The Book of Gutsy Women Read online

  Chelsea

  I was captivated by Ancient Egypt for the same reason: the stories of Nefertiti, Cleopatra, and Hatshepsut were all examples of strong, brave, and fearless women leaders. In fourth grade, I wrote my then longest report ever on Hatshepsut, one of the first female pharaohs, and the woman who would sit longest on Egypt’s throne. A couple of years earlier, in 1987, my mom and I had gone to the Ramses II exhibit in Memphis, Tennessee, and while I wanted to know more about the real-life pharaoh Yul Brynner portrayed in the movie The Ten Commandments, I spent most of the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Little Rock chatting incessantly about women in Ancient Egypt. As pharaoh, Hatshepsut commissioned construction on a scale that Egypt had never before seen—building temples, obelisks, and more, some of which still stand today. She also expanded trade routes and supported agricultural experimentation. She sent a powerful message to Egyptian women when she insisted on ruling as her young son’s equal—a statement that resonated with me thousands of years later.

  Like my mom, I looked for inspiring women everywhere. When at the age of nine or ten I took a summer class on medieval Europe, Joan of Arc stood out against the backdrop of histories and legends dominated by men. She was committed to driving the English out of France and never wavered in the face of sexist skepticism (what young woman could lead an army?!), doubts about her sanity, and even death; she was burned at the stake by her English captors for “insubordination and heterodoxy.” As soon as I learned about Joan, I immediately knew what I would be for Halloween months later. My Grandma Dorothy made me a beautiful costume; I spent most of my time trick-or-treating explaining who I was.

  About thirty years later, I learned of Joan’s mother, Isabelle Romée, from the play Mother of the Maid, which imagined the history of her life. In the play, Isabelle supported Joan and cared for her in her final days in prison. After Joan was burned at the stake, Isabelle spent more than two decades working to exonerate her daughter. She taught herself to read and to speak in public, journeying as far as Rome to plead her case to the Vatican; she was over seventy years old at the time. Finally, in Paris twenty-five years after Joan’s execution, a religious court overturned the earlier verdict. Talk about a mother-daughter pair of determined, gutsy women.

  My love of history and fascination with the ancient world, particularly Ancient Egypt, has continued into adulthood. In 2008, I picked up a copy of Crocodile on the Sandbank at a secondhand bookstore and instantly fell in love with the writing of Barbara Mertz. Under her pen name, Elizabeth Peters, she created a delightful heroine in turn-of-the-century archaeologist Amelia Peabody. From the moment I started the book, I couldn’t put it down. I laughed so hard that friends and strangers—anyone nearby—kept asking me what was so funny. As soon as I finished it, I shared it with my grandmother and then my mom. Our book club of three was born. My grandmother and I later read and loved Barbara’s more scholarly books on Egyptology, and my mom and I both wrote Barbara fan letters before she passed away, thanking her for the joy she brought us.

  Hillary

  By the time I started Wellesley College in the fall of 1965, the women’s movement had started, popularly catalyzed by The Feminine Mystique, a book by Betty Friedan published in 1963. We didn’t often buy books in my family, we checked them out of the library, and that’s what my mother did. She brought home a copy of Friedan’s book to read and found so much of interest in it that she then bought a copy she could underline. And she talked to me about it. I’ve read many valid criticisms of The Feminine Mystique in the years since, but for women like my mother, it was revelatory, even revolutionary. She had felt guilty about feeling unfulfilled and regretful about being at home full-time until Friedan described her feelings as “the problem that has no name.” She, along with millions of other women of her time, didn’t know what ailed her until Betty Friedan named it. She didn’t agree with all of the arguments in the book and always insisted that being a mother, especially after her own unhappy childhood, was the best thing she’d ever done, but suddenly, she felt like a veil had been lifted from her eyes. When I met Betty Friedan many years later, I thanked her for writing a book that meant so much to my mother. “What about you?” she replied.

  And, of course, what about me? Although The Feminine Mystique didn’t affect me in the same way it did my mother, I appreciated how impactful the book had been and agree with Gail Collins, the New York Times columnist who wrote the introduction to its fiftieth-anniversary edition. It deserved to be on the list of the most important books of the twentieth century. As Collins pointed out, it “also made one conservative magazine’s exclusive roundup of the ‘10 most harmful books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.’ Which if not flattering is at least a testimony to the wallop it packed.” It motivated me to read widely in feminist literature, including Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). My feminist reading continued well after college, from the writings of Gloria Steinem to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) to Roxane Gay’s Hunger (2017) and the many others whose work inspired me to think harder about women’s roles and rights.

  When I became a mom, I saw the search for role models through Chelsea’s eyes. She would page intently through her books, looking for the girl characters, and her face would light up when she found them. Like me, she was captivated by fictional heroines. But everywhere Chelsea looked, she saw real-life examples of women who were pursuing dreams that would have been unimaginable when I was a little girl. I loved watching her pepper our family friends and fascinating women she met with questions about what they did and why they loved it. In the span of a single generation, so much of what once seemed impossible had become not only possible but commonplace.

