April 10, 2020 • 54 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to stuff.
Moon never told your production of I Heart Radio. So
today we are excited to bring another crew who also
love to talk about amazing women in history and talk
(00:26):
about all the amazing or even unknown accomplishments they did.
So let's welcome Olivia. Olivia him so happy to be here. Yay, Olivia,
thank you for joining us. Can you introduce yourself for us? Yeah,
my name's Olivia Michael, and I teach women's studies in Denver, Colorado,
(00:48):
and I am the host of the What's her Name
Women's History podcast with my sister and co host Katie Nelson. Ah,
and we are so excited that you have joined us.
You and I actually kind of connected because well I
thought you and I because I was the one handling
the social media at that point. Um, because we got
listed together and I was like, oh my god, it's
(01:08):
be a crossover, so exciting. So can you tell a
little bit about yourself, our listeners, and about your fantastic
podcast and the reason you and your sister decided to
start all of it. 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
(01:29):
groceries have a master's degree, so it's really hard to
get an academic job here, and I was afraid I
wasn't gonna find anything. Thank goodness, I did, but um,
and I didn't want to do nothing with my degree.
It felt like 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
(01:51):
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 our goals
or doing a blog or something to get more women's
history into the world. And at that point, podcasting was
just about to shift from do you know what a
podcast is? Two? Do you listen to podcasts? And so
(02:16):
we realize 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 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.
(02:36):
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 humanities professors learning to audio
edit was hilarious, so we'll tell you, um and incredibly frustrating,
But so we we weren't really exactly sure what we
wanted to focus on. Just you know, we knew women's history,
(02:59):
and that you 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 want There might
be dozens of women who did stuff throughout history. And
(03:20):
Katie's idea was that she really wanted to focus on
all the women that have not been talked about. The
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 have
has a brilliant idea, but a terrible idea because, as
you know, it's really hard to get people interested in
(03:40):
women's history anyway, and doing a whole podcast around 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 Semitarian boulder and I
(04:02):
just sort of stumbled across this gravestone that didn't have
any name on it. All it said was mother. And
I was just horrified. I mean it, it gutted me
because I'm 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
(04:23):
that identity. And I just it suddenly just felt so
horrifying to me that this woman was gone. Um. And
I know that that usually there's a larger gravestone with
all the names and 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
(04:44):
I freaked out frankly and called Katie on the way
back to my car out of the reabue. Yes, we're
doing it, We're doing the Forgotten Women podcast. We have
to rescue these women from the security and and that
was it. And she claims that since then that I've
been four seeing her to do it, but it was
her idea, so and it's been it's been really fun
(05:07):
to 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 and be much much more
successful than we anticipated it being. I love that. And
it is the last day of March, which is still
(05:28):
technically Women's month. We'ven'tgotten it. Oh my god, it's March. March,
the longest month in the world. It really feels like
it's been this month for over two years now, because
I'm like, wait, I've been in quarantine for how long?
(05:48):
Because it feels like six years. I'm pretty sure I
died and came back and it's still the same time frame, right,
it's Groundhogs Day all the time. Well, we were so
excited when you 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. Yeah, so, um, I have picked two of
(06:12):
our women who I think are some of my favorite
stories to tell and 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
but I think these are two um important ones to
tell and and some of the most surprising that they
(06:34):
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 except the person
that we talked to, because every 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 that's talking to us.
(06:54):
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 Jacobs, who is the author of
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and she
was a self emancipated slave in the American South. And
(07:16):
noor Jahan, who was the only Mughal empress to rule
as a co emperor and sort of even more important
than her husband. So we're India and the uses a
couple of centuries apart, and the composite sides of the world, right,
(07:38):
and completely different situations. One was so yeah, I love
this variation, So yeah, tell us about Harriet Jacobs. I'm
not gonna lie. When I was delving into it, we
kind of had a similar story from our female first
also named Harriet, right, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of
I think we even set up the episode with her
similarity to Harriet Tubman, the famous Harriet, because the one
(08:03):
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 and we well,
we already talked about a black woman singer, so now
there's no more room for them, and there's plenty of
room for everyone. We talk about all kinds of kings,
(08:24):
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 story is so
amazing and ridiculous that four hundred years everybody thought it
(08:44):
was fiction. They believed 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 real woman who was an enslaved person who
emancipated herself and whose story is not at all what
(09:06):
we expect. And that's what I love about her, is
that we when we think of in the u S,
when we think of runaway slave 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, you leave
the location and you go somewhere else, and that's how
you become free. And Harriet Jacobs didn't. She ran away
(09:31):
across the street because she was the man who owned her,
who probably stole her by forging a will um, which
is a whole other horrific side of the story. She
probably should have been freed, but he forged a will
and he becomes to own her and is at least
(09:52):
sexually harassing her, and probably more. She can't tell the
truth about this. In nineteenth century writing eventually reatens to
sell her children to try to force her to put
up with his sexual advances, and she knows that as
long as she is there, he's going to keep trying
to abuse her children to get to her. But she
(10:14):
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
didn't know this was going to be this appropriate when
I chose her for this, but where she self isolates
(10:36):
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
store and we can sit up, she is literally laying
(11:00):
down in a space that is seven by ten by
three ft tall, and it's in the eaves of the attic,
so it's three ft 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
space for seven years. It's I genuinely don't even know
(11:22):
how to think about this right. My back's already heart
and thinking about this, and our our guest Mario and Dell,
who's wonderful. She's a professor at CE 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
(11:42):
from under the table, just to help them realize how
small this space is. And you know, after one hour,
she can barely get up, 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 reason 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,
(12:05):
and and you know, aside from the the extreme isolation
and the you know, being forced to be in the space,
it's also it's North Carolina and it's you know, a
hundred and twelve degrees and 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
(12:28):
then it's freezing cold, and she is just entombed alife
in this space and that 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
(12:50):
wasn't that bad. It was bad enough that this woman
spent seven years in a coffin to escape. Yeah, And
worse than that, 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 streets, she can hear them visiting her
(13:11):
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. 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
(13:32):
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
ideas she's there. I mean, it's brilliant and horrifying and
sobering and amazing. Eventually he agrees to sell her children
(13:55):
to their father, who's a white lawyer in town, and
so she knows children are safe. He doesn't free his children,
this lawyer, but at least they're not going to get
sold to 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,
(14:19):
she's doing all of this incredible work, but mostly she's
focusing on education. She was educated because the woman who
owned her before this man treated her well for an
enslave 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 the
(14:42):
absolute brutal reality of her world. So she starts some
of the first colored schools. She starts these massive education
programs for all of these escaping and and freed slaves.
