Top Quotes: “Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed The World” — Amy Shen

“It’s the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.”

“Good girls go to heaven; bad girls go everywhere.”

Klutalun

“Great-great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan, Khutulun (1260–1306) became a legend among the nomadic Mongol people as an undefeated wrestler of suitors. Khutulun was also known for her impressive athleticism in horsemanship, archery, and wrestling. At the time, women in Mongolian culture were trained to participate in battles on the field; archery on horseback was their combat style of choice. As a princess, Khutulun challenged every suitor to a bet of one hundred horses on a wrestling match, promising to marry the man who could defeat her. No man ever did, and it’s rumored that she collected a coterie of ten thousand horses along the way. Because of her athletic talent and political savvy, her tribe believed that she was blessed by the heavens, so she rode into battle alongside her father, Khaidu, and they never lost. She finally married a follower of her father’s, a man of her choosing, and when Khaidu passed on, he named her as his successor over her fourteen older brothers.”

Grace O’Malley

“A chieftain of the Irish O’Malley clan, Grace O’Malley (ca. 1530-ca. 1603) inherited the family piracy business and a fortune from her parents and her first husband. Scores of Irishmen joined her ranks to evade the growing English inroads into Irish territory. Her strengths as a sea captain were speed and agility as well as a talent for disappearing into the mist, thanks to her intimate knowledge of the Irish coast. Legend has it that she married her second husband, “Iron Richard” Burke, only to expand her property. He lived in Rockfleet Castle, in an area full of sheltered harbors — perfect for pirates. At the time, marriages could be easily annulled before the first anniversary, so one day when he returned to the castle from a trip, he found all the gates locked and O’Malley calling down to him, “Richard Burke, I dismiss you.” She kept the castle.

Another O’Malley legend claims that she attempted to visit the eighth Baron Howth at his home, Howth Castle, but was turned away because the family was at dinner. Offended, O’Malley retaliated by abducting the heir. Lord Howth negotiated his return by offering O’Malley a permanent extra setting at the table just for her; this is still honored today. O’Malley was so respected and feared in the British Isles that she was even granted a request to visit Queen Elizabeth I to petition for the release of her two sons and half-brother from the clutches of an English lord. After they were freed, the lord was removed from his post. That’s some serious pirate clout.”

Queen Elizabeth I

“Crowned queen of England at the age of twenty-five, Elizabeth I (1533–1603) had one of the longest reigns in history. She never married, earning the nickname the Virgin Queen, and she brought great unity and prosperity to an England and Ireland divided after the bloody reign of her father, Henry VIll. Queen Elizabeth l was the second modern female monarch of England, after her sister, Bloody Mary, who ruled for a brief and turbulent five years.

Famously intelligent, cunning, and hot-tempered, Elizabeth quickly established herself as a courageous queen. She decided to never marry, on the grounds that God had given her alone the divine right to rule; thus she never divided her power. She solidified her father’s establishment of England as a Protestant country and became public enemy number one to the Pope and the Catholic Church. With this new, more progressive perspective on religion, Elizabeth was able to rule over the dawn of the English Renaissance and bring about a cultural revival of arts and literature that nurtured writers such as William

Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

Elizabeth made England the leading world power when she defeated the Spanish Armada and ousted the French from Scotland. England became a leader of world trade through her aggressive tactics in commissioning adventurers to establish new trade routes. This included engaging Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, whose explorations led to England’s establishing the American colonies — thus influencing the future of an entire continent. Her era is romanticized as the golden age of England and she did all of it solo.”

Catherine The Great

“A confident and charming ruler, Catherine was credited with modernizing her country by ushering in the Russian Enlightenment. She expanded Russia’s borders with aggressive military force. Additionally, she reeled back the Orthodox Church’s power in the state and passed an act that allowed religious freedom. Catherine was a strong supporter of the arts and education, and she established the first state-funded schools for girls. The empress never remarried, and she was as famous for her many lovers as she was for her power, with at least twenty-two documented affairs. Never one to hold a grudge, she often rewarded her men with power and jewels before sending them off to bring her the next one; she even made one of them king of Poland.”

