, that’d be four languages self-taught to the level of writing poetry in them and teaching them to others by early adolescence.

Wanting something a little more formal than teaching herself from borrowed books, Juana asked her family for permission to disguise herself as a man in order to gain access to the university in Mexico City. Her family were not keen and permission was denied, so instead she found private tutoring from the Vicereine Leonor Carreto.

The Viceroy was intrigued by this apparent prodigy studying under his wife, and seemed to doubt that a 17-year-old woman could have the intellectual prowess she claimed. He set her a test (because apparently that’s what you do when someone is awesome; you make them jump through hoops to prove it): many of the country’s leading minds were invited to put difficult questions to her in fields of law, literature, theology and philosophy, and to have her explain difficult concepts without preparation. You can probably guess what happened. If you can’t guess, here’s what happened: she kicked intellectual ass.

Over the next few years the now really rather popular Juana would reject several marriage proposals from assorted influential types before, in 1669, entering a Hieronymite convent.

Sor Juana made for a rather unusual Sister. Set against the social pressures of the time, prevailing attitudes in the church, and the continued influence of the Spanish Inquisition, she wrote works that bordered on the heretical in their focus on freedom, science and the education of women. One surviving, translated example of her work, Redondillas, deals with the madonna/whore complex, and the issue of whether someone who pays for sin is any better than someone who is paid for it.

“The greater evil who is in-
When both in wayward paths are straying?
The poor sinner for the pain
Or he who pays for the sin?”

– Sor Juana, Redondillas

In 1690 the pressure against Sor Juana began to mount. A letter was published attacking her intellectual pursuits, and several high-ranking church officials spoke out against her. On her side she had the Viceregal court and the Jesuits, who remained impressed by her intellect and works. She also had a lot of popular appeal, being considered at the time to be one of the first great writers to emerge in the country.

The support bought her the time to write an open letter to her critics, in which she defended the right of women to proper education. Even with powerful friends, it takes some distinct bravery to stand up to not only the Inquisition, but to the very church institution that you’re a part of via your convent, and tell them just why they’re wrong.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Details get a bit fuzzy here, and it’s possible that some of the letters involved were not in fact by Sor Jauna but merely had her name stuck at the bottom. What is clear is that around about 1693 the official censure became too much and Sor Jauna stopped writing (or at least, stopped making public things that she had written.) Her personal library of books and scientific instruments, which by that point consisted of some 4,000 or so volumes, was sold off.

A year later Sor Juana died when a plague hit the convent. She had done what she could to tend to the other sisters who were afflicted, but succumbed after a few weeks. She left behind a legacy as one of the most important poetic writers in recent South American history.

Part of what makes Sor Juana’s story fascinating is the difference 100 years made between her reception and that of Maria Agnesi. Both were fiercely intelligent, both spoke and wrote in multiple languages across an array of subjects, and both ended up in a convent. But where Agnesi was offered a professorship by the Pope, Sor Juana was censured and driven to abandon her lifestyle. It’d be interesting to see what Sor Juana might have managed, had she born a little later.

• 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]!

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.

– Mae Jemison

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]!

1. 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.
2. As of today only around 500 people have been up there, depending on exactly what you define as “in space”.

Marian was born in Philadelphia in 1897, the eldest of three Anderson children. Her mother had previously worked as a school teacher but was unable to do so in Philadelphia due to stricter controls on the qualifications needed by black teachers as opposed to those for white teachers. The family was active in their local Union Baptist church, and Marian’s aunt Mary encouraged her to sing with the church choir.

From age six onwards Marian began to sing at local concerts and functions, encouraged by her aunt. She had a clear talent from the start, and by her teens was earning several dollars for a performance.¹ After attending high school – which was paid for by charitable donations raised by her pastor and other local community leaders – Anderson applied to the Philadelphia Music Academy, but was turned away. The reason? ‘We don’t take coloureds.’

As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.