And she is a huge force for black education in
the Northern United States and just a hugely important person.
(15:06):
And so when she publishes this memoir anonymously because she
at the point she publishes this memoir, she is still
officially owned by Dr. Norkam her the man who owns her,
or Dr Norcom's daughter technically owns her, and so she
(15:28):
publishes this memoir anonymously and no one knows who it is,
and it eventually gets it's so it's so wild that
people 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
(15:49):
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 a hundred
years in schools that this is fiction by a white woman.
And it's not until the nineteen eighties someone starts putting
this together and realizes, wait a minute, this story tracks
(16:10):
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 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
(16:34):
she wrote this book. It's it's just unbelievable to me.
So it took over a hundred, like hundred forty years
almost for them to realize who this belonged to. When
even though when it first came out it wasn't sold
as fiction, it was sold as this is a narrative,
this is a true narrative, but there were some fake
narratives floating around. And but I think, you know, it's
(16:57):
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
all of the tricks that we expect, and 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
(17:19):
this genre is called already taught, but that when we
do read them, we read Frederick Douglas is or we
read these men's narratives. 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
(17:43):
over again, nor con traming to find her and the
white family she's living with, sending her off with their
baby so that she 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
talks about the importance of emancipating herself that one of
her friends eventually purchases her to free her. And while
(18:07):
that's a very kind act and she acknowledges like that
was 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
(18:27):
history has a bill of sale that Harriett Jacobs was
sold in the nineteenth century in New York City, when
I had already freed myself. So it 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
(18:51):
exceptionally specific problem when they are enslaved people. Right that now,
our standard narrative of slavery includes sexual violence, but 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 and she's the one who shone a light on
it and said, women, if you value Christianity, if you
(19:14):
value fidelity and marriage, you have to abolish slavery, because
look what's happening right under your nose. It was just
brilliantly strategic writing too. Yeah. One of the things I
read while UM we were researching this, there was a
quote that our researchers said that this was specifically for
(19:34):
white women and for them to acknowledge that this is
something that's happening and to call out the patriarchy for
sexual tyranny over black women like herself, and that she
was trying to put it in delicate ways, but to
let them know this is actually happening, and you were
allowing this to happen, and it's happening in your house,
(19:55):
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 it's happening, everywhere. This is not me. This
(20:15):
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, horrifyingly, It's that this
system is a system of sexual assault that we have,
you know, codified, and that has to go if we're
going to call ourselves Christians. Yeah, and I did like
(20:37):
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, uh,
this love affair with this white man, definitely in order
to kind of validate what's happening and to actually pull
herself from that situation as well. Right, Yeah, that her
(20:59):
her only choice chices were succumb to. I mean, in
the story she doesn't succumb, but right, that's not a
choice you can make, uh 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
with a white man who at least might be able
(21:21):
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, and but
she knows that very well that this is a choice
that will be hugely frowned on by these very devout
Christian abolitionist women she's writing to, and that balancing act
(21:44):
she has to do of that's the point. Look, what
choices you left me? You left me no choices. My
choices are affair. Her owner wouldn't let her marry the
man she wanted to marry, a free black man, so
she does have choices outside of these ones, and she
made the best choice she could, even though she says repeatedly,
(22:06):
knowing her audience, I know this was wrong, but it
was less wrong than the other choices. And that old
man was Sam tread Well Sawyer, who ended up being
in the US House of Representatives, right right, Yeah, the
man who significance, Yeah, and who was sent who bought
his children and then sent them to work for his
(22:27):
white children as enslaved people. I mean they treated them
a little better. No, they didn't. They didn't. He bought
his children and put them to work. It's just it's
not the White Night story that we wanted to be,
which is an important thing to pay attention to, you know,
and that's kind of there are no white saviors in
(22:48):
this story. 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 and that makes a lot of sense. This, like,
there's no good situation. This is the best that I
could do. And now I'm able to fight for my
rise and for others and let people know the atrocities
(23:09):
that are happening that you are turning a blind eye to,
which is really significant of a conversation in itself. Yeah,
it's 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
(23:29):
underplaying the story, if anything. They literally said that she
was kind of trying to make it mild enough that
people would read it, 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
(23:51):
read it who might not be interested in abolition, but
also not selling out your own dignity. I mean, it's
a masterful of writing. It really is. And and the
woman who edited it, Lydia Child. Again, often even when
they said once they realized, oh, she didn't write this,
Harriett Jacobs right it, there are a lot of people
who still say, well, she heavily edited, but she herself
(24:14):
was very upfront and said, I did almost nothing. I
moved a few things around this. She wrote this. I
didn't fix this. This is how she wrote it. Um
and that urged to delegitimize her voice. I think is
it tells us a lot and it's upsetting. So, I mean,
(24:34):
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 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
(24:56):
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, that's it's amazing. So Yeah, Harriet Jacobs.
I hope she deserves a lot more attention she's getting.
(25:18):
And she died in d C. Right, Yeah, and she
was a significant impact in just women in bondage and slavery.
And again, the horrendous things that were are happening that
people oftentimes want to ignore because it's just you know, shames,
there sensibilities. Yeah, the the determination of so many people
(25:45):
to clean this up and too, 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. And just
let's just go it's slavery the word of itself. It's
gonna be bad. That's such an obnoxious conversation. And saying
(26:06):
ownership is not a bad thing, right, well, as long
as you know, as long as they weren't physically beaten,
it wasn't that. But no, you owned a person, You
own a person. They didn't get paid, they didn't get
any kind of compensation, they didn't get help, they weren't
treated as equals. That means as bad and whatever. The
greatest situation is, Yeah, if you wouldn't be willing to
(26:29):
trade right now. Then it was bad. We have some
more of our conversation, but first we have a quick
break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
(26:51):
Thank you sponsor. So let's get back into it now.