Ching Shih

“From prostitute to pirate captain, Ching Shih (1775–1844) lived an extraordinary life that far surpassed expectations for a woman of her time and place. Abducted by pirates from a Canton brothel, Shih married their notorious captain, Cheng I, and oversaw his crew, the Red Flag Fleet, beside him. When he died in a typhoon a few years later, Ching Shih maintained her leadership position and married Cheng I’s right-hand man, Cheung Po Tsai, to cement her authority. Shih commanded over seventy thousand pirates, including many additional small fleets that had joined up with her own. The Red Flag Fleet controlled the Southern China seas and made their profits from merchants paying for safe passage through the lucrative trade route.

Shih ran a tight ship, as she nailed a strict code of conduct to every boat in the fleet. The laws required her approval for all raids, fair distribution of loot, and a no-tolerance policy on rape or even consensual sex between pirates and female captors unless the pirate chose to marry the female prisoner and be faithful to her. Violators of her edicts could be punished by being clapped in irons, flogged, quartered, or beheaded. If anyone was caught trying to desert the fleet, their ears were cut off and passed around to shame them. These surprisingly civil laws kept her fleet in line, and they became the “Terror of South China.” When the Chinese navy attempted to take down the Red Flag Fleet in 1809, Shih sailed straight into their army and swiftly defeated the ships. Their loss was so bad that the leader of the expedition committed suicide when captured. Shih offered the survivors a choice: join her ranks, or be nailed to the boards of the ship by their feet and flogged to death. After nine years of her terror, the Qing emperor decided to offer her an amnesty deal, which she negotiated to allow her tens of thousands of pirates to return to life on land with a tidy sum and without prosecution. At thirty-five, Ching Shih achieved a rare accomplishment in the pirate world: she retired from the life to spend the rest of her days on land running a gambling house and brothel.”

Maria Mitchell

“Born into a Quaker family based in Nantucket, Massachusetts, the first female American astronomer, Maria Mitchell (1818–1889), was raised in a community that was rare in that it valued equal education for boys and girls. She took her education far, exhibiting early signs of brilliance at the age of twelve when she helped her father calculate the exact time of a solar eclipse. At twenty-seven, she opened her own school and admitted non-white children, despite the segregation of public schools at the time. The next year, Mitchell became the first American woman to discover a comet by telescope, which earned her a gold medal prize from the king of Denmark. The comet was dubbed “Miss Mitchell’s Comet.” She became the first professional female astronomer in the United States and the first female member of many science academies. Mitchell also became the first female professional employed by the U.S. government when she was hired by the Coastal Service to be a celestial observer in 1849. Six years later, she became the first astronomy professor ever at Vassar College. When she discovered that she was getting paid less than many of her younger male coworkers, she demanded a pay increase — and got it. Along with Mitchell’s contributions to the field of astronomy, she was also an active suffragette and abolitionist, boycotting cotton clothing in protest of slavery.”

Amalia Eriksson

“Amalia Eriksson (1824–1923) was a Swedish entrepreneur who overcame great personal tragedies, including the death of her entire immediate family due to cholera when she was ten, to invent a treat that continues to be one of the most popular candies today: the peppermint stick. At the age of thirty-one, she moved to Gränna from her hometown to work as a maid. Two years later, she married and had twins; sadly, one was stillborn, and her husband died a week later. Widowed, poor, and now a single parent, Amalia applied for a permit to open a bakery and candy shop in her town. She soon became the first female entrepreneur to successfully open a business in Sweden. The story goes that in 1859, when her daughter Ida was sick with a cold, Amalia bought a bottle of peppermint oil and made her own homemade cough drops. This developed into her secret recipe for a red and white swirled candy she would call polkagris. The polka was a popular dance at the time, and the swirls in the candy reminded Amalia of the dance’s motion; gris is the Swedish word for “pig,” which was then slang for candy. She had great success with her new innovation, and her shop became so popular that it was visited by royalty. Eriksson died a wealthy woman at the age of ninety-nine, and the secret to her polkagris was finally passed on to other candy makers, who continue to manufacture the peppermint stick today.”