– Marian Anderson, My Lord What A Morning

Undaunted, Anderson sought private tuition from the talented Giuseppe Boghetti.² Boghetti was a good teacher, and Anderson would credit him with expanding her repertoire to include classical works and arias in addition to choral music. She took these skills to the New York Philharmonic, winning a voice contest there in 1925. The prize was the chance to perform in concert with them, marking the first major critical success of her career.

Despite being critically acclaimed and applauded by all who heard her, Anderson’s career struggled to take off in the United States. Much like Josephine Baker she found difficulty getting bookings due to racism, and like Baker she responded by touring heavily in a more welcoming Europe. She toured extensively through the 1930s, befriending many influential people in the music field who were impressed with her voice. Toscanini, Jean Sibelius, and Kosti Vehanen were all amongst those who worked with her or applauded her voice.

Those Lincoln Memorial crowds. All 70,000 of them.

For all her European success, there were still issues in America. In 1939 Howard University sought to have her perform at Constitution Hall. The hall was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), who denied her the chance to play there on grounds of race. This kicked off a storm with many DAR members resigning in protest, including board member Eleanor Roosevelt. This is where we get that aforementioned lovely example of people stepping up to do the right thing. Eleanor Roosevelt, along with Anderson’s manager, members of the NAACP, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes arranged an open air concert for Marian Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The performance was a huge success, attended by over 70,000 people, and with a million or so more listening in by radio.

Four years later the DAR asked Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall. She accepted.

I forgave the DAR many years ago. You lose a lot of time hating people.

– Marian Anderson

Although she was trained for it and regularly performed operatic arias in her concerts, Anderson shied away from appearing in actual operas. She was offered positions consistently throughout her time in Europe, but felt she lacked the acting talent to accompany her voice. The exception to this was 1955’s appearance with the New York Metropolitan Opera in a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Un Ballo in Machera. This was the first time a black singer had been counted amongst the regular cast.

The next decade was studded with achievements for Anderson, almost too many to give each one the detail they deserve here. which frankly is sign of brilliance in itself, when you have too much cool stuff to actually describe at any great length. Between 1955 and 1965, then, she:

• sang at the inaugurations of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy
• was appointed a UN delegate
• was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• sang at the 1963 March on Washington
• … and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Oh, and she released an album of poetry, songs and spoken word pieces dedicated to her beloved pet cat Snoopy. A busy and exceedingly well spent decade.

Anderson retired from public performance in 1965 with a farewell tour that began at Constitution Hall and ended in New York’s Carnegie Hall. By the time of her death in 1993 she would accrue a list of honours and accolades quite staggering in length, including but not limited to honorary degrees from three different universities, a Grammy, a Silver Buffalo from the Boy Scouts of America, and her likeness on postage stamps and $5000 Series I Savings Bonds.

There are many persons ready to do what is right because in their hearts they know it is right. But they hesitate, waiting for the other fellow to make the make the first move – and he, in turn, waits for you.

– Marian Anderson, My Lord What A Morning

For further reading, check the following:

• Marian’s autobiography, My Lord What A Morning, which is unfortunately quite hard to get a hold of.
• Raymond Arsenault’s The Sound of Freedom which goes into much more detail on the 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert.
• Allan Keiler’s A Singer’s Journey provides an in-depth study of Anderson’s life.
• 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]!
1. Which may not sound like much, but for early 20th century America it was pretty damn impressive.
2. Born Joe Bogash, he had changed his name to something Italian sounding in the hopes that it would boost his opera career. It didn’t, and he returned to America in 1918 to open studios in New York City instead.
]]> /2011/07/06/unsung-heroes-marian-anderson/feed/ 2 6332 /2011/05/27/unsung-heroes-the-night-witches/ /2011/05/27/unsung-heroes-the-night-witches/#comments Fri, 27 May 2011 08:00:58 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=3671 Russia, 1942. Not a good place to be.