Let's go back even further into the past side of
the world. Yes, and tell us about our next famous
fabulous woman. Yeah, nor Johan. And first nor Johan, I
had never heard of her until I did this interview
(27:11):
for this episode with Dr Ruby Lall of Emory 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 nor John is wildly famous in India. She is
a household name. Her story is the story that you
(27:34):
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 Johan is about
her falling in love with Emperor John Gear and then
marrying him. And that's her story, like she she married
(27:56):
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 study 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 world has been talking about love for thousands of years.
(28:17):
But this love story, this really powerful genre of love story,
is an important thing to talk about in the way
that women influence society's 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
(28:37):
Law'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 and women's studies in one of
these related fields, I love when historians acknowledge the power
(28:59):
of literally true, 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, and but then
(29:21):
also tells us the unbelievable forgotten facts about Nora Jahn,
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
(29:45):
not a better story in the world than that, no
matter what else happened, Like just those sentences. Tier Queen.
Yeah she was. I mean she was at the time
when only the king, only the emperor is allowed to
kill a tiger, and she does it, which is how
(30:10):
we know she was the emperor. She was co regent
with her husband, who was either ill or alcoholic or
maybe both 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 side chose
who's she is rescuing people from man eating tigers on
(30:30):
the rampage. But that, I mean, I just muskets have
barely been invented. No one knows how to shoot them,
and if anyone has ever shot an old school like
black powder rifle, musket 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
(30:55):
four man eating tigers in one day with six shots
from an elephant, which you know is not standing there
nicely while tigers nippet 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, and but
(31:20):
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 and
doing it effectively that people love her. She's mint minting
(31:40):
coins 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 then, like her husband gets kidnapped by
(32:01):
people who are trying to take over, probably one of
his sons is involved trying to undermine his his rule,
and rather than send the army or send one of
her stepsons or do political channels or whatever you know,
a good wife he should do. She gets on another
elephant and storms off across India to go rescue him.
(32:23):
And then when her stepson 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.
(32:45):
Because she's a woman, 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. It's impossible that you
did that, and she did it. She was just the coolest,
(33:07):
unstoppable force of this Mughal empress. She dressed like a man.
She would go hunting. She sometimes dressed like a man,
but other times was like the peak of fashion. She
was a fashion designer and influenced the entire fashion of
a hundred years of India. She designed jewelry, She was
an artist. She designed tombs, she designed buildings. She shifted
(33:31):
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 hole entirely different form and then
everyone went, oh, it's kind of cool and copied it.
(33:53):
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 because
not only well, yes, she got married, but she kind
(34:14):
of fixed the mistakes have been occurring or what are
the card under the husband's reign, who again was either
sick or an alcoholic or whatever whatnot, And she was like, no,
I got this, let me let me not. On top
of that, she's like, and you're gonna see me do it.
You're going to see that no one making this change right,
and that everybody apparently was cool with it until until
(34:36):
she wrote off on elephant at the head of the army.
That seems to have been the line when her stepson 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 out of power, they erase her again.
(34:57):
And they not only erase her, they base 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 it
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 ever in power. And this comes
(35:20):
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 it's 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, Pam Toler, who's wonderful.
(35:42):
She has a book called Women Warriors that's fantastic. She
Um was a 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 she stood by the
end she had thousands. She had thousands of names of
these women who were rulers, warriors and broke all of
these norms, which means they aren't norms. I mean, it
(36:04):
happens all the time, but we every time we pretend like, oh,
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.
But as long as we keep women convinced that women
have never been in power, women don't ask for power,
(36:25):
it's easier to insist that it's not normal. I think
that's one of the conversations that we've had with past guests,
as 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 then because they weren't
given the credit for the world that they had done.
(36:47):
And then as we keep continuing to dig more and more,
we're realizing there's a lot of significant people is specifically
women are those who identify as women are non binary
that just got passed over, right, or at least just
the their ideas stolen or their the credit taken from them, right. Yeah,
I mean even even when we give women credit, it's
often at the expense of other women, like the famously
(37:10):
and I adore her. Mary Shelley invented science fiction, as
we all are told. No, she didn't. Margaret Cavendish invented
science fiction two years earlier, but we don't pay attention
to it, you know, and I love Mary Shelley, but
she didn't invent science fiction. It was a thing well before,
and and that we don't talk about the many, many
(37:32):
generations and layers of women who have been doing stuff.
We picked the one story and and Mary shelley story
is amazing and fantastic and we should tell it, but
we don't need to add things that, you know, Frankenstein
stands on its own. Whether it was the first time
someone had done something like that or not, it's it
is peak science fiction, but it's not the person. Yeah,
(37:54):
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 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, yea,
(38:15):
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 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
(38:37):
doesn't understand the way these stories work in Mughal culture.
But it's it's just it's a wild ride no matter
what you know about her, And 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
(38:58):
they they're so obsessed with her tigers? Because they were
telling us something because if you you know, if we
don't know until Ruby Lall 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 the clues they've been trying to give us,
(39:21):
you know. And I do love that her fact that
her name was and I'm going to butcher this mayor Nissa,
that she was born with the name which was son
among women, and then the Emperor changed her name to
new John, which is the light of the world. Right.
I love that kind of like the transition for that
as well, to show the significance of how amazing she
(39:44):
was an influencing the emperor. 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 honest ng story of
female power and political boundary pushing and and historical detective work.
(40:09):
It's it's interesting. It's really the 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.
(40:32):
Women all look the same in moughal 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 drama draw?
You know who knows? And it's so it's so many
(40:53):
fun rabbit holes to go down, like who was this woman?
And you know, how did she manage all of this,
all of these grown stepsons 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. I did
(41:13):
love that that there was like a poem about her.
He was like, though, nor John being formal woman in
the ranks of men, she's a tiger slayer. Yeah, yeah,
making it very clear, like don't mess with her. She's
she's in charge here, you know. I mean, unfortunately it
(41:34):
does sound like, oh, she's not one of those women
different I mean, that's an unfortunate say, 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. Watch me. Yeah, I will
write an elephant into battle and I will bring my
husband home. And she did. I mean, it's just amazing.
(41:57):
And I 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
how women could fight, and they don't. They refuse to
(42:18):
acknowledge that as 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. Man, Hey, attention. Yeah, there's
nothing more dangerous than underestimate made woman. So that when
you can use that ideology, you know they're not going
to pay attention to you. You know, so many spies
(42:41):
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 could do whatever they want.
