May 21, 2025 • 55 mins
Olivia of the women's history podcast What'sHerName joins us to discuss two fascinating women you might never have heard of, Harriet Jacobs and Nur Jahan. Get ready for astounding tales of extreme self-isolation, tiger queens and resilience in this classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
All of this stuff I never told you production by
Heart Radio, and recently we had the pleasure of getting
to talk to Olivia and Katie over at the What's
Her Name Podcast and it was an excellent conversation. We're
(00:29):
still trying to make this Savannah trip happen, but you
mentioned in there we had previously interviewed Olivia during early
pandemic days and it was such a fascinating conversation, so
we thought we would bring this one back for people
to listen to. And it's two amazing stories of amazing women,
(00:49):
so please enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Hey, this is.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Annie and Samantha and welcome to stuff Mom told your
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
So today we are excited to bring another crew who
also loves to talk about amazing women in history and
talk about all the amazing or even unknown accomplishments they did.
So let's welcome Olivia.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Olivia.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Hi, so happy to be here.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Yay, Olivia, thank you for joining us. Can you introduce
yourself for us?
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Yeah, my name's Olivia mikel and I teach women's studies
in Denver, Colorado, and I am the host of the
What's Her Name? Women's history podcast with my sister and
co host Katie Nelson.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
And we are so excited that you have joined us.
You and I actually kind of connected because well, I
say you and I because I was the one handling
the social media at that point, because we got listed together,
and I was like, oh my god, it is cold.
Speaker 5 (01:59):
Yeah, yeah, crossover so exciting.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
So can you tell a little bit about yourself for
our listeners and about your fantastic podcast and the reason
you and your sister decided to start all of it.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yeah. So I was finishing up grad school and jobs
were very thin on the ground here. I live in Boulder,
and like the people bagging your groceries, to have a
master's degree, so it's really hard to get an academic
job here. And I was afraid I wasn't going to
find anything. Thank goodness, I did, but and I didn't
want to do nothing with my degree. It felt like
(02:34):
it felt frustrating to not do anything with this degree
that I had discerned. And so I called Katie, my sister,
who is a history professor, and we had been talking
for a while about doing something for women's history since
it was the perfect crossover of our interests. And so
we thought about writing articles or doing a blog or
something to get more women's history into the world. And
(02:57):
at that point podcasting was us about to shift from
do you know what a podcast is? To do you
listen to podcasts? And so we realized if we can
jump on this early on, then we have an advantage
over all the other podcasts that will start, and this
really seems like the venue that we're looking for. We
(03:20):
want this to be public and accessible and something that
you can use in classes, but also something that your
next door neighbor will enjoy. And so we decided to
do this to try to find a way to do
a podcast. We knew nothing about it at all, and
humanity professors learning to audio edit was hilarious, I will
tell you, and incredibly frustrating. But so we weren't really
(03:46):
exactly sure what we wanted to focus on. Just you know,
we knew women's history and that we were frustrated that
you keep hearing the same five women's stories over and
over again. And there are I don't know if you
know this, but there are more women than five who
didn't what I thought they were. There might be dozens
of women who did stuff throughout history, and Katie's idea
(04:12):
was that she really wanted to focus on all the
women that have not been talked about the you know,
our tagline is fascinating women you've never heard of, And
she knows this now. I didn't tell her at the time.
I thought it was a terrible idea, because you I met.
It was a brilliant idea, but a terrible idea because,
as you know, it's really hard to get people interested
in women's history anyway, and doing a whole podcast around
(04:36):
women that you've never heard of before just seemed like
such a hard sell to me, and I was worried
that nobody would listen to it. And then I was
walking through a graveyard, as one does, I do. I'm
informed that people don't, but apparently they I do. And
I was walking through this great old cemeterian boulder and
I just sort of stumbled across this gravestone that didn't
(04:57):
have any name on it. All it said was mother.
And I was just horrified. I mean, it gutted me
because I'm a mother and I love being a mother.
I have three children who I love, and I am
not mother. I am Olivia, and I am more than
that identity and I just it suddenly just felt so
(05:20):
horrifying to me that this woman was gone. And I
know that usually there's a larger gravestone with all the names,
and you know that it was probably attached to something
at one point, but nothing else was there anymore, and
all she was was mother. And I freaked out frankly
and called Katie on the way back to my car
(05:40):
out of the revery. Yes, we're doing it. We're doing
the Forgotten Women podcast. We have to rescue these women
from obscurity.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
And that was it.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
And she claims that since then that I've been forcing
her to do it, but it was her idea, so
and it's been it's been really fun to do, and
it's been way more successful than we expected, especially given
that setup of you've never heard of any of these people,
but we're going to make you interested in them, and
it's been really fun to have it take off and
(06:11):
be much much more successful then we anticipated it being.
Speaker 5 (06:16):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
And it is the last day of March, which is
still technically women's first month.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
We've forgotten it. Oh my god, March No, March ninety eighth,
the longest month in the world.
Speaker 4 (06:32):
It really feels like it's been this month for over
two years now, Yeah, because I'm like, wait, I've been
in quarantine for how long? Because it feels like six years.
I'm pretty sure I died and came back and it's
still the same time frame, right as Groundhog's Day all
the time.
Speaker 5 (06:49):
Well, we were so.
Speaker 4 (06:50):
Excited when talking with you about bringing in some women
that you want to talk about, and can you kind
of introduce us to who you have brought for our listeners.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Yeah, so I have picked two of our women who
I think are some of my favorite stories to tell.
And it really is hard. I mean, it's you probably
get this one, which is your favorite episode? All of
them don't make me choose a child, but I think
these are two important ones to tell, and some of
(07:24):
the most surprising that they have been erased or that
they have been ignored, because some of the women that
we profiled are are just genuinely like no one knows
about them, accept the person that we talk to, because
every episode we have a guest, and some of them
just genuinely like this guest found this person and no
one in the world knows about them except this person
(07:45):
that's talking to us. And those are exciting, but these
ones are more well known in certain circles and certain
areas of the world, but still just way less celebrated
than they should be. So I've chosen Harriet Jacob, who
is the author of Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl and she was a self emancipated slave in
(08:06):
the American South, and noor Jahan, who was the only
Mughal empress to rule as a co emperor and sort
of even more important than her husband. Right, So we're
India and the US, yes, a couple of centuries apart. Yeah,
and opposite sides of the world, right, right.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
And completely different situations. One was slave, So yeah, I
love this variation.
Speaker 5 (08:46):
So, yeah, tell us about Harriet Jacobs.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 4 (08:48):
When I was delving into it, we kind of had
a similar story from our female first also named Harriet, right.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Yeah, Yeah, there's a lot of I think we even
set up the episode with her similarity to to Harriet Tubman, Yeah,
the famous Harriet. Because one of the things that is
frustrating about women's history is that we have one slot
for each story, right, we have one slot for a
runaway slave, and we have one slot for a pilot
and we well, we already talked about a black woman singer,
(09:18):
so now there's no more room for them, and there's
plenty of room for everyone. Absolutely, we talk about all
kinds of kings, and we don't just have room for
one queen. But her story is bananas, like you couldn't
make it up. If you made it up, no one
would believe you. And that's what happened, is that her
(09:40):
story is so amazing and ridiculous that four one hundred
years everybody thought it was fiction. They believe that this
must be a composite story trying to invoke the worst
possible experiences in order to serve abolition. And instead it's
the absolutely factual narrative of this woman who was an
(10:02):
enslaved person who emancipated herself and whose story is not
at all what we expect. And that's what I love
about her, is that we when we think of in
the US, when we think of runaway slafe stories, the
story is that you run away, that you run north,
and you, if you're lucky, you go all the way
to Canada. But at least you run to the north.
(10:24):
You leave the location and you go somewhere else and
that's how you become free, and Harriet Jacobs didn't. She
ran away across the street because she was the man
who owned her, who probably stole her by forging a will,
which is a whole other horrific side of the story.
(10:47):
She probably should have been freed, but he forged a
will and it comes to own her and is at
least sexually harassing her and probably more. She can't tell
the truth about this. In nineteenth century eventually threatens to
sell her children to try to force her to put
up with his sexual advances, and she knows that as
(11:09):
long as she is there, he's going to keep trying
to abuse her children to get to her. But she
doesn't have any way to get north. She doesn't have
any funds, she doesn't have a network, she doesn't know
where the underground railroad is running, and so she runs
away across the street to her grandmother's house, wherein I
(11:31):
didn't know this was going to be this appropriate when
I chose her for this, but where she self isolates
in a coffin sized space in her grandmother's attic for
seven years. Now, if we're all losing our minds after
two weeks, and we can still go to the grocery
(11:54):
store and we can sit up. She is literally laying
down in a space that is seven x ten by
three feet tall, and it's in the eaves of the attic,
so it's three feet tall at the point, but it
slopes down to the side. She can lay on one side.
She can't even lay down and roll over in this
(12:16):
space for seven years. Wow, it's I genuinely don't even
know how to think about this, right.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
My back's already hard and thinking about this, I know.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
And our guest Mario Indell, who's wonderful. She's a professor
at CU Boulder, and she talks about when she teaches
this book, she tapes out on the floor these dimensions,
and the tables in the classroom are exactly three feet tall,
so she teaches it from under the table. Wow, just
to help them realize how small this space is. And
(12:50):
you know, after one hour she can barely get up. Yeah,
and I mean very Occasionally, in the middle of the night,
they would sneak her down and let her walk around
a little, and that's the only and she can walk,
but she has physical damage to her body for the
rest of her life from this. She has difficulty walking,
and she has back problems, and you know, aside from
the extreme isolation and the you know, being forced to
(13:14):
be in the space, it's also it's North Carolina and
it's you know, one hundred and twelve degrees and one
hundred percent humidity, and there are bugs. And this is
not a modern attic, this is just planks, and it's
raining and it's hot, and then it's freezing cold. And
she is just entombed alive in this space. And that
(13:38):
that to her is preferable to what looked from the
outside as a good situation as an enslaved person, I
think really drives home. We can tell all the narratives
we want about, Oh, slavery wasn't that bad. It was
bad enough that this woman spent seven years in a
coffin right to escape, right, yeah. And worse than that,
(14:00):
to me is that her children didn't even know where
she was. Her grandmother knows where she is, and her
uncle knows where she is. No one else knows where
she is. And so she can see her children in
the street, she can hear them visiting her grandmother's house,
and they don't know she's there. That I just can't
I can't imagine it's brilliant too, because he's not looking here, right,
(14:25):
no one would stay here, and he immediately assumes she's
gone north, and she plays into that. She is writing
letters as if she's in New York and sending them
with people to mail back from the north, and he
is spending all of this time, He keeps going north
and wasting all this time looking for her when she's
five hundred feet away and he has no idea she's there.