A year into the war with Germany, the German 6^th Army surrounding Stalingrad, millions dead and countless more dying of starvation and disease. Supplies and equipment were running low and the need for people to throw into combat was soaring. These were the conditions that gave rise to some of the most daring and impressive pilots ever, the 588^th Night Bomber Regiment, nicknamed the Night Witches by the German forces. The name alone pretty much conveys how ridiculously amazing these women were, but let’s go into a bit more detail.

Formed in October of 1941, the Night Witches were an all female bomber regiment tasked with precision bombing¹ runs against German military targets. The formation of the group took some time, as the move to recruit female combat pilots had initially been rejected, with one recruiting officer quoted as saying “Things may be bad but we’re not so desperate that we’re going to put little girls like you up in the skies. Go home and help your mother.” This in spite of the fact that many young Russian women had more piloting experience than the pilots of the front line fighter regiments thanks to the Osoaviakhim, a paramilitary flying club that provided free training to Soviet boys and girls in the 1920s and 30s.

Soviet military officials then, as US military officials now, questioned whether it was strategically or morally appropriate to send women into combat. But the Night Witches proved to themselves and a skeptical country that their gender made no difference in the defense of one’s home.

– Phyllis-Anne Duncan

The heavy casualties of the war brought about a quick change to this attitude, and three regiments were formed, commanded by the famous aviatrix Major Marina Raskova (left)². The selection process for the 588^th (and its companion squads, the 586^th Fighters and the 587^th Dive Bombers) was gruelling, the young women going through two years’ worth of training in just six months. Up to fourteen hours a day were spent in the air, including night flights and simulated dogfights. By June 1942, they were ready to fight against the formidable might of the German invasion.

The Night Witches were not a well equipped regiment. Wearing hand-me-down uniforms from male pilots (boots were reportedly stuffed with paper and fabric to make them fit), they flew in aging Polikarpov PO-2 biplanes. The PO-2s were about as basic as a plane could get and still technically qualify as a plane. First built in 1928, they consisted of fabric strung over a wooden frame, and lacked any but the most rudimentary of instrumentation. There was no radio to communicate with ground control, and navigation was done with a stopwatch and a map – just a normal map, not even a flight chart. The planes carried no guns and only had enough weight allowance to take two bombs up on a flight, forcing the Night Witches to make multiple sorties in a single night, returning to base each time to collect more bombs.

The one thing the PO-2 had going for it, and which the Night Witches used to full effect, was its remarkable maneuverability. With a top speed of around 95mph, the plane was slower than the slowest speed a German fighter could maintain (its stall speed), allowing them to pull tight, evasive circles that the faster German craft couldn’t match. Combine this with the impressive nap-of-the-earth piloting skills that allowed the Night Witches to get closer to the ground than the planes of the Luftwaffe could manage, and shooting down a PO-2 from the air became a challenging prospect. There was, supposedly, a promise to award an Iron Cross to any Luftwaffe pilot who actually managed to bring down a Night Witch.

Whilst the German fighters struggled to bring down the Night Witches (who included Evgeniya Rudneva, left), the ground defences proved rather more formidable. 6^th Army encampments were protected by what was known as the ‘circus of flak’ – concentric rings of up to two dozen flak cannons and searchlights. The traditional tactic for dealing with this had been to fly directly towards the target and hope to get your bombs away before the flak could blast you out of the air. It wasn’t the most successful tactic. The Night Witches developed a far more effective method for getting past the circus of flak: flying in groups of three, two planes would approach the target and wait for the searchlights to pick them up. These two would then split apart and manoeuvre around the target, drawing the attention of the cannons. The third plane, having waited behind, would cut their engines and glide in to deliver the bombs. This was repeated until each of the three planes had made a bombing run. The mind boggles at the sheer level of stone-cold bravery needed to repeatedly offer yourself as a distraction to dozens of flak cannons, protected only by a flimsy frame of wood and fabric, and to keep doing that night after night.

At its largest the Night Witches’ regiment consisted of 80 flying crew, plus ground support. By the end of the war they had collectively flown over 23,000 bombing runs. The surviving pilots had all flown around 1,000 missions each by 1945 (for sake of comparison, Colonel Don Blakelee, who had more missions for the USAF than anyone else in WW2, completed 500). Thirty of them had died in combat, and over a quarter of the pilots had been awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Examples of extreme courage were almost the rule for them.