  Chelsea

  Growing up in Little Rock, I was surrounded by inspiring women: my mom and my grandmothers; my teachers at school, Sunday school, and ballet; my pediatrician, Dr. Betty Lowe; for a time, our mayor, Lottie Shackelford; the historical women I learned about; and the fictional girls and women I fell in love with when reading and watching their stories. I’ve also been blessed to have wonderful female friends throughout my life; my oldest friend, Elizabeth Fleming Weindruch, is the daughter of a woman my mom met in Lamaze class. I have known and loved her my whole life. My friends have provided support, community, shared love, and adventures. They, too, have been an important source of inspiration—as women, friends, leaders, professionals, mothers, and citizens.

  In some ways, the cascade of inspiration started before I can remember: my grandmothers and mom talking to me about their lives, my mom reading me The Runaway Bunny—a clear lesson in the power of a mother’s love as well as the power of determination, from parent and little bunny alike. Or, arguably, the inspiration started somewhere between Kansas and the Emerald City.

  I will always be grateful to my first-grade teacher, Dr. Sadie Mitchell, for the gift of helping me conquer my first chapter book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It took our class a month, maybe longer, to get through L. Frank Baum’s classic about Dorothy’s magical adventures and realizing “there’s no place like home.” I was in awe of Dorothy’s refusal, at an age not much older than I was, to give up on herself or her friends.

  HILLARY

  The Wizard of Oz was also the first movie I ever saw in a theater, and I remember feeling the exact same way. I also remember being scared of the flying monkeys!

  At the end of the year, our class, along with Mrs. Tabitha Phillips’s class across the hall, put on a Wizard of Oz play for our classmates and families. I was the Wicked Witch of the West and determined to have the most spectacular melting scene possible on our Forest Park Elementary stage. My mom was supportive but not enthusiastic when I declared I would temporarily dye my hair green and paint my face green for the role. Her lack of enthusiasm was warranted—it took about a week for my hair, washed daily, to turn back to its normal color.

  Dr. Mitchell cheered me on every step of the wa
y and told me my melting scene was perfect. While Dorothy was one of my first imaginary heroes, Dr. Mitchell was one of my first real-life heroes beyond my family. She spent time with every student. When we’d had a rough day, she would tell us the next morning, “That was yesterday. Today is a new day.” She never treated me differently because I was the daughter of the governor of Arkansas. She expected me to be a good student and a good person—it’s what she expected of everyone to the best of our abilities. Dr. Mitchell was unfailingly patient, kind, and fair in doling out praise and punishment alike. She set the standard for what an excellent teacher is.

  HILLARY

  Having wonderful teachers sparked a lifelong love of learning in each of us. And while our teachers introduced us to inspiring women and role models, we both wish we had learned more about the sung and unsung heroines of history. (That’s one reason why we’re writing this book!) Still, we know how lucky we were to have had, more than once, extraordinary teachers who made us sit up a little taller as it dawned on us that we, too, could change the world.

  After Dorothy, there was Meg Murry, the indomitable star of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I remember talking nonstop to my parents about this book. Inspired by Meg, I practiced multiplication tables in my head to ward off any attempts at mind control. I would frequently ask myself: What would Meg do? If there had been a bracelet back then with that written on it, I’d never have taken it off. Alongside Meg, there was also Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby. When my Grandma Ginger asked me what I wanted for my eighth birthday, inspired by Ramona’s efforts with her father, I said I wanted her to stop smoking. She said okay. Ginger never hid how hard it was for her to give up her couple-pack-a-day habit. Her candor and lack of self-pity impressed me as much as her success in quitting cigarettes. As inspired as I was by Meg and Ramona, Ginger inspired me even more.

  Now, as a mother myself, I hope that my children understand why I was and am drawn to the girls and women who have long inspired me—some of whom are in these pages. I hope they will read a few of the books I loved so much as a kid. They certainly don’t have to have the same role models, but I hope they understand why I have carried these women in my heart for so long.

  Harriet Tubman

  Hillary and Chelsea

  The year was 1860. Charles Nalle, a fugitive slave, was getting ready to stand trial in Troy, New York. The authorities weren’t letting any of the protesters who had gathered outside the courthouse into the proceedings. But an elderly-looking woman wrapped in a shawl, carrying a food basket, seemed innocuous. She had found a spot at the back of the room. When the judge announced that Charles Nalle would be sent back to Virginia, she suddenly rushed forward. She threw off her shawl, revealing that she wasn’t an old woman at all—she was thirty-four years old. She grabbed Nalle and rushed him out of the room, taking advantage of the guards’ surprise. As the two ran down the stairs, she fended off blows from policemen’s clubs. Finally, she put her passenger onto a waiting ferry.

  Victory was short-lived. The policemen waiting on the other side of the water brought him right back and shut him in the judge’s office. But the young woman wasn’t going to give up so easily. She rallied the people of Troy, and on her signal, the crowd stormed the office, freed Nalle, and put him on a wagon heading west. It was Harriet Tubman’s first public rescue of a runaway slave.