(14:46):
I mean, it's brilliant and horrifying and sobering and amazing.
Eventually he agrees to sell her children to their father,
who's a white lawyer in town, and so she knows
her children are safe. He doesn't free his children this lawyer,
but at least they're not going to get sold to
(15:08):
the plantation anymore. So then she eventually does go north
and gets incredibly involved in abolition. She's running reading rooms,
she is working on running other slaves. You know, she's
doing all of this incredible work, but mostly she's focusing
on education. She was educated because the woman who owned
(15:29):
her before this man treated her well for an enslaved
person and educated her, and she knew how important that
was to be able to read and write, to be
able to escape in a way from the absolute brutal
reality of her world. So she starts some of the
first colored schools. She starts these massive education programs for
(15:53):
all of these escaping and freed slaves. And she is
a huge force for black education in the Northern United
States and just a hugely important person. And so when
she publishes this memoir anonymously, because she at the point
(16:16):
she publishes this memoir, she is still officially owned by
doctor Norcombe, her the man who owns her, or doctor
Norkam's daughter technically owns her. And so she publishes this
memoir anonymously, and no one knows who it is, and
it eventually gets it's so it's so wild that people
(16:41):
assume it must be fake and it must be written
by a white woman. And so the woman who writes
a preface for her one of her friends, it starts
being ascribed to her Lydia child. And even though she
keeps saying no, no, no, no, no, I didn't write this,
but that's how it's taught for one hundred years in
school that this is fiction by a white woman. And
(17:03):
it's not until the nineteen eighties someone starts putting this
together and realizes, wait a minute, this story tracks exactly
with the things that that important, famous abolitionist educator, Harriet
Jacobs said about her life. Tracks everything down and even
to the floor plans of the houses and the description
(17:24):
of all of these places. It matches exactly. And they
realized this was Harriet Jacobs who wrote this, So she
was already important and famous, and no one knew she
wrote this book. Wow, it's just unbelievable to me.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
So it took over a one hundred and forty years
almost for them to realize who this belonged to, what right.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
When, Even though when it first came out it wasn't
sold as fiction, it was old as this is a narrative,
This is a true narrative, but there were some fake
narratives floating around. But I think, you know, it's very
easy for people to say, well, and I'm sure that
there was an element of this is very well written.
It must be a white woman, and it's not employing
(18:09):
all of the tricks that we expect, and so it
just it makes me so happy that she's getting credit
now and it is being taught a lot more in classes.
But we don't have enough slave narratives, as this genre
is called already taught. But when we do read them,
we read Frederick Douglas's or we read these men's narratives.
(18:30):
When frankly, her story is the wildest story that you
have ever heard about. All this, I mean, this is
the very pair debt. There's so much more going on
in her story than these tiny little vignettes here and
you know, running off over and over again or come
chruming to find her, and the white family she's living
with sending her off with their baby so that she
(18:51):
can escape, like no, no one will stop you if
you have a white baby with you, go go go,
and just astonishing, and the way that she she talks
about the importance of emancipating herself, that one of her
friends eventually purchases her to free her. And while that's
a very kind act, and she acknowledges like that was
(19:12):
probably the best way to prevent me from being sold
back into slavery, it breaks her heart because once again
she's been you know, after decades of being free of
her own work, she is again, she said, Now history
has a bill of sale that Harriet Jacobs was sold
(19:33):
in the nineteenth century in New York City, when I
had already freed myself. So it's complicated and it's messy,
and it doesn't conform to the ways that we like
to tell these stories. And this really was the first
one that pointed out that women have an exceptionally specific
(19:55):
problem when they are enslaved people. Right that now our
standard narrative of slavery and includes sexual violence, But it
didn't until that point. No one had talked about it,
and it was carefully hidden away as a thing that
didn't happen. And she's the one who shone a light
on it and said, women, if you value Christianity, if
(20:16):
you value fidelity in marriage, you have to abolish slavery,
because look what's happening right under your nose. It was
just brilliantly strategic writing, too, right.
Speaker 4 (20:27):
Yeah. One of the things I read while we were
researching this was the quote that our researcher said that
this was specifically for white women and for them to
acknowledge that this is something that's happening and to call
out the patriarchy for sexual tyranny.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Over black women like herself, and that she.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
Was trying to put it in delicate ways, but to
let them know this is actually happening, and you were
allowing this to.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Happen, and it's happening in your house exactly, because I
think until it had been talked about, of course, most
women knew this was happening because it's happening in their house,
but it's not spoken about, and so they don't know
that it's happening everywhere. It's humiliating and shameful that it's
happening in my house. But once I find out that
(21:14):
it's happening everywhere, this is not me. This is not
a me problem. This is a societal problem. Right. It's
not that I can't keep my husband's interest, which is
usually how it was framed, or frankly, it's that this
system is a system of sexual assault that we have,
you know, codified, right, and that has to go if
(21:35):
we're going to call ourselves Christians. Right.
Speaker 4 (21:38):
Yeah, And I did like her point of saying that
she almost it almost seemed like she was implying and
you can correct me if I'm wrong, that it was
a lesser evil to have.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
This love affair with this white man.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Oh, definitely, in ordered to kind of validate what's happening
and to actually pull herself from that situation as well.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
Right, Yeah, that her only choices were succumb to. I mean,
in the story she doesn't succumb. But yeah, right, that's
not a choice you can make to her owner who
is trying to rape her or have an affair consensually. Whatever,
we can argue about what consent means in this scenario
(22:19):
with a white man who at least might be able
to buy her children his children right, and might at
least protect them from this system in a tiny amount,
and might at least give her some semblance of agency.
That she made a choice to do this, but she
knows very well that this is a choice that will
(22:40):
be hugely frowned on by these very devout Christian abolitionist
women she's writing to, and that balancing act she has
to do of that's the point. Look, what choices you
left me? You left me no choices. My choices are
a fair Her owner wouldn't let her marry the man
she wanted to marry, a free black man, so she
(23:01):
doesn't have choices outside of these ones, and she made
the best choice she could, Even though she says repeatedly,
knowing her audience, I know this was wrong, but it
was less wrong than the other choices.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
And that man was Sam Trentwell Sawyer, who ended up
being in the US House of Representatives.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Right right, Yeah, and also significant, Yeah, and who sent
who bought his children and then sent them to work
for his white children as enslaved people. I mean they
they treated them a little better. No, they didn't. They didn't.
He bought his children and put them to work. It's
(23:41):
just it's not the white Knight story that we wanted
to be, which is an important thing to pay attention to,
you know.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
And that's kind of the.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
There are no white saviors in this story.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
Yeah, and that was kind of her point, is Hey,
I think quote she said, to tell you the truth,
let it cost me what it may. Yeah, And that
makes a lot of sense in this, like there's no
good situation.
Speaker 5 (24:04):
This is the best that I could do.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
And now I'm able to fight for my rise and
for others and let people know the atrocities that are
happening that you are turning a blind eye to, which
is really significant of a conversation in itself.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Yeah, it's a I mean, aside from the story, which
is all very I mean, it seems it's the first
time you read it. You know, students reading go, this
can't be true. This is exaggerated, it's verified, it's fact checked.
She is underplaying right story. If anything.
Speaker 4 (24:34):
They literally said that she was kind of trying to
make it mild enough that people would read it.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Right, Yeah, you can't tell the truth about what really happened,
or it'll be too vile for ladies to read. I mean,
and walking that line of making it voyeuristically exciting enough
that people want to read it who might not be
interested in abolition, but also not selling out your own dignity.
I mean, it's it's a masterful piece of writing. It
(25:02):
really is. And the woman who edited it, Lydia Child. Again,
often even when they said once they realized, oh, she
didn't write this, Harriet Jacobs write it, there are a
lot of people who still say, well, she heavily edited,
but she herself was very upfront and said I did
almost nothing. I moved a few things around. She wrote this.
I didn't fix this. This is how she wrote it.
(25:26):
And that urge to delegitimize her voice. I think is
it tells us a lot and it's upsetting, right, So,
I mean, it's an amazing book. I really strongly recommend
everybody read it. It's just astonishing from a plot perspective,
from a literary perspective, from a history perspective, it's a
(25:47):
gem of a book. And her daughter went on to
become an extremely important educator. And I mean she just
she really she made a powerful impact on the world
and changed it in really important ways, even when no
one knew that she wrote this. And now that we
put these things together, that this woman wrote this book,
(26:10):
that's it's amazing. So yeah, Harriet Jacobs, I hope she
deserves a lot more attention than she's getting.
Speaker 4 (26:20):
And she died in eighteen ninety seven DC, right, Yeah,
And she was a significant impact in just women in
bondage and slavery and again the horrendous things that were
happening that people oftentimes want to take ignore because it just,
you know, shames their sensibilities.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Yeah, the determination of so many people to clean this
up and to convince ourselves that slavery wasn't that bad.
It was so much worse than you can imagine. Imagine
the worst thing you can imagine about slavery, and it
was worse than that.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
And just let's just go it's slavery the word of itself.
Any it is gonna be bad. That's such an obnoxious
conversation in saying ownership is not a bad.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Thing, right, well, as long as you know, as long
as they weren't physically beaten, it wasn't that.
Speaker 5 (27:15):
But no, you owned a person, You own a person.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
They didn't get paid, they didn't get any kind of conversation,
they didn't get help. They weren't treated as equals. That
means as bad and whatever. The greatest situation is.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
Yeah, if you wouldn't be willing to trade right now,
then it was bad.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
We have some more of our conversation, but first we
have a quick break for a word from our sponsor,
and we're back.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Thank you sponsor.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
So let's get back into it now.
Speaker 5 (27:56):
Let's go back even further, as you said.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
Into the past and on the other side of the world.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
Yes, and tell her was about her next famous fabulous woman?
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Yeah, uh noor Jahan, Empress nor Jahan. I had never
heard of her until I did this interview for this
episode with doctor Ruby Lall of emer University, who's wonderful
and Katie teaches this period in history a lot, so
she had heard of her, but there was still this
whole aspect of the story that she had never heard.
Because noor Jahan is wildly famous in India. She is
(28:31):
a household name. Her story is the story that you
hear from your grandmother and your mother. It is a famous,
famous story. But her story doesn't tell any of her story.
The story that is famous about nor Jahan is about
her falling in love with Emperor Jahangiir and then marrying him.
(28:55):
And that's her story, like she she married him the end.
And it's a beautiful love story. I mean it is.
And I think that's important too, for especially those who
said a European history and Western history have this idea
that like love wasn't a thing courtly, you know, until
courtly love, no one fell in love. Nonsense. The Eastern
(29:15):
world has been talking about love for thousands of years.
But this love story, this really powerful genre of love story,
is an important thing to talk about in the way
that women influence societies. But it's so frustrating because this
woman was amazing and none of the stuff she did
is in her story that everyone knows. And so Ruby
(29:39):
Lall's biography, which is called Empress, and it's just amazing.