It just didn't interview about these amazing teenage girls who
were the some of the most effective anti Nazi resistance
workers in the nether Lens during World War Two because
(43:01):
they were cute teenage girls. And nobody thought that 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 you take the
terrible structure as you've been given and use them to
subvert the power. Those my favorite stories always. I love it.
(43:25):
I'm just so glad people are doing this work because
it is something we talked 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.
I would have loved this story about a tiger slayer
(43:45):
when I was a kid. I would have loved How
did this not feature in our history classes? Come on,
you know, it's not a movie like a big you know,
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 we
(44:06):
wouldn't 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, Um, we were watching
some American, famous American movie I can't remember, and my
son at that point, probably about nine, set the problem
with American movies is there aren't enough angry dance offs.
That is the problem with American movies. You can only
(44:27):
get that in the fifties and sixties. And yeah, why yeah,
that's why we love that. Right, you need more dance offs.
And I'm just saying, Hollywood, get it together, agreed. And
that's the other part of this, right, that that we
the Western world in scare quotes just feel free to
(44:48):
absolutely ignore the entire 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, don't
(45:10):
what do you know? It's like what? 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 and just all the details,
(45:32):
and people walking past we're looking at us like what
that's a weird conversation. And 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. But
that's that's like so many good stories. And I think
(45:52):
it's from where you're from too, because growing up in
Georgia myself, as you can tell from my accident, uh,
I got the a edited dumb down, not completely history
of things, because you know, when you are from a
very politically angled Yeah. I don't even know how to
(46:13):
say that all of that, but you know your your
history is it through a very specific filter variation. I mean,
even to the point when we're talking about Harriet Jacobs again,
that point of slavery wasn't that bad. The Civil War
wasn't based on slavery. A little more like every single
one of the state's mentioned slavery and their statement of secession.
But that's probably just a coincidence, right, I mean, that's
(46:36):
kind of like a variation of history. So you start
being like, wait, this is not this history is not
pertained And again for me as an Asian woman that
I could call myself brown woman, and I'm like, that's
this is not pertained to me in that level. So
you have a very like excued version. And I would
love to, yeah, hear about this badass empress who was
shooting up tigers and doing her thing, rescuing her husband
(46:58):
and fighting too much a civil battle with her own
stepsons because we're afraid of women. I'm like, oh my god,
where was that at in my growing up? I want
to know about those heroes. 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.
(47:19):
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 only shooting man eating tigers.
She's doing that are killing people. It's not just out
shooting tigers. They send, no, they send for the emperor
(47:41):
to come and rescue them from the tiger who's killed
a hundred people, and then she shoots the tigers. That's
the kind of awesome, badass warrior queen that I can
get behind. Again, it was, So that's a hold of
the level. We have some more for you listeners, but
first we have one more quick break for word from
our sponsors, and we're back. Thank you sponsored. Well, I mean,
(48:14):
these stories are not just for like a feminist perspective.
These stories are the live realization of the amazing people
are and the fact that women are very much ignored
and a race 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
(48:35):
because she's a woman, or because she has a vagina,
people chose to ignore it. But now it's time. This
is just just listen to the good stories if you
want to. 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
(48:59):
of things and very soon the goal on some level.
Like I'm angry all the time doing these podcasts, Like
some of them are super inspiring, but a lot of
them might end up just furious, furious about these women's
lives or the things they had to endure or the
way they were erased or you know, it's it's it's
frustrating in so I do this, and then I teach
women's studies, and then I was writing a lot of
(49:19):
women study stuff. And finally my husband said, I think
you need a hobby that's not about feminism, because like
I just it was aiding 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
(49:42):
if you could not improve as a person, my husband, um,
and so he is super helpful and supportive and and
great on all this stuff, and he is consistently surprised
by how few men listen to our podcast. You know,
we have pretty clear demographics. And when when the demographics
(50:02):
came through the first time, he came in just furious
and he said, do you how many men? What? What
percentage of your listeners do you think our men? And
I said, uh three, and he looked at me startled,
and he said, how did how did you know? How
do you do why? And he just was so angry.
He was like incandescen with anger that men aren't listening.
He's like, why are men so terrible? Why aren't they
(50:24):
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
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.
(50:48):
And I love that. So tell your husband he gets
an A plus from us, okay, and we are very
much approving that those are very bad. He's like out there, yeah,
I mean he's out there pushing and challenging people like,
oh you listen to history podcasts. Do you listen to
any women's history and they're like like, here's a list
(51:09):
of options for you. But and it's frustrating, right, it is,
just it keeps repeating, generation after generation, your trains to
believe 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.
(51:32):
There's so much good stuff that's been thrown out and
this objective standard of only white men are good writers.
Oh interesting, who decided? Oh white man? Right, who's the
one that's the judges? And this moment 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
(51:54):
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 have never written for television.
We've never let them right before, and it's great. It's
not about diversity because we need to check the boxes,
(52:16):
because it's better to have more people talking. There are
new stuff you've never heard before. We love that. Well, Olivia,
you are amazing and obviously going to be one of
our best friends. Yeah, because we're going to collaborate again.
I have a feeling that's the dream. Yes, and of
(52:38):
course let your system know. She is always welcome as well. Yeah,
hopefully she's a she's quarantined with small children, quarantine with teenagers,
so mine are happy to ignore me and hers are.
I'm going to say those women and the mothers with
tiny children children at all during quarantine times are rock
(53:00):
stars and heroes, because I'm annoyed with my dogs sometimes
and I could just tell her to be quiet. Can
you tell our listeners where to find you? Yes, we're everywhere.
We're everywhere that there are podcasts is what's your Name?
All one word with the apostrophe. Some of them are
very picky about getting that apostrophe in there, or just
(53:23):
google us. We're also at what's your Name podcast dot
com and from there there's links to all the main platforms,
and we're also on Spotify and YouTube. Our website has
tons of pictures and we always try to have pictures
and links and more information about all our subjects and
our guests who are amazing. That brings us to the
end of that wonderful interview with Olivia. Definitely go check
(53:43):
out their podcast. Um 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 we should be
collaborating with. You can Our email is Stuff Media mom
Stuff at i heeart meatia dot com. You can also
find us on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast and on
(54:03):
Instagram at Stuff Whom I've Never Told You. Thanks as
always to our super producer producing from Afar, Andrew Howard,
and thanks to you for listening Stuff I've Never Told You.
Protection of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from I
Heart Radio is the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to stuff.