Annie Oakley

“”Little Sure Shot” Annie Oakley (1860–1926) was born in rural Ohio, where her father taught her to shoot small game while her sisters played with dolls. Her skilled marksmanship supported her family after her father’s untimely death when she was ten. At the age of fifteen, she beat touring shooting champion Frank Butler, who was ten years her senior. He fell in love with her immediately, and they married the following year. They traveled together as a performance duo and joined the vaudeville circuit. Her specialties included splitting cards on their edges, snuffing candles, popping corks off bottles, and shooting a cigarette out of her husband’s mouth.

In 1887, Oakley became the first female American international entertainment superstar when she crossed the Atlantic to join Buffalo Bill Cody’s show at the American Exposition in London. She performed for Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm II — even shooting a cigarette out of the Kaiser’s mouth. During World War I, Oakley offered to train a regiment of women sharpshooters, but the government ignored her. Instead, she set out to assist the war effort by performing at army camps to fund-raise for the Red Cross. Because of her impoverished upbringing, she was extremely frugal with her earnings and generous to charities.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

“With the support of her husband, Roosevelt was the first First Lady to give public press conferences and speak at a national party convention. She was a strong advocate for women’s rights and women in the workforce; for example, she permitted only female reporters to attend her press conferences, which forced publications to keep female journalists on staff.

Roosevelt was also a vocal advocate for the civil rights movement. She lobbied for a bill that made lynching a federal crime, and she flew with the Tuskegee Airmen, bringing nationwide attention to their cause of training black combat pilots. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt spoke publicly against anti-Japanese hysteria and privately opposed her husband’s executive order of internment camps. She served as the first chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights. After her husband’s death, she continued to work as a leader in human rights issues. She was so beloved that there was widespread support in the Democratic party for her to run for president, but she quickly shuttered the idea.”

Mary Pickford

“Before she came along, there were no actor credits in films for fear of inflating egos and salaries. Pickford knew her value, though, and made sure those credits appeared — and in the process, invented the Hollywood star. She studio jumped, each time getting a substantial pay raise equal to the highest-paid male star’s, until she became the first actor in history to become a millionaire. Then Pickford pulled the ultimate power play: she formed her own studio, United Artists, with her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, and their best friends, Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith. As America’s first movie sweetheart, Pickford was savvy enough to leave her name off the executive producer and director credits in order to play to the public’s perception of her as a sweet, innocent young girl, but industry insiders knew that she called all the shots.”

Josephine Baker

“Black Pearl. Bronze Venus. Creole Goddess. These are just some of the names that showgirl, activist, and spy Josephine Baker (1906–1975) was given in her life. Born into poverty in St. Louis, Baker was on her own at thirteen and danced her way onto the chorus lines of Broadway, quickly followed by the Paris revues. She had a pet cheetah named Chiquita who wore a diamond collar and paraded around the stage during her acts. France loved Josephine Baker, and she became a huge star on the stage and screen. Her influence in Europe was so big that the French government asked her to work as a spy for the Allies during World War Il — just by socializing as she did at high-level parties with German, Italian, and Japanese officials. She carried secret notes written in invisible ink on her music sheets as she freely toured across borders.

When she returned to America for a performance at a New York club, she was enraged by the segregation laws still in place. She became a civil rights leader and marched alongside Martin Luther King, Jr, in the March on Washington. She was the only official female speaker that day. After King was assassinated, his widow, Coretta Scott King, asked Baker to lead the movement — but Baker declined, stating that her children were too young to lose their mother. To fulfill her dream of showing the world that people of different ethnicities and religions can live in peace, Baker adopted twelve children from different countries, forming a family she would come to call her “rainbow tribe,” and raised them in her French castle, Château des Milandes.”