– Valerie Moolman, Women Aloft

The best English language source of further information on the 588^th Bomber Regiment is probably Bruce Myles’ Night Witches: Untold Story of Soviet Women in Combat. There’s also Women in Air War: The Eastern Front of World War II by Kazmeira Jean Cottam.

• 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]!
1. Precision bombing differs from strategic bombing in that the bombs are aimed for individual targets as opposed to mass releasing them over an area, resulting in less collateral damage. It’s hard to do in the best of conditions, let alone an ageing biplane at night.
2. 
   In 1938 Rakova had taken part in a record breaking non-stop flight across Russia. Somewhere over Siberia, the plane began to ice up and lose altitude, forcing the three-woman crew to jettison everything they could to lose weight and gain height. Eventually Rakova herself parachuted out of the plane to allow her two co-pilots to complete the trip. Jumping out of a plane over Siberia at night is the aviation equivalent of Lawrence Oates’ “I’m going outside, I may be some time.”
]]> /2011/05/27/unsung-heroes-the-night-witches/feed/ 9 3671 /2011/05/19/unsung-heroes-wilma-rudolph/ /2011/05/19/unsung-heroes-wilma-rudolph/#comments Thu, 19 May 2011 08:00:58 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=4778

Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.

– Wilma Rudolph

The 1960 Summer Olympics, the first to be broadcast internationally (the 1948 games had been aired by the BBC, but only in London), helped launch the fame of one of the world’s best known athletes, Cassius Clay. But this post is about someone else who competed that year: the woman who would become known as “the Tornado” and “La Gazella Negra”, Wilma Glodean Rudolph (June 23, 1940 – November 12 1994).

Rudolph was not the most likely choice to become one of the best runners of her generation. The 20th in a family of 22 children, she was a premature birth, weighing only 4.5lbs. Racial segregation in the US at the time prevented Wilma from being treated at the local hospital, and the poverty caused by the Great Depression made it financially difficult for her family to take her elsewhere. Throughout her childhood her mother had to nurse her through measles, mumps, scarlet fever, whooping cough, chickenpox, and pneumonia.

The disease that had the most impact on her chances of athletic stardom, however, was polio, which left her partially paralysed and with a twisted left leg. It seemed unlikely that she would be able to walk again, let alone run. Wilma, however, was far too tenacious to be slowed down by a little thing like polio and childhood paralysis. Through a combination of intense physical therapy, corrective shoes, and a metal leg brace, Wilma regained the ability to walk unaided by the age of twelve.

My doctor told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.

– Wilma Rudolph

No stranger to physical training by this point, Wilma decided to follow in the path of one of her older sisters and take up basketball. She excelled at the sport, setting state records for scoring, and catching the attention of Edward Temple – the track and field coach for Tennessee State University. She had some track experience already from high school athletics classes, and by 1956, aged 16, she was running to a high enough standard to have a spot on the US Olympic team for the 1956 games in Melbourne, where she picked up a bronze medal.

Four years beforehand she’d been unable to walk unaided, and four years before that she was being told by doctors that she’d never walk at all. Now she was an Olympic medallist. Of course, someone who overcomes polio through sheer determination isn’t the sort of person who settles for a mere bronze medal. In 1960 Wilma returned to the Olympics for the Rome games and landed no less than three gold medals, the first American woman to do so. She set a world record for the 200m sprint at 23.2 seconds, and one for the 400m relay with her teammates Martha Hudson, Lucinda Williams, and Barbara Jones.

What made Wilma’s Olympic victory go from a regular badass achievement to a triple-decker pile of brilliance, however, was what she did afterwards. Upon returning to Clarksville, Tennessee, with her medals, a homecoming parade was arranged in her honour. She insisted the parade be an integrated event, where previous such occasions had always been segregated. Her banquet was the first time in the city’s history that a large meal was held without segregation. After this, Wilma joined the protests that took place in the city until segregation laws were struck down.