It's so great, and I recommend it really strongly takes
all of that and puts it all back together. And
as not a historian myself, but someone who has studied
a lot of history in women's studies in one of
these related fields, I love when historians ignore knowledge, the
(30:00):
power of literature, the power of mythology, the power of story,
and that it's not just written off as well, that's
the legend, yeah, but the legend has affected the history.
She is as much her legendary self as she was
her historical self now, and so she brings all of
those things in together and talks about the intersection of
those in ways that I really love. But then also
(30:23):
tells us the unbelievable forgotten facts about nor Jehan, such
as she was a world renowned tiger hunter and she
once shot four man eating tigers with six musket shots
from the top of an elephant. I mean, there's not
(30:47):
a better story in the world than that, no matter
what else happened, Like just those sentences, she.
Speaker 5 (30:54):
Was our tiger queen.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Yeah, I mean at the time when only the king,
only the emperor is allowed to kill a tiger, right,
and she does it, which is how we know she
was the emperor. She was co regent with her husband,
(31:16):
who was either ill or alcoholic or maybe both right
and kind of out of the picture for a lot
of it. She took over and she is running it,
and instead of thankfully running scary sideshows us, she is
rescuing people from man eating tigers on the rampage. But
that I mean, I just muskets have barely been invented.
(31:39):
No one knows how to shoot them. And if anyone
has ever shot an old school like black powder rifle
muskets something, they are difficult and they are wildly inaccurate.
I mean, if you hit anything within an eight foot range,
you did well. And she kills four man eating tigers
(31:59):
in one day with six shuts from an elephant which
you know is not standing there nicely while tiger is
nip at its heels and she's shooting a musket like
this is an impossible job, and she does it. That's
that woman is. I don't care what else she did.
That woman I want to learn about, right, yes, but
(32:21):
she was absolutely incredible. She is taking over this very
male dominated society and ruling and stepping into the role
of emperor. In very public and meaningful ways and doing
it effectively that people love her. She is minting coins
(32:42):
in her own name, which is the number one sign
that you know, that's how in most of history we
know who was in charge there on the coin. And
she's doing executive orders with her own seal, not her
husband's name. Her name. Just really astonishing power that she's wielding.
But like her husband gets kidnapped by people who are
(33:04):
trying to take over, probably one of his sons is involved,
trying to undermine his rule. And rather than send the army,
or send one of her step sons, or do political
channels or whatever you know a good WiFi should do,
she gets on another elephant and storms off across India
to go rescue him. And then when her step son
(33:26):
sells her out and it doesn't work, she gets captured,
and she's now captured with him. Rather than feeling bad
about that, she goes, great, I'm inside the machine. Now
this will be even easier, and she stages an elaborate
like escape coup from inside the prison camp, raises an
army under the noses of her captors. Because she's a woman,
(33:48):
she couldn't be, and escapes and rides triumphantly back into
town with her husband that she has saved. I mean,
it's just it's made up, crazy, hilarious nonsense, and it
absolutely happened, right, It's impossible that you did that, and
she did it. She was just the coolest, unstoppable force
(34:11):
of this Mughal empress. She dressed like a man. She
would go hunting. She sometimes dressed like a man, but
other times it was like the peak of fashion. She
was a fashion designer and influenced the entire fashion of
one hundred years of India. She designed jewelry, She was
an artist. She designed tombs, she designed buildings. She shifted
(34:33):
the course of Indian architecture forever. Like the most famous building,
the taj Mahal, is based on the tomb she built
for her parents. That was wild and ridiculous, white marble.
Who uses white marble, We use red sandstone. And she
made up this new whole entirely different form and then
everyone went, oh, that's kind of cool and copied it.
(34:55):
And that's where we get the taj Mahal from her
step son. She was just this massive force in society
and that she's known for getting married. It's frustrating right.
Speaker 4 (35:12):
Right, because not only would yes, she got married, but
she kind of fixed the mistakes that have been occurring
or what are occurred under the husband's reign, who again
was either sick or an alcoholic or whatever whatnot. And
she's like, nah, I got this, let me let me not.
On top of that, she's like, and you're going to
see me do it. You're going to see that I'm
(35:33):
no one that's making this change.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Right, and that everybody apparently was cool with it until
until she wrote off on an elephant at the head
of the army that seems to have been the line
when her steps and went, okay, stop it, no, I'm
in charge now, you're not a man. But I mean,
it's just it's amazing, and I think it it illustrates
the point that we we as soon as she is
(35:57):
out of power, they erase her again. And they not
only erase her, they debase all women, that all women
are chaotic and unstable, and that's why she was chaotic
and unstable, and therefore she was terrible and we should
not talk about her anymore. And this very effective erasure
that doesn't just erase her, that we do this over
and over and over again, we act like women weren't
(36:20):
ever in power. And this comes up in the podcast
all the time that we pretend that women ruling is
an aberration that just every once in a while we
get a weird queen victoria. But it's not the norm,
and it doesn't happen very often, and we shouldn't encourage it,
and that's nonsense. Women are in power all over the
place all the time. And one of our other guests,
(36:42):
Pam Toller, who's wonderful. She has a book called Women
Warriors that's fantastic. She was our guest on another episode,
but she talked about when she went into writing that book,
she had a list of you know, a few dozen
famous warrior women that she knew about and stood by
the end she had thousands. She had thousands of names
of these women who were rulers and warriors and broke
all of these norms, which means they aren't norms. I mean,
(37:06):
it happens all the time, but we every time we
pretend like, ohoh, this was unusual, and then five years
later happens again and go, oh, unheard of, never seen
this happen before. Maybe pay attention that it happens a
lot and it's normal.
Speaker 5 (37:20):
Right.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
But as long as we keep women convince that women
have never been in power, women don't ask for power, right,
it's easier to insist that it's not normal. Right.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
I think that's one of the conversations that we've had
with past guests is the fact that there's always a
discovery that when we think we know who did the first,
there was also someone else who may have done that first,
and we just didn't recognize it until them because they
weren't given the credit for the work they had done.
And then as we keep continuing to dig more and more,
we're realizing there's a lot of significant people, specifically women.
(37:54):
Are those who identify as women a non binary that
just got passed over, right, just their idea is stolen
or the credit taken from them, right.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
Yeah. I mean even when we give women credit, it's
often at the expense of other women, like the famously
and I adore her. Mary Shelley invented science fiction, as
we all are told, No she didn't. Margaret Cavendish invented
science fiction two hundred years earlier, but we don't pay
(38:25):
attention to it, you know. And I love Mary Shelley,
but she didn't invent science fiction. It was a thing
well before, and that we don't talk about the many,
many generations and layers of women who have been doing stuff.
We picked the one story and Mary Shelley Sorry, is
amazing and fantastic and we should tell it, but we
don't need to add things that, you know, Frankenstein stands
(38:47):
on its own. Whether it was the first time someone
had done something like that or not, it's it is
peak science fiction, right, but it's not the first.
Speaker 4 (38:56):
And yeah, and I do love when we talk about
these amazing women, whether it's true or not, we do
have this fantasized level of and we know beauty does
accentuate and help give some privilege. But the fact nor
John was known as a beauty as one of the
first things as you recognize, and then all of the
soap opera backgrounds, yeah, hinder.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
That she was in love with the emperor but had
to marry someone else. And I mean it's an unusual
story anyway, because now the Empress is someone who is
a widow, right, she's already been married. That's not something
that's supposed to happen, you know, But he loved her
before she got married, so I mean, it's it's an interesting,
unusual story, especially from a Western perspective who doesn't understand
(39:40):
the way these stories work in mingle culture. But it's
it's just it's a wild ride no matter what you
know about her, and Ruby lall had to do all
of this detective work to find out these things about her.
You know that, Yeah, we all Why do they keep
talking about her hunting? Why is they they're so obsessed
(40:01):
with her hunting tigers? Because they were telling us something
because if you you know, if we don't know until
Ruby Laule digs this up, who was allowed to hunt
tigers the emperor. When they keep talking about this in
court documents, they're making a point she is the emperor
that we we don't have the historical knowledge to understand
(40:21):
the clues they've been trying to give us.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
You know. And I do love that her fact that
her name was and I'm gonna butcher this mayor Unissa,
that she was born the name which was son among women,
and then the emperor changed her name to nir John, which.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Is the light of the world, right right.
Speaker 4 (40:38):
I love that that kind of is like the transition
for that as well, to show the significance of how
amazing she was.
Speaker 5 (40:46):
Yeah, and influencing the emperor.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
Yeah, I mean he absolutely that. The love story part
is not a lie. He absolutely adored her. I mean
it was a devoted, passionate love affair that also turns
into this astonishing story of female power and political boundary
pushing and historical detective work. It's interesting. It's really the
(41:13):
portraits of her bizarre and fascinating. There's one of her
loading a musket. I mean, have you ever seen a
royal portrait of a queen where she's loading a musket? No?
And she's dressed like a man. The only reason they
can tell it's a woman is the very small waist
and the henna on her feet. I mean, this broke
every boundary of art. Women all look the same in
(41:35):
Mughal art, Right, it's the same woman, the perfect woman
with different dresses on, and she doesn't look anything like that?
Was that her? The royal artist who did this had
never done another portrait like that ever for the rest
of his career. So is she insisting? Is she saying, no,
draw me draw you know? Who knows? And it's so
many fun rabbit holes to go down, like who was
(41:57):
this woman and you know, how did she manage all
of this, all of these grown step sons that are
vying for power as soon as her husband dies. And
it's just it's fascinating. It is She's she's such a
fascinating woman.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
I did love that that there was like a poem
about her.
Speaker 4 (42:20):
She He's like though nor John being formal woman in
the ranks of men.
Speaker 5 (42:24):
She's a tiger slayer.
Speaker 3 (42:25):
Yeah, yeah, making it very clear, like, don't mess with her.
She's in charge here, you know.
Speaker 4 (42:35):
I mean, unfortunately it does sound like, oh, she's not
one of those women.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (42:39):
Different.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
I mean, that's an unfortunate say.
Speaker 4 (42:40):
But at the same time, it kind of is the
credit to her that she took a challenge. It was like, nah,
I'm not I'm not going to stay behind. I'm going
to be the forefront of this.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Watch me.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
Yeah, I will write an elephant into battle and I
will bring my husband home.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
And she did.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
I mean, it's just amazing. And I we especially love
the stories where patriarchy ignores women and gets bitten for it,
right that over and over again women, i mean, the
Roman Empire, every single time a woman rises up against them,
they're like, what is this we have never seen a woman.
We had no idea women could fight, and they don't.