Moon never told your production of I Heart Radio. So
today we are excited to bring another crew who also
love to talk about amazing women in history and talk
(00:26):
about all the amazing or even unknown accomplishments they did.
So let's welcome Olivia. Olivia him so happy to be here. Yay, Olivia,
thank you for joining us. Can you introduce yourself for us? Yeah,
my name's Olivia Michael, and I teach women's studies in Denver, Colorado,
(00:48):
and I am the host of the What's her Name
Women's History podcast with my sister and co host Katie Nelson. Ah,
and we are so excited that you have joined us.
You and I actually kind of connected because well I
thought you and I because I was the one handling
the social media at that point. Um, because we got
listed together and I was like, oh my god, it's
(01:08):
be a crossover, so exciting. So can you tell a
little bit about yourself, our listeners, and about your fantastic
podcast and the reason you and your sister decided to
start all of it. 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
(01:29):
groceries have a master's degree, so it's really hard to
get an academic job here, and I was afraid I
wasn't gonna find anything. Thank goodness, I did, but um,
and I didn't want to do nothing with my degree.
It felt like 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
(01:51):
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 our goals
or doing a blog or something to get more women's
history into the world. And at that point, podcasting was
just about to shift from do you know what a
podcast is? Two? Do you listen to podcasts? And so
(02:16):
we realize 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 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.
(02:36):
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 humanities professors learning to audio
edit was hilarious, so we'll tell you, um and incredibly frustrating,
But so we we weren't really exactly sure what we
wanted to focus on. Just you know, we knew women's history,
(02:59):
and that you 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 want There might
be dozens of women who did stuff throughout history. And
(03:20):
Katie's idea was that she really wanted to focus on
all the women that have not been talked about. The
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 have
has a brilliant idea, but a terrible idea because, as
you know, it's really hard to get people interested in
(03:40):
women's history anyway, and doing a whole podcast around 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 Semitarian boulder and I
(04:02):
just sort of stumbled across this gravestone that didn't have
any name on it. All it said was mother. And
I was just horrified. I mean it, it gutted me
because I'm 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
(04:23):
that identity. And I just it suddenly just felt so
horrifying to me that this woman was gone. Um. And
I know that that usually there's a larger gravestone with
all the names and 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
(04:44):
I freaked out frankly and called Katie on the way
back to my car out of the reabue. Yes, we're
doing it, We're doing the Forgotten Women podcast. We have
to rescue these women from the security and and that
was it. And she claims that since then that I've
been four seeing her to do it, but it was
her idea, so and it's been it's been really fun
(05:07):
to 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 and be much much more
successful than we anticipated it being. I love that. And
it is the last day of March, which is still
(05:28):
technically Women's month. We'ven'tgotten it. Oh my god, it's March. March,
the longest month in the world. It really feels like
it's been this month for over two years now, because
I'm like, wait, I've been in quarantine for how long?
(05:48):
Because it feels like six years. I'm pretty sure I
died and came back and it's still the same time frame, right,
it's Groundhogs Day all the time. Well, we were so
excited when you 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. Yeah, so, um, I have picked two of
(06:12):
our women who I think are some of my favorite
stories to tell and 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
but I think these are two um important ones to
tell and and some of the most surprising that they
(06:34):
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 except the person
that we talked to, because every 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 that's talking to us.
(06:54):
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 Jacobs, who is the author of
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and she
was a self emancipated slave in the American South. And
(07:16):
noor Jahan, who was the only Mughal empress to rule
as a co emperor and sort of even more important
than her husband. So we're India and the uses a
couple of centuries apart, and the composite sides of the world, right,
(07:38):
and completely different situations. One was so yeah, I love
this variation, So yeah, tell us about Harriet Jacobs. I'm
not gonna lie. When I was delving into it, we
kind of had a similar story from our female first
also named Harriet, right, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of
I think we even set up the episode with her
similarity to Harriet Tubman, the famous Harriet, because the one
(08:03):
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 and we well,
we already talked about a black woman singer, so now
there's no more room for them, and there's plenty of
room for everyone. We talk about all kinds of kings,
(08:24):
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 story is so
amazing and ridiculous that four hundred years everybody thought it
(08:44):
was fiction. They believed 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 real woman who was an enslaved person who
emancipated herself and whose story is not at all what
(09:06):
we expect. And that's what I love about her, is
that we when we think of in the u S,
when we think of runaway slave 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, you leave
the location and you go somewhere else, and that's how
you become free. And Harriet Jacobs didn't. She ran away
(09:31):
across the street because she was the man who owned her,
who probably stole her by forging a will um, which
is a whole other horrific side of the story. She
probably should have been freed, but he forged a will
and he becomes to own her and is at least
(09:52):
sexually harassing her, and probably more. She can't tell the
truth about this. In nineteenth century writing eventually reatens to
sell her children to try to force her to put
up with his sexual advances, and she knows that as
long as she is there, he's going to keep trying
to abuse her children to get to her. But she
(10:14):
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
didn't know this was going to be this appropriate when
I chose her for this, but where she self isolates
(10:36):
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
store and we can sit up, she is literally laying
(11:00):
down in a space that is seven by ten by
three ft tall, and it's in the eaves of the attic,
so it's three ft 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
space for seven years. It's I genuinely don't even know
(11:22):
how to think about this right. My back's already heart
and thinking about this, and our our guest Mario and Dell,
who's wonderful. She's a professor at CE 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
(11:42):
from under the table, just to help them realize how
small this space is. And you know, after one hour,
she can barely get up, 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 reason 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,
(12:05):
and and you know, aside from the the extreme isolation
and the you know, being forced to be in the space,
it's also it's North Carolina and it's you know, a
hundred and twelve degrees and 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
(12:28):
then it's freezing cold, and she is just entombed alife
in this space and that 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
(12:50):
wasn't that bad. It was bad enough that this woman
spent seven years in a coffin to escape. Yeah, And
worse than that, 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 streets, she can hear them visiting her
(13:11):
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. 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
(13:32):
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
ideas she's there. I mean, it's brilliant and horrifying and
sobering and amazing. Eventually he agrees to sell her children
(13:55):
to their father, who's a white lawyer in town, and
so she knows children are safe. He doesn't free his children,
this lawyer, but at least they're not going to get
sold to 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,
(14:19):
she's doing all of this incredible work, but mostly she's
focusing on education. She was educated because the woman who
owned her before this man treated her well for an
enslave 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 the
(14:42):
absolute brutal reality of her world. So she starts some
of the first colored schools. She starts these massive education
programs for all of these escaping and and freed slaves.