You want to hear about more awesomeness? Hopefully you do, because Wilma Rudolph still had plenty more of it to deliver. Her athletic excellence had earned her a full scholarship at Tennessee State University, you see, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in education. She taught for a while at her own former high school, followed by schools in Maine and Indiana. In 1967 she was asked by the then Vice President of the US, Hubert Humphrey, to take part in an athletic outreach programme aimed at underprivileged children living in housing projects in several major cities. When the programme ended she established her own non-profit organisation, the Wilma Rudolph Foundation, to continue the work. The foundation provided free coaching, academic assistance and personal support to kids in deprived areas.

The triumph can’t be had without the struggle. And I know what struggle is. I have spent a lifetime trying to share what it has meant to be a woman first in the world of sports so that other young women have a chance to reach their dreams.

– Wilma Rudolph

For more detailed discussion on Wilma Rudolph’s athletic achievements and work as an educator and civil rights campaigner, check out Wilma Rudolph: Athlete and Educator by Alice Flanagan, and the good but somewhat short Wilma Unlimited by Kathleen Krull. Wilma’s 1977 autobiography, Wilma, is also good, but a bit tricky to find.

• 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]!
]]> /2011/05/19/unsung-heroes-wilma-rudolph/feed/ 4 4778 /2011/05/13/unsung-heroes-helen-taussig/ /2011/05/13/unsung-heroes-helen-taussig/#respond Fri, 13 May 2011 08:00:14 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=3880 You know you’re pretty awesome when you’re credited with founding a field of medicine. Not just a particular technique or methodology, which is impressive enough in itself, but a whole field of practice. It’s the sort of achievement that you drop into conversation and then everyone else feels a little bit bad, because they will never do anything quite as cool. One person who can claim such an achievement is Dr Helen Taussig, pioneer of paediatric cardiology.


Helen Taussig, taken during her time as a professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Prior to 1944, children born with a condition known as Tetralogy of Fallot – or more commonly “blue baby syndrome” – could expect poor physical development, difficulty feeding, and an early death (untreated cases saw only 30% survive to the age of 10). Tetralogy of Fallot was the most common (400 cases out of every million live births) of complex heart defects and considered at the time to be surgically irreparable.

Taussig (b. 1898) had other ideas. Having studied at a series of prestigious schools, including Harvard, Taussig graduated from Johns Hopkins University Medical School in 1927, moving to Johns Hopkins Hospital to spend several years specialising in cardiology and paediatrics. In 1930 she was appointed head of the Children’s Heart Clinic, making her one of the highest ranking women in American medicine at the time. She noted that infants with another particular heart deformity (patent ductus arteriosus, which allows blood to flow between the aorta and the pulmonary artery) who suffered from Tetralogy of Fallot tended to have better survivability than those with Tetralogy of Fallot alone.

Based on this, Taussig came to a conclusion that had evaded everyone else up until then: by creating an artificial hole, or shunt, between the two arteries it might be possible to overcome most of the problems caused by Tetralogy of Fallot. She took her ideas to Robert Gross, a surgeon at Boston who had pioneered patent ductus arteriosus ligation (the tying off of the hole between the arteries to stop the flow between them). Gross dismissed the idea, acting on the accepted wisdom of the time that stated the condition to be impossible to fix surgically. Without the help of an experienced cardiac surgeon, there would be no way to actually test Taussig’s ideas.

In addition to the resistance from established surgeons, Taussig faced another obstacle to developing her idea: Around the time of graduating from Johns Hopkins she had become profoundly deaf, something which seemed, at the time, like it might put an end to her career. How could one practise cardiology without being able to hear heart rhythms through a stethoscope? Taussig was not one to be stopped by such trifling matters though, and developed an exceptional proficiency for feeling the rhythms by hand instead of listening to them, later crediting some of her discoveries to this talent.

You must learn to listen with your fingers.