(43:19):
They refuse to acknowledge that it's possible. So it keeps
happening over and over and over all. These women defeat
the Roman Empire because they refuse to admit that it
might happen. It just happened three years ago. Many pay attention.
Speaker 4 (43:31):
Yeah, there's nothing more dangerous than an underrestimated woman, so.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
That when you can use that ideology, you know they're
not going to pay attention to you. You know, so
many spies during the Civil War, spies all the time
who just are absolutely they know that the men aren't
going to think they're anything, so they can do whatever
they want. I just did an interview about these amazing
teenage girls who were some of the most effective anti
(43:58):
Nazi resistance workers in the Netherlands during World War Two
because they were cute teenage girls, and nobody thought the
cute teenage girl is gonna ride by on her bicycle
and assassinate the Nazi captain, but they did. I mean,
it was just I love those when you take the
(44:20):
terrible structures you've been given and use them to subvert
the power. Those my favorite stories always.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
I'm just so glad people are doing this work because
it is something we talk about a lot. How unfortunately,
these stories have been lost, and there's a part of
me that when I hear such an amazing stories like these,
I'm so glad to hear them. They're great, but I'm
also angry that I'm learning them so late in life. Yeah,
I would have loved this story about a tiger slayer
(44:47):
when I was a kid.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
I would have loved How did this not feature in
our history classes? Come off?
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Yeah, you know, it's not a movie like a big
you know deal.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
They got lots in India, right, there's lots of great
Bollywood versions of this, which I adore Bollywood, so like
they've done it better than you need more dancing anyway,
so a lot more. We wouldn't have got enough dancing
in that fight. My teenage sons, when they were quite young,
they've grown up watching Bollywood with me and one of them,
we were watching some American, famous American movie I can't remember,
and my son, at that point, probably about nine, set
(45:20):
The problem with American movies is there aren't enough angry
dance offs. So that is the problem with American movies.
Speaker 4 (45:28):
True, you can only get that in the fifties and sixties.
Speaker 3 (45:30):
Yeah, the Galley, Yeah, that's why we love that. Right,
you need more dance offs. And I'm just saying, Hollywood,
get it together. Yes, agreed. And that's the other part
of this, right, that that we the Western world in
scare quotes just feel free to absolutely ignore the entire
(45:52):
rest of the world, and that you know, with that
story doesn't matter. I mean, come on, that story is
amazing and if you want to make kids. You know,
my son, my younger son, just about a year ago,
just in passing, mentioned that history was boring, and I just,
like his brother, went, oh, don't know what he's like what?
(46:16):
And so I pulled it together because I know what
he means. Right, we tell history so badly. And so
we were out. I was forcing him to walk with
me around this lake, and so for three laps around
the lake, I told him just the story of Henry
the eighth and his three wives and his six wives, right,
and just all the details, and people walking past were
looking at us like what that's a weird covers and
(46:39):
then she was beheaded. But by the end of the lake,
I said So do you think history is boring? He said, no,
I think my history teachers are boring. That's amazing, thank you.
Speaker 5 (46:50):
Mean, but that's that's like so many good stories.
Speaker 4 (46:54):
And I think it's from where you're from too, because
growing up in Georgia myself, as you can tell from
my accent, uh, I got a very edited, dumb down,
not completely history of things because you know, when you
are from a very politically angled Yeah.
Speaker 5 (47:14):
I don't even know how to say it all of that,
but you.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Know your history is it through a very specific filter variation.
Speaker 4 (47:20):
I mean, even to the point when we're talking about
Harriett Jacobs again, that point of slavery wasn't that bad.
The Civil War wasn't based on slavery.
Speaker 5 (47:27):
A little more like.
Speaker 3 (47:30):
Every single one of the states mentioned slavery in their
statement of secession. But that's probably just a coincidence.
Speaker 5 (47:36):
Right, I mean, that's kind of like a variation of history.
Speaker 4 (47:39):
So you start being like, wait, this is not this
history is not pertained And again for me as an
Asian woman, and I could call myself brown woman, and
I'm like, this not pertained to me? Yeah, in that level,
So you have a very like a skewed version, and
I would have loved it. Yeah, hear about this badass
empress who was shooting up tigers and doing her thing,
(47:59):
rescuing her husband and fighting a pretty much a civil
battle with her own stepsons because they were afraid of women.
I'm like, oh my god, where was that at in
my grow I want to know about those heroes.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
Yeah, we You know, you can't be what you can't see.
How are we supposed to grow into tiger shooting, elephant
writing warrior women. No. And I will say, as someone
who adores tigers a lot, like I can't even I
can't even bring myself to watch the Tiger King show
because it will hurt my heart too much. But she's
(48:32):
only shooting man eating tigers that are killing people. He's
not just out shooting tigers. The space send, No, they
send for the emperor to come and rescue them from
the tiger who's killed one hundred people, and then she
shoots the tigers. That's the kind of awesome, badass warrior
queen that I can get behind.
Speaker 4 (48:52):
Again, it was fifteen hundred, so that's a whole different level.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
We have some more for you listeners, But first we
have one more quick break for word from ours.
Speaker 5 (49:14):
And we're back.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
Thank you sponsor.
Speaker 4 (49:16):
Well, I mean these stories are not just for like
a feminist perspective. These stories are yeah, the live realization
of how the amazing people are and the fact that
women are very much ignored in or raced through history,
and so we have to acknowledge and go beyond and
be like, hey, listen to this. This is a fascinating
story about a human being. But because she's a woman,
(49:38):
or because she has a vagina, people who chose to
ignore it.
Speaker 5 (49:41):
But now it's time.
Speaker 4 (49:42):
This is just just listen to the good stories if
you want to.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
Yeah, I mean that, you know, amazingly half of humanity
has done stuff and it's worth talking about. Yeah. I mean,
my my field makes me both very aware of things
and very cynical on some level. Like I'm angry all
the time doing these podcasts, Like some of them are
(50:06):
super inspiring, but a lot of them I end up
just furious, right, furious about these women's lives or the
things they had to endure, or the way they were
erased or you know, it's frustrating. And so I do
this and then I teach women's studies and then I
was writing a lot of women's studies stuff, and finally
my husband said, I think you need a hobby that's
not about feminism, because, like I just it was eating
(50:27):
me alive, and I thought, you were right. I need
something else that is just fun. Right, that's just positive
all the time. But it also makes me unsurprised by things.
So like I have the platonic ideal of a supportive husband.
He is the best there you could not improve as
a person, my husband, and so he is super helpful
(50:51):
and supportive and great on all of this stuff. And
he is consistently surprised by how few men listen to
our podcast, you know, pretty clear demographics. And when the
demographics came through the first time, he came in just
furious and he said, do you how many men?
Speaker 2 (51:07):
What?
Speaker 3 (51:08):
What percentage of your listeners do you think are men?
And I said, ah, three? And he looked at me startled,
and he said.
Speaker 5 (51:14):
How did how did you know?
Speaker 3 (51:15):
How did you why? And he just was so angry,
he was like incandescent with anger that men aren't listening.
He's like, why are men so terrible? Why aren't they
listening to this? Don't they understand that this is just history.
Women's history is not a niche subject, and he like
ranted for a long time, and it was very good
for my soul to see my husband just so angry
(51:38):
that other men just blow this stuff off. You know
that it's not a podcast for women just because it's
about women, Right, you can listen to it boys, exactly.
Speaker 4 (51:50):
And I love that. So tell your husband. He gets
an A plus from us, and we are very much approving.
Speaker 3 (51:56):
Yeah, those are very valuable. He's like out there, I mean,
he's out there pushing and challenging people like, oh, you
listen to history podcasts? Do you listen to any women's
And they're like, oh, like, here's a list of options
for you. But and it's frustrating, right, it is, just
it keeps repeating, generation after generation. Your trains to believe
(52:18):
that women aren't interesting and didn't do anything. And even
if we do the what we think is progressive version
of it's not women's fault. They didn't do anything. They
just weren't allowed to. Women weren't allowed to write, and
so they didn't write anything good. It's not their fault. Rubbish.
There's so much good stuff that's been thrown out and
this objective standard of only white men are good writers.
(52:40):
Oh interesting, who decided? Oh white men.
Speaker 4 (52:44):
Right, who's the one that's the judges and the right
in this moment.
Speaker 3 (52:49):
There's so much good stuff, you know, when you watch
I'm a huge fan of The Good Place, the TV show,
because there are so many jokes in that show we've
never heard before in our lives. Right, we've heard every
joke on sitcoms. You always know where the joke is going,
even when they're funny. You're like, oh yeah, all right there,
and we don't never know where the jokes are going
there because they're written by people who've never written for television.
(53:10):
We've never let them write before. And it's great. It's
not about diversity because we need to check a box.
It's because it's better to have more people talking. There
are new stuff you've never heard before.
Speaker 4 (53:26):
Yes, oh we love that well, Olivia, you are amazing
And obviously it's gonna be one of our best friends.
Speaker 5 (53:34):
Yay, because we're going to collaborate again.
Speaker 3 (53:36):
I have a feeling that's the dream.
Speaker 4 (53:38):
Yes, And of course, let your sister know she is
always welcome as well.
Speaker 3 (53:43):
Love. Yeah, hopefully she's a she's quarantined. With small children
quarantine with teenagers, so mine are happy to ignore me
and hers are not.
Speaker 4 (53:55):
I'm gonna say this women and the mothers with tiny
children and children at all during start times.
Speaker 5 (54:01):
Are rock stars and heroes.
Speaker 4 (54:03):
Yes, because I'm annoyed with my dog sometimes.
Speaker 1 (54:05):
And I could just tell her to be quiet.
Speaker 2 (54:10):
Can you tell our listeners where to find you?
Speaker 3 (54:14):
Yes, we're everywhere. We're everywhere that there are podcasts is
what's her name? All one word with the apostrophe. Some
of them are very picky about getting that apostrophe in there,
or just google us. We're also at what's your namepodcast
dot com and from there there's links to all the
main platforms, and we're also on Spotify and YouTube. Yeah,
our website has tons of pictures and we always try
(54:35):
to have pictures and links and more information about all
our subjects and our guests who are amazing.
Speaker 2 (54:41):
That brings us to the end of that wonderful interview
with Olivia. Definitely go check out their podcast if you
want to learn more about these two women. Are so
many other women, and if you would like to email
us about women. We should be talking about our other podcasts.
Speaker 3 (54:57):
We should be collaborating with.