And she is a huge force for black education in
the Northern United States and just a hugely important person.
(15:06):
And so when she publishes this memoir anonymously because she
at the point she publishes this memoir, she is still
officially owned by Dr. Norkam her the man who owns her,
or Dr Norcom's daughter technically owns her, and so she
(15:28):
publishes this memoir anonymously and no one knows who it is,
and it eventually gets it's so it's so wild that
people 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
(15:49):
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 a hundred
years in schools that this is fiction by a white woman.
And it's not until the nineteen eighties someone starts putting
this together and realizes, wait a minute, this story tracks
(16:10):
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 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
(16:34):
she wrote this book. It's it's just unbelievable to me.
So it took over a hundred, like hundred forty years
almost for them to realize who this belonged to. When
even though when it first came out it wasn't sold
as fiction, it was sold as this is a narrative,
this is a true narrative, but there were some fake
narratives floating around. And but I think, you know, it's
(16:57):
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
all of the tricks that we expect, and 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
(17:19):
this genre is called already taught, but that when we
do read them, we read Frederick Douglas is or we
read these men's narratives. 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
(17:43):
over again, nor con traming to find her and the
white family she's living with, sending her off with their
baby so that she 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
talks about the importance of emancipating herself that one of
her friends eventually purchases her to free her. And while
(18:07):
that's a very kind act and she acknowledges like that
was 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
(18:27):
history has a bill of sale that Harriett Jacobs was
sold in the nineteenth century in New York City, when
I had already freed myself. So it 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
(18:51):
exceptionally specific problem when they are enslaved people. Right that now,
our standard narrative of slavery includes sexual violence, but 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 and she's the one who shone a light on
it and said, women, if you value Christianity, if you
(19:14):
value fidelity and marriage, you have to abolish slavery, because
look what's happening right under your nose. It was just
brilliantly strategic writing too. Yeah. One of the things I
read while UM we were researching this, there was a
quote that our researchers said that this was specifically for
(19:34):
white women and for them to acknowledge that this is
something that's happening and to call out the patriarchy for
sexual tyranny over black women like herself, and that she
was trying to put it in delicate ways, but to
let them know this is actually happening, and you were
allowing this to happen, and it's happening in your house,
(19:55):
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 it's happening, everywhere. This is not me. This
(20:15):
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, horrifyingly, It's that this
system is a system of sexual assault that we have,
you know, codified, and that has to go if we're
going to call ourselves Christians. Yeah, and I did like
(20:37):
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, uh,
this love affair with this white man, definitely in order
to kind of validate what's happening and to actually pull
herself from that situation as well. Right, Yeah, that her
(20:59):
her only choice chices were succumb to. I mean, in
the story she doesn't succumb, but right, that's not a
choice you can make, uh 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
with a white man who at least might be able
(21:21):
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, and but
she knows that very well that this is a choice
that will be hugely frowned on by these very devout
Christian abolitionist women she's writing to, and that balancing act
(21:44):
she has to do of that's the point. Look, what
choices you left me? You left me no choices. My
choices are affair. Her owner wouldn't let her marry the
man she wanted to marry, a free black man, so
she does have choices outside of these ones, and she
made the best choice she could, even though she says repeatedly,
(22:06):
knowing her audience, I know this was wrong, but it
was less wrong than the other choices. And that old
man was Sam tread Well Sawyer, who ended up being
in the US House of Representatives, right right, Yeah, the
man who significance, Yeah, and who was sent who bought
his children and then sent them to work for his
(22:27):
white children as enslaved people. I mean they treated them
a little better. No, they didn't. They didn't. He bought
his children and put them to work. It's just it's
not the White Night story that we wanted to be,
which is an important thing to pay attention to, you know,
and that's kind of there are no white saviors in
(22:48):
this story. 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 and that makes a lot of sense. This, like,
there's no good situation. This is the best that I
could do. And now I'm able to fight for my
rise and for others and let people know the atrocities
(23:09):
that are happening that you are turning a blind eye to,
which is really significant of a conversation in itself. Yeah,
it's 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
(23:29):
underplaying the story, if anything. They literally said that she
was kind of trying to make it mild enough that
people would read it, 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
(23:51):
read it who might not be interested in abolition, but
also not selling out your own dignity. I mean, it's
a masterful of writing. It really is. And and the
woman who edited it, Lydia Child. Again, often even when
they said once they realized, oh, she didn't write this,
Harriett Jacobs right it, there are a lot of people
who still say, well, she heavily edited, but she herself
(24:14):
was very upfront and said, I did almost nothing. I
moved a few things around this. She wrote this. I
didn't fix this. This is how she wrote it. Um
and that urged to delegitimize her voice. I think is
it tells us a lot and it's upsetting. So, I mean,
(24:34):
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 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
(24:56):
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, that's it's amazing. So Yeah, Harriet Jacobs.
I hope she deserves a lot more attention she's getting.
(25:18):
And she died in d C. Right, Yeah, and she
was a significant impact in just women in bondage and slavery.
And again, the horrendous things that were are happening that
people oftentimes want to ignore because it's just you know, shames,
there sensibilities. Yeah, the the determination of so many people
(25:45):
to clean this up and too, 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. And just
let's just go it's slavery the word of itself. It's
gonna be bad. That's such an obnoxious conversation. And saying
(26:06):
ownership is not a bad thing, right, well, as long
as you know, as long as they weren't physically beaten,
it wasn't that. But no, you owned a person, You
own a person. They didn't get paid, they didn't get
any kind of compensation, they didn't get help, they weren't
treated as equals. That means as bad and whatever. The
greatest situation is, Yeah, if you wouldn't be willing to
(26:29):
trade right now. Then it was bad. We have some
more of our conversation, but first we have a quick
break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
(26:51):
Thank you sponsor. So let's get back into it now.
Let's go back even further into the past side of
the world. Yes, and tell us about our next famous
fabulous woman. Yeah, nor Johan. And first nor Johan, I
had never heard of her until I did this interview
(27:11):
for this episode with Dr Ruby Lall of Emory 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 nor John is wildly famous in India. She is
a household name. Her story is the story that you
(27:34):
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 Johan is about
her falling in love with Emperor John Gear and then
marrying him. And that's her story, like she she married
(27:56):
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 study 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 world has been talking about love for thousands of years.