– Dr Helen Taussig

This might be the point where a less awesome individual might give up, might let their idea drop and become just another footnote in medical history. Instead, Taussig approached Alfred Blalock, a recent appointment at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Together with his surgical technician, Vivien Thomas, they began to develop the idea, and by 1944 were ready to perform their first operation on a person.

The first operation was a qualified success – the initial surgery went well, but the patient didn’t survive a follow up surgery the following year. The following two attempts were wholly successful, and by 1952 over 1,000 patients had undergone the Blalock-Taussig Shunt procedure, as it became known, with around 85% survival rates. Taussig and Blalock lectured on their technique in Paris and London, where surgeons experienced similar success rates.

But pioneering a new field of medicine and improving the life expectancy and quality of life for countless infants wasn’t enough for Taussig – she had more awesome achievements still to go. In 1957 the sedative drug Thalidomide was distributed to thousands of clinicians in the US for testing, proposed as a safe drug for a variety of conditions. We now know, of course, that the drug was far from safe for this, having massively teratogenic properties. Taussig was one of the doctors, along with the FDA inspector Frances Oldham Kelsey, who provided evidence for the dangers of the drug. This lead to its being refused approval for sale in the US, and eventually removed from other markets once its dangers had been exposed.

So that’s twice that Taussig was a key figure in improving the quality of life of infants, thus arguably making the world a better place through her actions. In addition to this she campaigned for the legalisation of abortion and became one of the first women to be appointed to a full professorship at Johns Hopkins University in 1959, and the first to serve as president of the American Heart Association. One of the four colleges of the Johns Hopkins medical school still bears her name.

Her 1947 textbook, Congenital Malformations of the Heart, is worth reading whether or not one has a medical background, as it stands as an example of a very well written work by one of the field’s most incisive minds.

[Taussig] was truly a remarkably notable woman in health care.

– Harold Ellis, Journal of Perioperative Practice

• 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]!
]]> /2011/05/13/unsung-heroes-helen-taussig/feed/ 0 3880 /2011/05/04/fairy-tale-fest-fairy-tales-in-context/ /2011/05/04/fairy-tale-fest-fairy-tales-in-context/#comments Wed, 04 May 2011 07:05:39 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=5214 Okay, it’s probably not a hugely shocking revelation to point out that stories are influenced by the social conditions surrounding their writing. As a general principle this is pretty obvious. However, more specific examples and details may be slightly less obvious, so what we’re going to do here is take a look at the differences in the role of female characters between 15th and 16th century fairy tales, and the changes in society at the same time. Hopefully this will be both interesting and illustrative.

Begin the Béguinage

In the late middle ages (and please note that I am by no means suggesting the late middle ages were a good time to be in, I’m just covering some things that would become unavailable in later centuries) there were several avenues by which a woman might live independently. Béguinages offered something akin to the male guild systems, a community by which women might live collectively and pursue a trade, functioning much like convents but without the whole “retiring from the world to pursue a life of spirituality” element.

Many small industries were dominated by female crafters at the time, particularly the production of votive candles, and the brewing of beer (which, prior to increases in production scales in the 1500s was mostly a home industry).

Lastly, at the opposite end of the scale to the beguinages, there was the sex industry. (This is not to suggest that independent woman meant prostitute in the late middle ages, as some people often imply. See above for counter-examples.) Disclaimers aside, municipally sanctioned prostitution was both common and acceptable in the latter part of the 15th century, and provided one route to an independent life.

…the courtesan was not a phenomenon on the margin of society, but one of its essential components… and constituted an important stage in the diversification of social roles and of labour.

-Achillo Olivieri, Eroticism and Social Groups in Sixteenth-Century Venice

By the mid-16th century, much of this had changed. Economic conditions had all but eradicated the béguinage; the production of goods had switched to a male-dominated large scale industry; the rise of Protestantism had seen the closure of many convents; and socially acceptable sex-work was done away with by changing religious mores and the increasing prevalence of syphilis (the “French evil”) and other STDs as public health threats from 1493 onwards. The Renaissance may have improved overall quality of life, but in many ways it proved a step backwards for the opportunities of Western European women.