Speaker 2 (54:58):
You can our email Stuff Media mom Stuff at iHeartMedia
dot com. You can also find us on Twitter at
mom Stuff Podcast and on Instagram at stuff moom Never
Told You. Thanks as always to our super producer producing
from Afar, Andrew Howard, and thanks to you for listening
stuff mom Never Told You the protection of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or
(55:19):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
All of this stuff I never told you production by
Heart Radio, and recently we had the pleasure of getting
to talk to Olivia and Katie over at the What's
Her Name Podcast and it was an excellent conversation. We're
(00:29):
still trying to make this Savannah trip happen, but you
mentioned in there we had previously interviewed Olivia during early
pandemic days and it was such a fascinating conversation, so
we thought we would bring this one back for people
to listen to. And it's two amazing stories of amazing women,
(00:49):
so please enjoy.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Hey, this is.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Annie and Samantha and welcome to stuff Mom told your
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
So today we are excited to bring another crew who
also loves to talk about amazing women in history and
talk about all the amazing or even unknown accomplishments they did.
So let's welcome Olivia.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Olivia.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Hi, so happy to be here.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
Yay, Olivia, thank you for joining us. Can you introduce
yourself for us?
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Yeah, my name's Olivia mikel and I teach women's studies
in Denver, Colorado, and I am the host of the
What's Her Name? Women's history podcast with my sister and
co host Katie Nelson.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
And we are so excited that you have joined us.
You and I actually kind of connected because well, I
say you and I because I was the one handling
the social media at that point, because we got listed together,
and I was like, oh my god, it is cold.
Speaker 5 (01:59):
Yeah, yeah, crossover so exciting.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
So can you tell a little bit about yourself for
our listeners and about your fantastic podcast and the reason
you and your sister decided to start all of it.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yeah. So I was finishing up grad school and jobs
were very thin on the ground here. I live in Boulder,
and like the people bagging your groceries, to have a
master's degree, so it's really hard to get an academic
job here. And I was afraid I wasn't going to
find anything. Thank goodness, I did, but and I didn't
want to do nothing with my degree. It felt like
(02:34):
it felt frustrating to not do anything with this degree
that I had discerned. And so I called Katie, my sister,
who is a history professor, and we had been talking
for a while about doing something for women's history since
it was the perfect crossover of our interests. And so
we thought about writing articles or doing a blog or
something to get more women's history into the world. And
(02:57):
at that point podcasting was us about to shift from
do you know what a podcast is? To do you
listen to podcasts? And so we realized if we can
jump on this early on, then we have an advantage
over all the other podcasts that will start, and this
really seems like the venue that we're looking for. We
(03:20):
want this to be public and accessible and something that
you can use in classes, but also something that your
next door neighbor will enjoy. And so we decided to
do this to try to find a way to do
a podcast. We knew nothing about it at all, and
humanity professors learning to audio edit was hilarious, I will
tell you, and incredibly frustrating. But so we weren't really
(03:46):
exactly sure what we wanted to focus on. Just you know,
we knew women's history and that we were frustrated that
you keep hearing the same five women's stories over and
over again. And there are I don't know if you
know this, but there are more women than five who
didn't what I thought they were. There might be dozens
of women who did stuff throughout history, and Katie's idea
(04:12):
was that she really wanted to focus on all the
women that have not been talked about the you know,
our tagline is fascinating women you've never heard of, And
she knows this now. I didn't tell her at the time.
I thought it was a terrible idea, because you I met.
It was a brilliant idea, but a terrible idea because,
as you know, it's really hard to get people interested
in women's history anyway, and doing a whole podcast around
(04:36):
women that you've never heard of before just seemed like
such a hard sell to me, and I was worried
that nobody would listen to it. And then I was
walking through a graveyard, as one does, I do. I'm
informed that people don't, but apparently they I do. And
I was walking through this great old cemeterian boulder and
I just sort of stumbled across this gravestone that didn't
(04:57):
have any name on it. All it said was mother.
And I was just horrified. I mean, it gutted me
because I'm a mother and I love being a mother.
I have three children who I love, and I am
not mother. I am Olivia, and I am more than
that identity and I just it suddenly just felt so
(05:20):
horrifying to me that this woman was gone. And I
know that usually there's a larger gravestone with all the names,
and you know that it was probably attached to something
at one point, but nothing else was there anymore, and
all she was was mother. And I freaked out frankly
and called Katie on the way back to my car
(05:40):
out of the revery. Yes, we're doing it. We're doing
the Forgotten Women podcast. We have to rescue these women
from obscurity.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
And that was it.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
And she claims that since then that I've been forcing
her to do it, but it was her idea, so
and it's been it's been really fun to do, and
it's been way more successful than we expected, especially given
that setup of you've never heard of any of these people,
but we're going to make you interested in them, and
it's been really fun to have it take off and
(06:11):
be much much more successful then we anticipated it being.
Speaker 5 (06:16):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
And it is the last day of March, which is
still technically women's first month.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
We've forgotten it. Oh my god, March No, March ninety eighth,
the longest month in the world.
Speaker 4 (06:32):
It really feels like it's been this month for over
two years now, Yeah, because I'm like, wait, I've been
in quarantine for how long? Because it feels like six years.
I'm pretty sure I died and came back and it's
still the same time frame, right as Groundhog's Day all
the time.
Speaker 5 (06:49):
Well, we were so.
Speaker 4 (06:50):
Excited when talking with you about bringing in some women
that you want to talk about, and can you kind
of introduce us to who you have brought for our listeners.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Yeah, so I have picked two of our women who
I think are some of my favorite stories to tell.
And it really is hard. I mean, it's you probably
get this one, which is your favorite episode? All of
them don't make me choose a child, but I think
these are two important ones to tell, and some of
(07:24):
the most surprising that they have been erased or that
they have been ignored, because some of the women that
we profiled are are just genuinely like no one knows
about them, accept the person that we talk to, because
every episode we have a guest, and some of them
just genuinely like this guest found this person and no
one in the world knows about them except this person
(07:45):
that's talking to us. And those are exciting, but these
ones are more well known in certain circles and certain
areas of the world, but still just way less celebrated
than they should be. So I've chosen Harriet Jacob, who
is the author of Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl and she was a self emancipated slave in
(08:06):
the American South, and noor Jahan, who was the only
Mughal empress to rule as a co emperor and sort
of even more important than her husband. Right, So we're
India and the US, yes, a couple of centuries apart. Yeah,
and opposite sides of the world, right, right.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
And completely different situations. One was slave, So yeah, I
love this variation.
Speaker 5 (08:46):
So, yeah, tell us about Harriet Jacobs.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
I'm not gonna lie.
Speaker 4 (08:48):
When I was delving into it, we kind of had
a similar story from our female first also named Harriet, right.
Speaker 3 (08:54):
Yeah, Yeah, there's a lot of I think we even
set up the episode with her similarity to to Harriet Tubman, Yeah,
the famous Harriet. Because one of the things that is
frustrating about women's history is that we have one slot
for each story, right, we have one slot for a
runaway slave, and we have one slot for a pilot
and we well, we already talked about a black woman singer,
(09:18):
so now there's no more room for them, and there's
plenty of room for everyone. Absolutely, we talk about all
kinds of kings, and we don't just have room for
one queen. But her story is bananas, like you couldn't
make it up. If you made it up, no one
would believe you. And that's what happened, is that her
(09:40):
story is so amazing and ridiculous that four one hundred
years everybody thought it was fiction. They believe that this
must be a composite story trying to invoke the worst
possible experiences in order to serve abolition. And instead it's
the absolutely factual narrative of this woman who was an
(10:02):
enslaved person who emancipated herself and whose story is not
at all what we expect. And that's what I love
about her, is that we when we think of in
the US, when we think of runaway slafe stories, the
story is that you run away, that you run north,
and you, if you're lucky, you go all the way
to Canada. But at least you run to the north.
(10:24):
You leave the location and you go somewhere else and
that's how you become free, and Harriet Jacobs didn't. She
ran away across the street because she was the man
who owned her, who probably stole her by forging a will,
which is a whole other horrific side of the story.
(10:47):
She probably should have been freed, but he forged a
will and it comes to own her and is at
least sexually harassing her and probably more. She can't tell
the truth about this. In nineteenth century eventually threatens to
sell her children to try to force her to put
up with his sexual advances, and she knows that as
(11:09):
long as she is there, he's going to keep trying
to abuse her children to get to her. But she
doesn't have any way to get north. She doesn't have
any funds, she doesn't have a network, she doesn't know
where the underground railroad is running, and so she runs
away across the street to her grandmother's house, wherein I
(11:31):
didn't know this was going to be this appropriate when
I chose her for this, but where she self isolates
in a coffin sized space in her grandmother's attic for
seven years. Now, if we're all losing our minds after
two weeks, and we can still go to the grocery
(11:54):
store and we can sit up. She is literally laying
down in a space that is seven x ten by
three feet tall, and it's in the eaves of the attic,
so it's three feet tall at the point, but it
slopes down to the side. She can lay on one side.
She can't even lay down and roll over in this
(12:16):
space for seven years. Wow, it's I genuinely don't even
know how to think about this, right.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
My back's already hard and thinking about this, I know.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
And our guest Mario Indell, who's wonderful. She's a professor
at CU Boulder, and she talks about when she teaches
this book, she tapes out on the floor these dimensions,
and the tables in the classroom are exactly three feet tall,
so she teaches it from under the table. Wow, just
to help them realize how small this space is. And
(12:50):
you know, after one hour she can barely get up. Yeah,
and I mean very Occasionally, in the middle of the night,
they would sneak her down and let her walk around
a little, and that's the only and she can walk,
but she has physical damage to her body for the
rest of her life from this. She has difficulty walking,
and she has back problems, and you know, aside from
the extreme isolation and the you know, being forced to
(13:14):
be in the space, it's also it's North Carolina and
it's you know, one hundred and twelve degrees and one
hundred percent humidity, and there are bugs. And this is
not a modern attic, this is just planks, and it's
raining and it's hot, and then it's freezing cold. And
she is just entombed alive in this space. And that
(13:38):
that to her is preferable to what looked from the
outside as a good situation as an enslaved person, I
think really drives home. We can tell all the narratives
we want about, Oh, slavery wasn't that bad. It was
bad enough that this woman spent seven years in a
coffin right to escape, right, yeah. And worse than that,
(14:00):
to me is that her children didn't even know where
she was. Her grandmother knows where she is, and her
uncle knows where she is. No one else knows where
she is. And so she can see her children in
the street, she can hear them visiting her grandmother's house,
and they don't know she's there. That I just can't
I can't imagine it's brilliant too, because he's not looking here, right,
(14:25):
no one would stay here, and he immediately assumes she's
gone north, and she plays into that. She is writing
letters as if she's in New York and sending them
with people to mail back from the north, and he
is spending all of this time, He keeps going north
and wasting all this time looking for her when she's
five hundred feet away and he has no idea she's there.
(14:46):
I mean, it's brilliant and horrifying and sobering and amazing.