Gypsy Rose Lee

“Lee was so beloved by the people that she was voted over Eleanor Roosevelt in a popularity poll — and Roosevelt sent her a congratulatory note that read, “May your bare ass always be shining.””

Lucille Ball

“In 1951, I Love Lucy premiered on CBS. Ball was forty-one and had just given birth to their first child. The show defined the golden age of television and broke new ground — along with televising the first interracial couple, it was the first television show to portray a pregnancy and birth. When Ball was pregnant with her second child, her character Lucy was also pregnant, which caused an uproar in the country. Pregnant women were not allowed to be shown on screen; the network demanded that the word “expecting” be used instead of “pregnant.” Both Lucys gave birth on January 19 and forty-four million people tuned in to celebrate. In contrast, that same day, twenty-nine million watched President Eisenhower’s inauguration.

I Love Lucy also invented the sitcom format, the live audience, and the rerun, and it was the first to be shot on film so that it could be filmed in Hollywood, where Ball and Arnaz lived.”

Valentina Tereshkova

“Valentina Tereshkova (1937-) opened up the starry sky to girls in every corner of the world when she became the first woman in space on June 16, 1963. Her journey was an unconventional one, having helped her widowed mother in a textile factory and attended school for only about eight years before leaving at the age of sixteen to work full-time.

Tereshkova’s turning point came when she joined a local aviation club to pursue her passion for skydiving. She completed 126 parachute jumps, which made her the ideal candidate for the Soviet space program when they were trying to recruit a woman to join the crew. At the time, astronauts had to parachute out of the space capsule on its return to earth. After eighteen months of training, at twenty-six Tereshkova passed all the tests and was chosen to pilot Vostok 6. She orbited the earth forty eight times, logging over seventy hours in space — more than all the Americans’ time in space combined up to that point. Upon her return, she became a national hero and a successful Soviet Union politician. She was given multiple awards, including the United Nations Gold Medal of Peace, and became the Soviet representative for international women’s organizations. She has yet to return to space, but remains an adventurer: in 2013, at the age of seventy-six, she volunteered to take a prospective one-way trip to Mars.”

Junko Tabei

“Japanese mountain climber Junko Tabei (1939-) became the first woman to climb to the summit of Mount Everest on May 16, 1975. In a sense, her ascent began when she was ten years old, when she climbed Mount Nasu with a teacher. She continued climbing while she attended college to study English literature and become a teacher. After school, she formed the first Ladies Climbing Club (LCC) in Japan in a time when women had jobs but were expected to serve tea to their male coworkers.

In 1970, Tabei led the LCC on a climb of Annapurna Ill that inspired them to apply to climb Mount Everest. While she was on the waiting list, Tabei’s story created a sensation, and she secured sponsorships from a newspaper and Nippon television while most people were telling her that she should stay home with her children. Her desire to mountain climb was contradictory to Japanese culture, which has a saying that the nail that sticks out gets hammered in. For the Japanese, asking questions or admitting you don’t know something is considered an embarrassment. Yet Tabei asked questions and expressed moments of weakness because this was integral to becoming a successful climber. When you’re on the mountain in extreme conditions, you have to be able to admit you need to go a little slower. When Tabei led her team of fourteen female mountain climbers up Everest, they were buried under an avalanche. Sherpas dug them out, and they continued the climb two days later, finally reaching the summit after twelve days.

In 1992, Tabei became the first woman to climb the Seven Summits — the highest point on every continent. So far, Tabei has climbed almost seventy major mountains. She’s also defied the gravity of antiquated Japanese views of women by becoming a speaker, a nature conservationist, and an inspiration to all other women who dare to be the nail that sticks out.”