Meanwhile, in the world of fiction…

So, that’s how society changed; what do we see happening in fiction over the same time period? In pre-16th century work we find heroines taking on roles the Grimms would later depict as “bad for a girl but bold for a boy”. We see, in an early Catalan variant of The Waters of Life, an adventurous princess succeeding where here brothers have failed, winning out through bravery and compassion to restore her home. In the fabliaux of France and Italy we see female characters taking the lead in stories that range from the bawdy to the obscene, which reflect the assumption that of course women will sometimes take the initiative.
Even moving away from the fantastic and magical tales we find similar characterisations in more serious works such as that of Madonna Lisetta in Boccaccio’s Decameron.

By the mid-16th century the characters were beginning to take the forms that would be most recognisable to most modern readers. Here we see the shift from the active, protagonistic female character to the passive, receptive object to whom fairy tales happen.

Straparola’s magic tales, dating to 1553, deliver a mixed message on sex and gender. The older tales in the collection stay fairly true to their roots, but the newer ones show female characters who must fear men, who must fear the consequences of associating with them. No longer do they take the lead, instead they are there to be won, as with the story of three brothers who rescue a princess and fall to arguing over who should wed her. She doesn’t get a say in the matter.

If Straparola’s collection shows the transition, Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone (1636) gives us the conclusion. By this point all the stories reflect the new order of things. Female characters are there now almost entirely to receive the actions of the male leads, without much choice in things themselves. A large portion of Basile’s tales revolve around unwanted and involuntary pregnancies. This tone continues all the way through to at least the early 19th century, and provides the link to the next point of this post.

And now, speculation!

Right, this next bit is somewhat more speculative: There is some research suggesting that up until around the start of the 16th century women had a good deal of control over their fertility (check the further reading section at the end here for more details). Between 1500 and 1700 this ability substantially declined, leaving women far more susceptible to the consequences of sex. We can suggest a few reasons for this decline: Firstly, there was the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1487, which branded midwifes who provided abortifacients as witches, and lead to witch-hunt panics through Western Europe. At the same time there was the rising tension caused by the Protestant Reformation, which saw increased conflict between Reformers and Counter-Reformers, and lead to both the Protestant and Catholic churches being increasingly zealous in order to demonstrate their own faithfulness.

There are arguments (see particularly Ruth Bottigheimer’s essay Fertility Control and the Modern European Fairy-Tale Heroine available in this anthology) that the change in the role of the fictional woman and the change in real life control over fertility are utterly bound together. The real dangers of sex became the over-arching dangers of the fairy-tale plot, the imprisonment in towers, the kidnappings, captivity, and general disempowerment. Thus the tales of the Grimms, in which “men act, women are acted upon.”

…old concepts took on a new force and came to dominate… Women in tale collections no longer survived by their wits… Instead, their bodies became vehicles of “honour” and “dishonour”.
– Ruth Bottigheimer

So yes, the overall point here is that considering the representations of gender in fairy tales is not quite so simple as just going “Cor, Disney/Grimm/Perrault were a bit crap at gender, eh?” There are myriad other factors that go into the formation of a story, as hopefully this (incredibly brief) overview of some has demonstrated.

Other stuff on vaguely related notes that’s worth reading:

• John Riddle’s Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West
• Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale
• Patricia Hannon’s Fabulous Identities: Women’s Fairytales in Seventeenth Century France
]]> /2011/05/04/fairy-tale-fest-fairy-tales-in-context/feed/ 2 5214 /2011/04/14/unsung-heroes-josephine-baker/ /2011/04/14/unsung-heroes-josephine-baker/#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2011 08:00:59 +0000 http://www.badreputation.org.uk/?p=4355 Star of stage and screen, major civil rights player, member of the French resistance, and recipient of the Croix de Guerre? That’s quite an impressive CV by any standards, and it only just begins to cover the achievements of Josephine Baker, one of the great performers and humanitarians of the 20th century.