Eventually he agrees to sell her children to their father,
who's a white lawyer in town, and so she knows
her children are safe. He doesn't free his children this lawyer,
but at least they're not going to get sold to
(15:08):
the plantation anymore. So then she eventually does go north
and gets incredibly involved in abolition. She's running reading rooms,
she is working on running other slaves. You know, she's
doing all of this incredible work, but mostly she's focusing
on education. She was educated because the woman who owned
(15:29):
her before this man treated her well for an enslaved
person and educated her, and she knew how important that
was to be able to read and write, to be
able to escape in a way from the absolute brutal
reality of her world. So she starts some of the
first colored schools. She starts these massive education programs for
(15:53):
all of these escaping and freed slaves. And she is
a huge force for black education in the Northern United
States and just a hugely important person. And so when
she publishes this memoir anonymously, because she at the point
(16:16):
she publishes this memoir, she is still officially owned by
doctor Norcombe, her the man who owns her, or doctor
Norkam's daughter technically owns her. And so she publishes this
memoir anonymously, and no one knows who it is, and
it eventually gets it's so it's so wild that people
(16:41):
assume it must be fake and it must be written
by a white woman. And so the woman who writes
a preface for her one of her friends, it starts
being ascribed to her Lydia child. And even though she
keeps saying no, no, no, no, no, I didn't write this,
but that's how it's taught for one hundred years in
school that this is fiction by a white woman. And
(17:03):
it's not until the nineteen eighties someone starts putting this
together and realizes, wait a minute, this story tracks exactly
with the things that that important, famous abolitionist educator, Harriet
Jacobs said about her life. Tracks everything down and even
to the floor plans of the houses and the description
(17:24):
of all of these places. It matches exactly. And they
realized this was Harriet Jacobs who wrote this, So she
was already important and famous, and no one knew she
wrote this book. Wow, it's just unbelievable to me.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
So it took over a one hundred and forty years
almost for them to realize who this belonged to, what right.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
When, Even though when it first came out it wasn't
sold as fiction, it was old as this is a narrative,
This is a true narrative, but there were some fake
narratives floating around. But I think, you know, it's very
easy for people to say, well, and I'm sure that
there was an element of this is very well written.
It must be a white woman, and it's not employing
(18:09):
all of the tricks that we expect, and so it
just it makes me so happy that she's getting credit
now and it is being taught a lot more in classes.
But we don't have enough slave narratives, as this genre
is called already taught. But when we do read them,
we read Frederick Douglas's or we read these men's narratives.
(18:30):
When frankly, her story is the wildest story that you
have ever heard about. All this, I mean, this is
the very pair debt. There's so much more going on
in her story than these tiny little vignettes here and
you know, running off over and over again or come
chruming to find her, and the white family she's living
with sending her off with their baby so that she
(18:51):
can escape, like no, no one will stop you if
you have a white baby with you, go go go,
and just astonishing, and the way that she she talks
about the importance of emancipating herself, that one of her
friends eventually purchases her to free her. And while that's
a very kind act, and she acknowledges like that was
(19:12):
probably the best way to prevent me from being sold
back into slavery, it breaks her heart because once again
she's been you know, after decades of being free of
her own work, she is again, she said, Now history
has a bill of sale that Harriet Jacobs was sold
(19:33):
in the nineteenth century in New York City, when I
had already freed myself. So it's complicated and it's messy,
and it doesn't conform to the ways that we like
to tell these stories. And this really was the first
one that pointed out that women have an exceptionally specific
(19:55):
problem when they are enslaved people. Right that now our
standard narrative of slavery and includes sexual violence, But it
didn't until that point. No one had talked about it,
and it was carefully hidden away as a thing that
didn't happen. And she's the one who shone a light
on it and said, women, if you value Christianity, if
(20:16):
you value fidelity in marriage, you have to abolish slavery,
because look what's happening right under your nose. It was
just brilliantly strategic writing, too, right.
Speaker 4 (20:27):
Yeah. One of the things I read while we were
researching this was the quote that our researcher said that
this was specifically for white women and for them to
acknowledge that this is something that's happening and to call
out the patriarchy for sexual tyranny.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
Over black women like herself, and that she.
Speaker 4 (20:47):
Was trying to put it in delicate ways, but to
let them know this is actually happening, and you were
allowing this to.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Happen, and it's happening in your house exactly, because I
think until it had been talked about, of course, most
women knew this was happening because it's happening in their house,
but it's not spoken about, and so they don't know
that it's happening everywhere. It's humiliating and shameful that it's
happening in my house. But once I find out that
(21:14):
it's happening everywhere, this is not me. This is not
a me problem. This is a societal problem. Right. It's
not that I can't keep my husband's interest, which is
usually how it was framed, or frankly, it's that this
system is a system of sexual assault that we have,
you know, codified, right, and that has to go if
(21:35):
we're going to call ourselves Christians. Right.
Speaker 4 (21:38):
Yeah, And I did like her point of saying that
she almost it almost seemed like she was implying and
you can correct me if I'm wrong, that it was
a lesser evil to have.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
This love affair with this white man.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Oh, definitely, in ordered to kind of validate what's happening
and to actually pull herself from that situation as well.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
Right, Yeah, that her only choices were succumb to. I mean,
in the story she doesn't succumb. But yeah, right, that's
not a choice you can make to her owner who
is trying to rape her or have an affair consensually. Whatever,
we can argue about what consent means in this scenario
(22:19):
with a white man who at least might be able
to buy her children his children right, and might at
least protect them from this system in a tiny amount,
and might at least give her some semblance of agency.
That she made a choice to do this, but she
knows very well that this is a choice that will
(22:40):
be hugely frowned on by these very devout Christian abolitionist
women she's writing to, and that balancing act she has
to do of that's the point. Look, what choices you
left me? You left me no choices. My choices are
a fair Her owner wouldn't let her marry the man
she wanted to marry, a free black man, so she
(23:01):
doesn't have choices outside of these ones, and she made
the best choice she could, Even though she says repeatedly,
knowing her audience, I know this was wrong, but it
was less wrong than the other choices.
Speaker 4 (23:15):
And that man was Sam Trentwell Sawyer, who ended up
being in the US House of Representatives.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Right right, Yeah, and also significant, Yeah, and who sent
who bought his children and then sent them to work
for his white children as enslaved people. I mean they
they treated them a little better. No, they didn't. They didn't.
He bought his children and put them to work. It's
(23:41):
just it's not the white Knight story that we wanted
to be, which is an important thing to pay attention to,
you know.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
And that's kind of the.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
There are no white saviors in this story.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
Yeah, and that was kind of her point, is Hey,
I think quote she said, to tell you the truth,
let it cost me what it may. Yeah, And that
makes a lot of sense in this, like there's no
good situation.
Speaker 5 (24:04):
This is the best that I could do.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
And now I'm able to fight for my rise and
for others and let people know the atrocities that are
happening that you are turning a blind eye to, which
is really significant of a conversation in itself.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Yeah, it's a I mean, aside from the story, which
is all very I mean, it seems it's the first
time you read it. You know, students reading go, this
can't be true. This is exaggerated, it's verified, it's fact checked.
She is underplaying right story. If anything.
Speaker 4 (24:34):
They literally said that she was kind of trying to
make it mild enough that people would read it.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Right, Yeah, you can't tell the truth about what really happened,
or it'll be too vile for ladies to read. I mean,
and walking that line of making it voyeuristically exciting enough
that people want to read it who might not be
interested in abolition, but also not selling out your own dignity.
I mean, it's it's a masterful piece of writing. It
(25:02):
really is. And the woman who edited it, Lydia Child. Again,
often even when they said once they realized, oh, she
didn't write this, Harriet Jacobs write it, there are a
lot of people who still say, well, she heavily edited,
but she herself was very upfront and said I did
almost nothing. I moved a few things around. She wrote this.
I didn't fix this. This is how she wrote it.
(25:26):
And that urge to delegitimize her voice. I think is
it tells us a lot and it's upsetting, right, So,
I mean, it's an amazing book. I really strongly recommend
everybody read it. It's just astonishing from a plot perspective,
from a literary perspective, from a history perspective, it's a
(25:47):
gem of a book. And her daughter went on to
become an extremely important educator. And I mean she just
she really she made a powerful impact on the world
and changed it in really important ways, even when no
one knew that she wrote this. And now that we
put these things together, that this woman wrote this book,
(26:10):
that's it's amazing. So yeah, Harriet Jacobs, I hope she
deserves a lot more attention than she's getting.
Speaker 4 (26:20):
And she died in eighteen ninety seven DC, right, Yeah,
And she was a significant impact in just women in
bondage and slavery and again the horrendous things that were
happening that people oftentimes want to take ignore because it just,
you know, shames their sensibilities.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Yeah, the determination of so many people to clean this
up and to convince ourselves that slavery wasn't that bad.
It was so much worse than you can imagine. Imagine
the worst thing you can imagine about slavery, and it
was worse than that.
Speaker 4 (27:00):
And just let's just go it's slavery the word of itself.
Any it is gonna be bad. That's such an obnoxious
conversation in saying ownership is not a bad.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Thing, right, well, as long as you know, as long
as they weren't physically beaten, it wasn't that.
Speaker 5 (27:15):
But no, you owned a person, You own a person.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
They didn't get paid, they didn't get any kind of conversation,
they didn't get help. They weren't treated as equals. That
means as bad and whatever. The greatest situation is.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
Yeah, if you wouldn't be willing to trade right now,
then it was bad.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
We have some more of our conversation, but first we
have a quick break for a word from our sponsor,
and we're back.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Thank you sponsor.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
So let's get back into it now.
Speaker 5 (27:56):
Let's go back even further, as you said.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
Into the past and on the other side of the world.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
Yes, and tell her was about her next famous fabulous woman?
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Yeah, uh noor Jahan, Empress nor Jahan. I had never
heard of her until I did this interview for this
episode with doctor Ruby Lall of emer University, who's wonderful
and Katie teaches this period in history a lot, so
she had heard of her, but there was still this
whole aspect of the story that she had never heard.
Because noor Jahan is wildly famous in India. She is
(28:31):
a household name. Her story is the story that you
hear from your grandmother and your mother. It is a famous,
famous story. But her story doesn't tell any of her story.
The story that is famous about nor Jahan is about
her falling in love with Emperor Jahangiir and then marrying him.
(28:55):
And that's her story, like she she married him the end.
And it's a beautiful love story. I mean it is.
And I think that's important too, for especially those who
said a European history and Western history have this idea
that like love wasn't a thing courtly, you know, until
courtly love, no one fell in love. Nonsense. The Eastern
(29:15):
world has been talking about love for thousands of years.
But this love story, this really powerful genre of love story,
is an important thing to talk about in the way
that women influence societies. But it's so frustrating because this
woman was amazing and none of the stuff she did
is in her story that everyone knows. And so Ruby
(29:39):
Lall's biography, which is called Empress, and it's just amazing.