(28:17):
But this love story, this really powerful genre of love story,
is an important thing to talk about in the way
that women influence society's 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
(28:37):
Law'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 and women's studies in one of
these related fields, I love when historians acknowledge the power
(28:59):
of literally true, 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, and but then
(29:21):
also tells us the unbelievable forgotten facts about Nora Jahn,
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
(29:45):
not a better story in the world than that, no
matter what else happened, Like just those sentences. Tier Queen.
Yeah she was. I mean she was at the time
when only the king, only the emperor is allowed to
kill a tiger, and she does it, which is how
(30:10):
we know she was the emperor. She was co regent
with her husband, who was either ill or alcoholic or
maybe both 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 side chose
who's she is rescuing people from man eating tigers on
(30:30):
the rampage. But that, I mean, I just muskets have
barely been invented. No one knows how to shoot them,
and if anyone has ever shot an old school like
black powder rifle, musket 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
(30:55):
four man eating tigers in one day with six shots
from an elephant, which you know is not standing there
nicely while tigers nippet 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, and but
(31:20):
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 and
doing it effectively that people love her. She's mint minting
(31:40):
coins 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 then, like her husband gets kidnapped by
(32:01):
people who are trying to take over, probably one of
his sons is involved trying to undermine his his rule,
and rather than send the army or send one of
her stepsons or do political channels or whatever you know,
a good wife he should do. She gets on another
elephant and storms off across India to go rescue him.
(32:23):
And then when her stepson 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.
(32:45):
Because she's a woman, 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. It's impossible that you
did that, and she did it. She was just the coolest,
(33:07):
unstoppable force of this Mughal empress. She dressed like a man.
She would go hunting. She sometimes dressed like a man,
but other times was like the peak of fashion. She
was a fashion designer and influenced the entire fashion of
a hundred years of India. She designed jewelry, She was
an artist. She designed tombs, she designed buildings. She shifted
(33:31):
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 hole entirely different form and then
everyone went, oh, it's kind of cool and copied it.
(33:53):
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 because
not only well, yes, she got married, but she kind
(34:14):
of fixed the mistakes have been occurring or what are
the card under the husband's reign, who again was either
sick or an alcoholic or whatever whatnot, And she was like, no,
I got this, let me let me not. On top
of that, she's like, and you're gonna see me do it.
You're going to see that no one making this change right,
and that everybody apparently was cool with it until until
(34:36):
she wrote off on elephant at the head of the army.
That seems to have been the line when her stepson 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 out of power, they erase her again.
(34:57):
And they not only erase her, they base 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 it
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 ever in power. And this comes
(35:20):
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 it's 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, Pam Toler, who's wonderful.
(35:42):
She has a book called Women Warriors that's fantastic. She
Um was a 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 she stood by the
end she had thousands. She had thousands of names of
these women who were rulers, warriors and broke all of
these norms, which means they aren't norms. I mean, it
(36:04):
happens all the time, but we every time we pretend like, oh,
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.
But as long as we keep women convinced that women
have never been in power, women don't ask for power,
(36:25):
it's easier to insist that it's not normal. I think
that's one of the conversations that we've had with past guests,
as 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 then because they weren't
given the credit for the world that they had done.
(36:47):
And then as we keep continuing to dig more and more,
we're realizing there's a lot of significant people is specifically
women are those who identify as women are non binary
that just got passed over, right, or at least just
the their ideas stolen or their the credit taken from them, right. Yeah,
I mean even even when we give women credit, it's
often at the expense of other women, like the famously
(37:10):
and I adore her. Mary Shelley invented science fiction, as
we all are told. No, she didn't. Margaret Cavendish invented
science fiction two years earlier, but we don't pay attention
to it, you know, and I love Mary Shelley, but
she didn't invent science fiction. It was a thing well before,
and and that we don't talk about the many, many
(37:32):
generations and layers of women who have been doing stuff.
We picked the one story and and Mary shelley story
is amazing and fantastic and we should tell it, but
we don't need to add things that, you know, Frankenstein
stands on its own. Whether it was the first time
someone had done something like that or not, it's it
is peak science fiction, but it's not the person. Yeah,
(37:54):
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 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, yea,
(38:15):
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 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
(38:37):
doesn't understand the way these stories work in Mughal culture.
But it's it's just it's a wild ride no matter
what you know about her, And 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
(38:58):
they they're so obsessed with her tigers? Because they were
telling us something because if you you know, if we
don't know until Ruby Lall 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 the clues they've been trying to give us,
(39:21):
you know. And I do love that her fact that
her name was and I'm going to butcher this mayor Nissa,
that she was born with the name which was son
among women, and then the Emperor changed her name to
new John, which is the light of the world. Right.
I love that kind of like the transition for that
as well, to show the significance of how amazing she
(39:44):
was an influencing the emperor. 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 honest ng story of
female power and political boundary pushing and and historical detective work.
(40:09):
It's it's interesting. It's really the 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.
(40:32):
Women all look the same in moughal 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 drama draw?
You know who knows? And it's so it's so many
(40:53):
fun rabbit holes to go down, like who was this woman?
And you know, how did she manage all of this,
all of these grown stepsons 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. I did
(41:13):
love that that there was like a poem about her.
He was like, though, nor John being formal woman in
the ranks of men, she's a tiger slayer. Yeah, yeah,
making it very clear, like don't mess with her. She's
she's in charge here, you know. I mean, unfortunately it
(41:34):
does sound like, oh, she's not one of those women
different I mean, that's an unfortunate say, 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. Watch me. Yeah, I will
write an elephant into battle and I will bring my
husband home. And she did. I mean, it's just amazing.
(41:57):
And I 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
how women could fight, and they don't. They refuse to
(42:18):
acknowledge that as 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. Man, Hey, attention. Yeah, there's
nothing more dangerous than underestimate made woman. So that when
you can use that ideology, you know they're not going
to pay attention to you. You know, so many spies
(42:41):
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 could do whatever they want.