Born Freda Josephine Mcdonald in St Louis, Missouri in 1906, Baker’s life got off to a rough start. As a child she worked as a cleaner and babysitter for a reportedly abusive wealthy woman – Baker later spoke of having her hands burnt for making a mistake, and of being told “not to kiss the baby”, presumably to avoid somehow “racially tainting” the child. By the age of 12 she had run away to live on the streets, surviving the East St Louis Riots of 1917, and working as a waitress and a street dancer. By the age of 15 she was onto her second marriage, where she picked up the Baker name she would keep through the rest of her career.



Around about 1921 things started to improve for Baker, as she moved to New York and began dancing in Broadway and vaudeville shows. Initially she was turned down as a vaudeville chorus dancer, described as “too skinny and too dark.” Not one to be put off, Baker worked as a dresser instead, learning all the dance moves from backstage. When a space came up for a chorus dancer she made herself the natural choice, knowing all the routines already, and put on an impressive performance. Before long she was one of the most successful chorus girls in vaudeville theatre.

Though successful, Baker found that continuing racial discrimination in the US led her to feel alienated and disrespected, and she moved to Paris in 1925. Here she quickly came to the attention of the director of the Folies Bergère, quickly climbing to stardom. She became one of the most talked about and photographed women in the world, and by 1927 was amongst the most highly paid entertainers alive (much of her pay being spent on pets. There’s something fantastic about having a pet snake, goat, pig, parakeet, several cats, dogs, fish, a chimpanzee and a leopard.) In 1927 she also appeared in  the silent film Siren of the Tropics, becoming the first African American woman to star in a major motion picture.

“She kissed babies in foundling homes, gave dolls to the young and soup to the aged, presided at the opening of the Tour de France, celebrated holidays, went to fairs, joked with workers and did charity benefits galore. She was all over Paris, always good-natured and exquisitely dressed.”

- Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra

Her return to America in 1936 did not go well. Audiences refused to accept the notion of a sophisticated black woman, and newspaper reviews tore her act apart, with the New York Times going so far as to refer to her as “a Negro wench”. She soon returned to France.

When war broke out, Baker did not sit idly by. In addition to playing up her role as an entertainer and boosting troops’ morale in Africa and Europe, she worked covertly for the French Resistance, smuggling secret messages on her sheet music and pinned to the inside of her clothing. This, and her wartime work with the Red Cross saw her awarded the Croix de guerre, making her the first American-born woman to achieve this.

Following the war Baker turned her attention to civil rights activism and unleashed a whole truckload of awesomeness. After her negative experiences performing in the US in the Thirties, Baker refused to perform at segregated clubs, and this insistence is credited with being influential in the integration of shows in Las Vegas. But that was only one tiny facet of her amazing actions in the Fifties and Sixties.



The most work-safe shot of that famous Banana Skirt

You see, Baker wanted to demonstrate that there was absolutely no reason why people of different races and faiths couldn’t live together just fine. So how did she set about proving this? By adopting a dozen children (whom she called her “Rainbow Tribe”), from places as far-flung as Cote D’Ivoire, Finland, Korea and Colombia, and raising them all together. Oh, and she raised them in a castle, the Chateau de Milandes, in Dordogne. Because if you’re going to go to the effort of doing something you might as well go all the way and do it in a castle.

In 1963 Baker stood alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington when he made his “I Have a Dream” speech. Baker was the only woman to deliver a speech at the rally, and was later offered a place at the head of the American Civil Rights Movement following King’s assassination, though she declined.

Over the space of her career Baker managed to be a hugely influential performer, to risk her life as a part of the French Resistance, and to take a major role in the civil rights movement. There’s just far too much kickassery in there to possibly sum up in the space of one post, so for more detailed looks at her life there’s Josephine: The Hungry Heart, by her adopted son Jean-Claude Baker, and Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time, by Phyllis Rose.

“Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one’s soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.”
– Josephine Baker

• 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]!
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