  Araminta Ross, as she was originally known, was born into slavery around 1820 in Maryland. Part of a big family, she was sent at age five to a neighbor who wanted “a young girl to help take care of a baby.” She was so small she had to sit on the floor in order to safely hold the baby. One of her jobs was staying up nights to rock the cradle. When she fell asleep, she was whipped. She was homesick; she missed her mother desperately. By the time she was returned to her family, she was sickly and weak. A few years later, an overseer threw an iron weight at a fleeing slave; it hit Harriet in the head, leaving her with a scar above her eyebrow and fainting spells that would last the rest of her life.

  Living in the shadow of constant violence, cruelty, and racism, Harriet developed remarkable self-reliance and physical endurance. In her twenties, she married John Tubman, a free black man. Five years later, her master died, throwing her future, and that of her family, into uncertainty. Deeply spiritual, she prayed for guidance. Like Sojourner Truth, she decided passive prayer wasn’t enough; to live out God’s will, she needed to combine her faith with action. “I had reasoned this out in my mind,” she said later. “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other.”

  That September, Harriet set out for unfamiliar territory, leaving behind her parents and her husband. Within weeks, her master’s family was running ads in the paper, offering a reward to anyone who found her and brought her back. She followed the North Star, relying on an “underground railroad” of safe houses and hiding places she hoped were waiting for her. She offered a favorite quilt to a sympathetic white woman in exchange for directions to the first house as well as a piece of paper with two names of people who could help her written on it. Harriet was illiterate, so she couldn’t read the names; she could only hand the paper to the next person she encountered and hope he or she would hide her.

  Catherine Clinton writes in her biography Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom: “Since the earliest days of bondage, those captured and enslaved spent enormous reservoirs of energy trying to unchain themselves. The vast majority of slaves hoped in vain. They prayed for freedom but resorted to seeking salvation in the afterlife.” Harriet risked everything to escape to freedom: the threat of bloodhounds on her trail, of slave catchers desperate to earn the bounty placed on her head, of danger and disease waiting for her in rivers and the woods, of the possibility that the door on which she knocked was not home to an abolitionist at all. She made her way almost entirely on foot, by night, across state lines. Most fugitive slaves, especially those who risked the dangerous journey on their own, were men; she was a young woman in her twenties.

  When she arrived safely in Philadelphia, like many other freed slaves, she chose a new name to go along with her new life. There, she found a community of like-minded people, a network of black churches, and an open forum to discuss abolition. She spoke publicly about her personal experiences with slavery and found paid work to support herself.

  Then one day, she heard a rumor that the wife of her former master was getting ready to sell Harriet’s favorite niece, Kizzy. Here, her story goes from courageous to heroic. She made up her mind to turn around and go back, braving the dangers all over again, in order to try to rescue Kizzy and her two children. Though the details of the escape are unknown, we do know that Harriet succeeded. She brought the family to Baltimore and hid them there until she could find a way to transport them to the North.

  In 1851, Harriet made her second trip back, rescuing not only one of her brothers but two of his coworkers. In the meantime, the U.S. had passed a fugitive slave law, making an already dangerous mission even more frightening: Even in free states, enslaved people were required by law to be returned to their masters. Anyone who aided an enslaved person could be thrown in jail or fined. Still, once again, Harriet was successful. But she had one more mission to undertake—this one deeply personal. On her third trip, Harriet sought out her husband, intent on persuading him to come with her. She made the unhappy discovery that he had remarried and had no plans to leave with her. At first, she said later, she thought “she would go right in and make all the trouble she could.” In the end, she concluded, “if he could do without her, she could do without him.”

  Originally set on bringing her own family to safety, Harriet turned her attention to others who were in the same desperate situation. In December 1851, she officially became part of the Underground Railroad. “The Lord told me to do this,” she said later. “I said, ‘Oh Lord, I can’t—don’t ask me—take somebody else.’ ” According to her, the answer came back in no uncertain terms: “It’s yo
u I want, Harriet Tubman.” So she went, bringing back a band of eleven fugitives that included another brother and several strangers. At this point, she decided to take her “passengers” to Canada, reasoning: “I wouldn’t trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer.” She settled there, eventually rescuing her entire family, including her elderly parents. She later moved the entire household to Auburn, New York, where she spent her later years.

  “I was a conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say: I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

  —HARRIET TUBMAN

  All told, Harriet is credited with bringing hundreds of slaves to freedom. She traveled alone, risking her freedom and her life to liberate others. As word of her missions spread, she earned the nickname “Moses.” She was single-minded, setting her own fear aside in order to bring her passengers on the “liberty lines.” She carried a pistol, which she used more than once to frighten a fugitive on the verge of losing his or her nerve into staying the course. On one trip, she was distracted by a painful dental infection. She grabbed her pistol, knocked out the problem teeth, and kept going.

  Harriet was also creative and a master of misdirection. Once she hid in plain sight in a town near her former Maryland home, covering her face with a sunbonnet and carrying two live chickens. When one of her former masters came toward her, she yanked the strings she had tied to the legs of the chickens, causing them to squawk and flap their wings. She rushed off, tending to the birds, and managing to avoid eye contact with the man. On another trip, she spotted another former master in a train car. Used to being underestimated or ignored, she passed herself off as an elderly woman, conveying instructions to hidden passengers through the spirituals she sang.