It's so great, and I recommend it really strongly takes
all of that and puts it all back together. And
as not a historian myself, but someone who has studied
a lot of history in women's studies in one of
these related fields, I love when historians ignore knowledge, the
(30:00):
power of literature, the power of mythology, the power of story,
and that it's not just written off as well, that's
the legend, yeah, but the legend has affected the history.
She is as much her legendary self as she was
her historical self now, and so she brings all of
those things in together and talks about the intersection of
those in ways that I really love. But then also
(30:23):
tells us the unbelievable forgotten facts about nor Jehan, such
as she was a world renowned tiger hunter and she
once shot four man eating tigers with six musket shots
from the top of an elephant. I mean, there's not
(30:47):
a better story in the world than that, no matter
what else happened, Like just those sentences, she.
Speaker 5 (30:54):
Was our tiger queen.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Yeah, I mean at the time when only the king,
only the emperor is allowed to kill a tiger, right,
and she does it, which is how we know she
was the emperor. She was co regent with her husband,
(31:16):
who was either ill or alcoholic or maybe both right
and kind of out of the picture for a lot
of it. She took over and she is running it,
and instead of thankfully running scary sideshows us, she is
rescuing people from man eating tigers on the rampage. But
that I mean, I just muskets have barely been invented.
(31:39):
No one knows how to shoot them. And if anyone
has ever shot an old school like black powder rifle
muskets something, they are difficult and they are wildly inaccurate.
I mean, if you hit anything within an eight foot range,
you did well. And she kills four man eating tigers
(31:59):
in one day with six shuts from an elephant which
you know is not standing there nicely while tiger is
nip at its heels and she's shooting a musket like
this is an impossible job, and she does it. That's
that woman is. I don't care what else she did.
That woman I want to learn about, right, yes, but
(32:21):
she was absolutely incredible. She is taking over this very
male dominated society and ruling and stepping into the role
of emperor. In very public and meaningful ways and doing
it effectively that people love her. She is minting coins
(32:42):
in her own name, which is the number one sign
that you know, that's how in most of history we
know who was in charge there on the coin. And
she's doing executive orders with her own seal, not her
husband's name. Her name. Just really astonishing power that she's wielding.
But like her husband gets kidnapped by people who are
(33:04):
trying to take over, probably one of his sons is involved,
trying to undermine his rule. And rather than send the army,
or send one of her step sons, or do political
channels or whatever you know a good WiFi should do,
she gets on another elephant and storms off across India
to go rescue him. And then when her step son
(33:26):
sells her out and it doesn't work, she gets captured,
and she's now captured with him. Rather than feeling bad
about that, she goes, great, I'm inside the machine. Now
this will be even easier, and she stages an elaborate
like escape coup from inside the prison camp, raises an
army under the noses of her captors. Because she's a woman,
(33:48):
she couldn't be, and escapes and rides triumphantly back into
town with her husband that she has saved. I mean,
it's just it's made up, crazy, hilarious nonsense, and it
absolutely happened, right, It's impossible that you did that, and
she did it. She was just the coolest, unstoppable force
(34:11):
of this Mughal empress. She dressed like a man. She
would go hunting. She sometimes dressed like a man, but
other times it was like the peak of fashion. She
was a fashion designer and influenced the entire fashion of
one hundred years of India. She designed jewelry, She was
an artist. She designed tombs, she designed buildings. She shifted
(34:33):
the course of Indian architecture forever. Like the most famous building,
the taj Mahal, is based on the tomb she built
for her parents. That was wild and ridiculous, white marble.
Who uses white marble, We use red sandstone. And she
made up this new whole entirely different form and then
everyone went, oh, that's kind of cool and copied it.
(34:55):
And that's where we get the taj Mahal from her
step son. She was just this massive force in society
and that she's known for getting married. It's frustrating right.
Speaker 4 (35:12):
Right, because not only would yes, she got married, but
she kind of fixed the mistakes that have been occurring
or what are occurred under the husband's reign, who again
was either sick or an alcoholic or whatever whatnot. And
she's like, nah, I got this, let me let me not.
On top of that, she's like, and you're going to
see me do it. You're going to see that I'm
(35:33):
no one that's making this change.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Right, and that everybody apparently was cool with it until
until she wrote off on an elephant at the head
of the army that seems to have been the line
when her steps and went, okay, stop it, no, I'm
in charge now, you're not a man. But I mean,
it's just it's amazing, and I think it it illustrates
the point that we we as soon as she is
(35:57):
out of power, they erase her again. And they not
only erase her, they debase all women, that all women
are chaotic and unstable, and that's why she was chaotic
and unstable, and therefore she was terrible and we should
not talk about her anymore. And this very effective erasure
that doesn't just erase her, that we do this over
and over and over again, we act like women weren't
(36:20):
ever in power. And this comes up in the podcast
all the time that we pretend that women ruling is
an aberration that just every once in a while we
get a weird queen victoria. But it's not the norm,
and it doesn't happen very often, and we shouldn't encourage it,
and that's nonsense. Women are in power all over the
place all the time. And one of our other guests,
(36:42):
Pam Toller, who's wonderful. She has a book called Women
Warriors that's fantastic. She was our guest on another episode,
but she talked about when she went into writing that book,
she had a list of you know, a few dozen
famous warrior women that she knew about and stood by
the end she had thousands. She had thousands of names
of these women who were rulers and warriors and broke
all of these norms, which means they aren't norms. I mean,
(37:06):
it happens all the time, but we every time we
pretend like, ohoh, this was unusual, and then five years
later happens again and go, oh, unheard of, never seen
this happen before. Maybe pay attention that it happens a
lot and it's normal.
Speaker 5 (37:20):
Right.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
But as long as we keep women convince that women
have never been in power, women don't ask for power, right,
it's easier to insist that it's not normal. Right.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
I think that's one of the conversations that we've had
with past guests is the fact that there's always a
discovery that when we think we know who did the first,
there was also someone else who may have done that first,
and we just didn't recognize it until them because they
weren't given the credit for the work they had done.
And then as we keep continuing to dig more and more,
we're realizing there's a lot of significant people, specifically women.
(37:54):
Are those who identify as women a non binary that
just got passed over, right, just their idea is stolen
or the credit taken from them, right.
Speaker 3 (38:04):
Yeah. I mean even when we give women credit, it's
often at the expense of other women, like the famously
and I adore her. Mary Shelley invented science fiction, as
we all are told, No she didn't. Margaret Cavendish invented
science fiction two hundred years earlier, but we don't pay
(38:25):
attention to it, you know. And I love Mary Shelley,
but she didn't invent science fiction. It was a thing
well before, and that we don't talk about the many,
many generations and layers of women who have been doing stuff.
We picked the one story and Mary Shelley Sorry, is
amazing and fantastic and we should tell it, but we
don't need to add things that, you know, Frankenstein stands
(38:47):
on its own. Whether it was the first time someone
had done something like that or not, it's it is
peak science fiction, right, but it's not the first.
Speaker 4 (38:56):
And yeah, and I do love when we talk about
these amazing women, whether it's true or not, we do
have this fantasized level of and we know beauty does
accentuate and help give some privilege. But the fact nor
John was known as a beauty as one of the
first things as you recognize, and then all of the
soap opera backgrounds, yeah, hinder.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
That she was in love with the emperor but had
to marry someone else. And I mean it's an unusual
story anyway, because now the Empress is someone who is
a widow, right, she's already been married. That's not something
that's supposed to happen, you know, But he loved her
before she got married, so I mean, it's it's an interesting,
unusual story, especially from a Western perspective who doesn't understand
(39:40):
the way these stories work in mingle culture. But it's
it's just it's a wild ride no matter what you
know about her, and Ruby lall had to do all
of this detective work to find out these things about her.
You know that, Yeah, we all Why do they keep
talking about her hunting? Why is they they're so obsessed
(40:01):
with her hunting tigers? Because they were telling us something
because if you you know, if we don't know until
Ruby Laule digs this up, who was allowed to hunt
tigers the emperor. When they keep talking about this in
court documents, they're making a point she is the emperor
that we we don't have the historical knowledge to understand
(40:21):
the clues they've been trying to give us.
Speaker 4 (40:23):
You know. And I do love that her fact that
her name was and I'm gonna butcher this mayor Unissa,
that she was born the name which was son among women,
and then the emperor changed her name to nir John, which.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Is the light of the world, right right.
Speaker 4 (40:38):
I love that that kind of is like the transition
for that as well, to show the significance of how
amazing she was.
Speaker 5 (40:46):
Yeah, and influencing the emperor.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
Yeah, I mean he absolutely that. The love story part
is not a lie. He absolutely adored her. I mean
it was a devoted, passionate love affair that also turns
into this astonishing story of female power and political boundary
pushing and historical detective work. It's interesting. It's really the
(41:13):
portraits of her bizarre and fascinating. There's one of her
loading a musket. I mean, have you ever seen a
royal portrait of a queen where she's loading a musket? No?
And she's dressed like a man. The only reason they
can tell it's a woman is the very small waist
and the henna on her feet. I mean, this broke
every boundary of art. Women all look the same in
(41:35):
Mughal art, Right, it's the same woman, the perfect woman
with different dresses on, and she doesn't look anything like that?
Was that her? The royal artist who did this had
never done another portrait like that ever for the rest
of his career. So is she insisting? Is she saying, no,
draw me draw you know? Who knows? And it's so
many fun rabbit holes to go down, like who was
(41:57):
this woman and you know, how did she manage all
of this, all of these grown step sons that are
vying for power as soon as her husband dies. And
it's just it's fascinating. It is She's she's such a
fascinating woman.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
I did love that that there was like a poem
about her.
Speaker 4 (42:20):
She He's like though nor John being formal woman in
the ranks of men.
Speaker 5 (42:24):
She's a tiger slayer.
Speaker 3 (42:25):
Yeah, yeah, making it very clear, like, don't mess with her.
She's in charge here, you know.
Speaker 4 (42:35):
I mean, unfortunately it does sound like, oh, she's not
one of those women.
Speaker 3 (42:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (42:39):
Different.
Speaker 1 (42:39):
I mean, that's an unfortunate say.
Speaker 4 (42:40):
But at the same time, it kind of is the
credit to her that she took a challenge. It was like, nah,
I'm not I'm not going to stay behind. I'm going
to be the forefront of this.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Watch me.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
Yeah, I will write an elephant into battle and I
will bring my husband home.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
And she did.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
I mean, it's just amazing. And I we especially love
the stories where patriarchy ignores women and gets bitten for it,
right that over and over again women, i mean, the
Roman Empire, every single time a woman rises up against them,
they're like, what is this we have never seen a woman.
We had no idea women could fight, and they don't.
(43:19):
They refuse to acknowledge that it's possible. So it keeps
happening over and over and over all. These women defeat
the Roman Empire because they refuse to admit that it
might happen. It just happened three years ago. Many pay attention.
