Badass Bitches of History (Part two)

Like most things in my life, this blog post is a little late.

For my birthday my grandmother bought me the most glorious book: the Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. It is a thousand pages of intrigue and strange stories, folk figures and murky meanings. It is my favourite thing to lose time in, going from one root word to another.

I was however, amid the feelings of awe and amusement, slightly disheartened by the lack of lady folk between the pages. Now, as a book that centres on the English language I can hardy expect it to be an anthology of every existence, yet the missing history saddens me: we women can only exist in myth or as a muse it seems.

So I did what any consistently angry feminist would do: I started writing in my own. For instance, one little titbit of floral folklore is that violets have long been used as a symbol of secret love for lesbians and bisexual women. The tradition of gifting the flower dates back to Sappho, a poetess in Ancient Greece who wrote of her lover wearing a garland of violets. The colour violet also signifies the soul in the rainbow flag.

Anyway, the tangential point I am trying to make is that if stories and histories refuse to remember us: we must make our own. History is awash with omitted, forgotten and usurped women. We have been discarded, disgraced, had our ideas and inventions stolen or accomplishments diminished. Here is a small attempt to bring these ladies – both good, bad and brutal – back into the light.

We must learn and revise and create our own ways of being. So here is part two of my Badass Bitches of History series (find part one here), this time stretching from 1100s to the late 1700s, which celebrates ladies that resisted and endured savagery and sainthood. Both defiant and deplorable, fantastic and frightening, this read is a long-un – so buckle up.