It just didn't interview about these amazing teenage girls who
were the some of the most effective anti Nazi resistance
workers in the nether Lens during World War Two because
(43:01):
they were cute teenage girls. And nobody thought that 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 you take the
terrible structure as you've been given and use them to
subvert the power. Those my favorite stories always. I love it.
(43:25):
I'm just so glad people are doing this work because
it is something we talked 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.
I would have loved this story about a tiger slayer
(43:45):
when I was a kid. I would have loved How
did this not feature in our history classes? Come on,
you know, it's not a movie like a big you know,
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 we
(44:06):
wouldn't 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, Um, we were watching
some American, famous American movie I can't remember, and my
son at that point, probably about nine, set the problem
with American movies is there aren't enough angry dance offs.
That is the problem with American movies. You can only
(44:27):
get that in the fifties and sixties. And yeah, why yeah,
that's why we love that. Right, you need more dance offs.
And I'm just saying, Hollywood, get it together, agreed. And
that's the other part of this, right, that that we
the Western world in scare quotes just feel free to
(44:48):
absolutely ignore the entire 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, don't
(45:10):
what do you know? It's like what? 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 and just all the details,
(45:32):
and people walking past we're looking at us like what
that's a weird conversation. And 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. But
that's that's like so many good stories. And I think
(45:52):
it's from where you're from too, because growing up in
Georgia myself, as you can tell from my accident, uh,
I got the a edited dumb down, not completely history
of things, because you know, when you are from a
very politically angled Yeah. I don't even know how to
(46:13):
say that all of that, but you know your your
history is it through a very specific filter variation. I mean,
even to the point when we're talking about Harriet Jacobs again,
that point of slavery wasn't that bad. The Civil War
wasn't based on slavery. A little more like every single
one of the state's mentioned slavery and their statement of secession.
But that's probably just a coincidence, right, I mean, that's
(46:36):
kind of like a variation of history. So you start
being like, wait, this is not this history is not
pertained And again for me as an Asian woman that
I could call myself brown woman, and I'm like, that's
this is not pertained to me in that level. So
you have a very like excued version. And I would
love to, yeah, hear about this badass empress who was
shooting up tigers and doing her thing, rescuing her husband
(46:58):
and fighting too much a civil battle with her own
stepsons because we're afraid of women. I'm like, oh my god,
where was that at in my growing up? I want
to know about those heroes. 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.
(47:19):
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 only shooting man eating tigers.
She's doing that are killing people. It's not just out
shooting tigers. They send, no, they send for the emperor
(47:41):
to come and rescue them from the tiger who's killed
a hundred people, and then she shoots the tigers. That's
the kind of awesome, badass warrior queen that I can
get behind. Again, it was, So that's a hold of
the level. We have some more for you listeners, but
first we have one more quick break for word from
our sponsors, and we're back. Thank you sponsored. Well, I mean,
(48:14):
these stories are not just for like a feminist perspective.
These stories are the live realization of the amazing people
are and the fact that women are very much ignored
and a race 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
(48:35):
because she's a woman, or because she has a vagina,
people chose to ignore it. But now it's time. This
is just just listen to the good stories if you
want to. 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
(48:59):
of things and very soon the goal on some level.
Like I'm angry all the time doing these podcasts, Like
some of them are super inspiring, but a lot of
them might end up just furious, furious about these women's
lives or the things they had to endure or the
way they were erased or you know, it's it's it's
frustrating in so I do this, and then I teach
women's studies, and then I was writing a lot of
(49:19):
women study stuff. And finally my husband said, I think
you need a hobby that's not about feminism, because like
I just it was aiding 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
(49:42):
if you could not improve as a person, my husband, um,
and so he is super helpful and supportive and and
great on all this stuff, and he is consistently surprised
by how few men listen to our podcast. You know,
we have pretty clear demographics. And when when the demographics
(50:02):
came through the first time, he came in just furious
and he said, do you how many men? What? What
percentage of your listeners do you think our men? And
I said, uh three, and he looked at me startled,
and he said, how did how did you know? How
do you do why? And he just was so angry.
He was like incandescen with anger that men aren't listening.
He's like, why are men so terrible? Why aren't they
(50:24):
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
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.
(50:48):
And I love that. So tell your husband he gets
an A plus from us, okay, and we are very
much approving that those are very bad. He's like out there, yeah,
I mean he's out there pushing and challenging people like,
oh you listen to history podcasts. Do you listen to
any women's history and they're like like, here's a list
(51:09):
of options for you. But and it's frustrating, right, it is,
just it keeps repeating, generation after generation, your trains to
believe 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.
(51:32):
There's so much good stuff that's been thrown out and
this objective standard of only white men are good writers.
Oh interesting, who decided? Oh white man? Right, who's the
one that's the judges? And this moment 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
(51:54):
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 have never written for television.
We've never let them right before, and it's great. It's
not about diversity because we need to check the boxes,
(52:16):
because it's better to have more people talking. There are
new stuff you've never heard before. We love that. Well, Olivia,
you are amazing and obviously going to be one of
our best friends. Yeah, because we're going to collaborate again.
I have a feeling that's the dream. Yes, and of
(52:38):
course let your system know. She is always welcome as well. Yeah,
hopefully she's a she's quarantined with small children, quarantine with teenagers,
so mine are happy to ignore me and hers are.
I'm going to say those women and the mothers with
tiny children children at all during quarantine times are rock
(53:00):
stars and heroes, because I'm annoyed with my dogs sometimes
and I could just tell her to be quiet. Can
you tell our listeners where to find you? Yes, we're everywhere.
We're everywhere that there are podcasts is what's your Name?
All one word with the apostrophe. Some of them are
very picky about getting that apostrophe in there, or just
(53:23):
google us. We're also at what's your Name podcast dot
com and from there there's links to all the main platforms,
and we're also on Spotify and YouTube. Our website has
tons of pictures and we always try to have pictures
and links and more information about all our subjects and
our guests who are amazing. That brings us to the
end of that wonderful interview with Olivia. Definitely go check
(53:43):
out their podcast. Um 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 we should be
collaborating with. You can Our email is Stuff Media mom
Stuff at i heeart meatia dot com. You can also
find us on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast and on
(54:03):
Instagram at Stuff Whom I've Never Told You. Thanks as
always to our super producer producing from Afar, Andrew Howard,
and thanks to you for listening Stuff I've Never Told You.
Protection of I Heart Radio. For more podcast from I
Heart Radio is the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
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