Speaker 4 (43:31):
Yeah, there's nothing more dangerous than an underrestimated woman, so.
Speaker 3 (43:37):
That when you can use that ideology, you know they're
not going to pay attention to you. You know, so
many spies during the Civil War, spies all the time
who just are absolutely they know that the men aren't
going to think they're anything, so they can do whatever
they want. I just did an interview about these amazing
teenage girls who were some of the most effective anti
(43:58):
Nazi resistance workers in the Netherlands during World War Two
because they were cute teenage girls, and nobody thought the
cute teenage girl is gonna ride by on her bicycle
and assassinate the Nazi captain, but they did. I mean,
it was just I love those when you take the
(44:20):
terrible structures you've been given and use them to subvert
the power. Those my favorite stories always.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
I'm just so glad people are doing this work because
it is something we talk about a lot. How unfortunately,
these stories have been lost, and there's a part of
me that when I hear such an amazing stories like these,
I'm so glad to hear them. They're great, but I'm
also angry that I'm learning them so late in life. Yeah,
I would have loved this story about a tiger slayer
(44:47):
when I was a kid.
Speaker 3 (44:48):
I would have loved How did this not feature in
our history classes? Come off?
Speaker 1 (44:53):
Yeah, you know, it's not a movie like a big
you know deal.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
They got lots in India, right, there's lots of great
Bollywood versions of this, which I adore Bollywood, so like
they've done it better than you need more dancing anyway,
so a lot more. We wouldn't have got enough dancing
in that fight. My teenage sons, when they were quite young,
they've grown up watching Bollywood with me and one of them,
we were watching some American, famous American movie I can't remember,
and my son, at that point, probably about nine, set
(45:20):
The problem with American movies is there aren't enough angry
dance offs. So that is the problem with American movies.
Speaker 4 (45:28):
True, you can only get that in the fifties and sixties.
Speaker 3 (45:30):
Yeah, the Galley, Yeah, that's why we love that. Right,
you need more dance offs. And I'm just saying, Hollywood,
get it together. Yes, agreed. And that's the other part
of this, right, that that we the Western world in
scare quotes just feel free to absolutely ignore the entire
(45:52):
rest of the world, and that you know, with that
story doesn't matter. I mean, come on, that story is
amazing and if you want to make kids. You know,
my son, my younger son, just about a year ago,
just in passing, mentioned that history was boring, and I just,
like his brother, went, oh, don't know what he's like what?
(46:16):
And so I pulled it together because I know what
he means. Right, we tell history so badly. And so
we were out. I was forcing him to walk with
me around this lake, and so for three laps around
the lake, I told him just the story of Henry
the eighth and his three wives and his six wives, right,
and just all the details, and people walking past were
looking at us like what that's a weird covers and
(46:39):
then she was beheaded. But by the end of the lake,
I said So do you think history is boring? He said, no,
I think my history teachers are boring. That's amazing, thank you.
Speaker 5 (46:50):
Mean, but that's that's like so many good stories.
Speaker 4 (46:54):
And I think it's from where you're from too, because
growing up in Georgia myself, as you can tell from
my accent, uh, I got a very edited, dumb down,
not completely history of things because you know, when you
are from a very politically angled Yeah.
Speaker 5 (47:14):
I don't even know how to say it all of that,
but you.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Know your history is it through a very specific filter variation.
Speaker 4 (47:20):
I mean, even to the point when we're talking about
Harriett Jacobs again, that point of slavery wasn't that bad.
The Civil War wasn't based on slavery.
Speaker 5 (47:27):
A little more like.
Speaker 3 (47:30):
Every single one of the states mentioned slavery in their
statement of secession. But that's probably just a coincidence.
Speaker 5 (47:36):
Right, I mean, that's kind of like a variation of history.
Speaker 4 (47:39):
So you start being like, wait, this is not this
history is not pertained And again for me as an
Asian woman, and I could call myself brown woman, and
I'm like, this not pertained to me? Yeah, in that level,
So you have a very like a skewed version, and
I would have loved it. Yeah, hear about this badass
empress who was shooting up tigers and doing her thing,
(47:59):
rescuing her husband and fighting a pretty much a civil
battle with her own stepsons because they were afraid of women.
I'm like, oh my god, where was that at in
my grow I want to know about those heroes.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
Yeah, we You know, you can't be what you can't see.
How are we supposed to grow into tiger shooting, elephant
writing warrior women. No. And I will say, as someone
who adores tigers a lot, like I can't even I
can't even bring myself to watch the Tiger King show
because it will hurt my heart too much. But she's
(48:32):
only shooting man eating tigers that are killing people. He's
not just out shooting tigers. The space send, No, they
send for the emperor to come and rescue them from
the tiger who's killed one hundred people, and then she
shoots the tigers. That's the kind of awesome, badass warrior
queen that I can get behind.
Speaker 4 (48:52):
Again, it was fifteen hundred, so that's a whole different level.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
We have some more for you listeners, But first we
have one more quick break for word from ours.
Speaker 5 (49:14):
And we're back.
Speaker 3 (49:14):
Thank you sponsor.
Speaker 4 (49:16):
Well, I mean these stories are not just for like
a feminist perspective. These stories are yeah, the live realization
of how the amazing people are and the fact that
women are very much ignored in or raced through history,
and so we have to acknowledge and go beyond and
be like, hey, listen to this. This is a fascinating
story about a human being. But because she's a woman,
(49:38):
or because she has a vagina, people who chose to
ignore it.
Speaker 5 (49:41):
But now it's time.
Speaker 4 (49:42):
This is just just listen to the good stories if
you want to.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
Yeah, I mean that, you know, amazingly half of humanity
has done stuff and it's worth talking about. Yeah. I mean,
my my field makes me both very aware of things
and very cynical on some level. Like I'm angry all
the time doing these podcasts, Like some of them are
(50:06):
super inspiring, but a lot of them I end up
just furious, right, furious about these women's lives or the
things they had to endure, or the way they were
erased or you know, it's frustrating. And so I do
this and then I teach women's studies and then I
was writing a lot of women's studies stuff, and finally
my husband said, I think you need a hobby that's
not about feminism, because, like I just it was eating
(50:27):
me alive, and I thought, you were right. I need
something else that is just fun. Right, that's just positive
all the time. But it also makes me unsurprised by things.
So like I have the platonic ideal of a supportive husband.
He is the best there you could not improve as
a person, my husband, and so he is super helpful
(50:51):
and supportive and great on all of this stuff. And
he is consistently surprised by how few men listen to
our podcast, you know, pretty clear demographics. And when the
demographics came through the first time, he came in just
furious and he said, do you how many men?
Speaker 2 (51:07):
What?
Speaker 3 (51:08):
What percentage of your listeners do you think are men?
And I said, ah, three? And he looked at me startled,
and he said.
Speaker 5 (51:14):
How did how did you know?
Speaker 3 (51:15):
How did you why? And he just was so angry,
he was like incandescent with anger that men aren't listening.
He's like, why are men so terrible? Why aren't they
listening to this? Don't they understand that this is just history.
Women's history is not a niche subject, and he like
ranted for a long time, and it was very good
for my soul to see my husband just so angry
(51:38):
that other men just blow this stuff off. You know
that it's not a podcast for women just because it's
about women, Right, you can listen to it boys, exactly.
Speaker 4 (51:50):
And I love that. So tell your husband. He gets
an A plus from us, and we are very much approving.
Speaker 3 (51:56):
Yeah, those are very valuable. He's like out there, I mean,
he's out there pushing and challenging people like, oh, you
listen to history podcasts? Do you listen to any women's
And they're like, oh, like, here's a list of options
for you. But and it's frustrating, right, it is, just
it keeps repeating, generation after generation. Your trains to believe
(52:18):
that women aren't interesting and didn't do anything. And even
if we do the what we think is progressive version
of it's not women's fault. They didn't do anything. They
just weren't allowed to. Women weren't allowed to write, and
so they didn't write anything good. It's not their fault. Rubbish.
There's so much good stuff that's been thrown out and
this objective standard of only white men are good writers.
(52:40):
Oh interesting, who decided? Oh white men.
Speaker 4 (52:44):
Right, who's the one that's the judges and the right
in this moment.
Speaker 3 (52:49):
There's so much good stuff, you know, when you watch
I'm a huge fan of The Good Place, the TV show,
because there are so many jokes in that show we've
never heard before in our lives. Right, we've heard every
joke on sitcoms. You always know where the joke is going,
even when they're funny. You're like, oh yeah, all right there,
and we don't never know where the jokes are going
there because they're written by people who've never written for television.
(53:10):
We've never let them write before. And it's great. It's
not about diversity because we need to check a box.
It's because it's better to have more people talking. There
are new stuff you've never heard before.
Speaker 4 (53:26):
Yes, oh we love that well, Olivia, you are amazing
And obviously it's gonna be one of our best friends.
Speaker 5 (53:34):
Yay, because we're going to collaborate again.
Speaker 3 (53:36):
I have a feeling that's the dream.
Speaker 4 (53:38):
Yes, And of course, let your sister know she is
always welcome as well.
Speaker 3 (53:43):
Love. Yeah, hopefully she's a she's quarantined. With small children
quarantine with teenagers, so mine are happy to ignore me
and hers are not.
Speaker 4 (53:55):
I'm gonna say this women and the mothers with tiny
children and children at all during start times.
Speaker 5 (54:01):
Are rock stars and heroes.
Speaker 4 (54:03):
Yes, because I'm annoyed with my dog sometimes.
Speaker 1 (54:05):
And I could just tell her to be quiet.
Speaker 2 (54:10):
Can you tell our listeners where to find you?
Speaker 3 (54:14):
Yes, we're everywhere. We're everywhere that there are podcasts is
what's her name? All one word with the apostrophe. Some
of them are very picky about getting that apostrophe in there,
or just google us. We're also at what's your namepodcast
dot com and from there there's links to all the
main platforms, and we're also on Spotify and YouTube. Yeah,
our website has tons of pictures and we always try
(54:35):
to have pictures and links and more information about all
our subjects and our guests who are amazing.
Speaker 2 (54:41):
That brings us to the end of that wonderful interview
with Olivia. Definitely go check out their podcast if you
want to learn more about these two women. Are so
many other women, and if you would like to email
us about women. We should be talking about our other podcasts.
Speaker 3 (54:57):
We should be collaborating with.
Speaker 2 (54:58):
You can our email Stuff Media mom Stuff at iHeartMedia
dot com. You can also find us on Twitter at
mom Stuff Podcast and on Instagram at stuff moom Never
Told You. Thanks as always to our super producer producing
from Afar, Andrew Howard, and thanks to you for listening
stuff mom Never Told You the protection of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or
(55:19):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
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