#WTFact: 10 Badass Women

10 Badass Women

of History

Written by Alison Eldridge

Curious about some of the most intriguing

women in history?

#WTFact strives to bring you stories of the amazing, the

absurd, and the what-did-I-even-just-read. The following

ten women lived lives that were sometimes stranger

than fiction, but we assure you: to the best of our

ability, all of the facts you’re about to read are true.

From the one-legged spy who was Klaus Barbie’s

number one enemy to the pirate queen of China to the

sci-fi writer who used her CIA training to disappear from

her marriage, read on to discover ten fascinating

women of history.

www.britannica.com

Virginia

Hall

Badass Rating:

• “The most dangerous of all

Allied spies”

• Also, incidentally, had only one

leg

• Born: April 6, 1906

• Died: July 8, 1982 (age 76)

• Country of origin: United States

To Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, Virginia Hall was the most dangerous of all Allied spies.

She was also the first civilian woman to win the Distinguished Service Cross, and she

worked for the CIA for 15 years—until her retirement at age 60. Oh, yeah, and she

accomplished all this with one leg plus a prosthetic she affectionately nicknamed

“Cuthbert.”

Hall was a born adventurer and had an early interest in foreign service. After college she

traveled in Europe and then worked at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, Poland. From there

she took an assignment in Izmir, Turkey, where she unfortunately lost her left leg below

the knee in a hunting accident. This was hardly a setback for Hall, who was fitted with a

wooden leg and then took a position at the consulate in Venice, Italy. She applied for the

foreign service but was rejected because of her missing limb. However, soon after, World

War II broke out, and Hall joined the ambulance corps in France. She eventually

volunteered for service with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), where she

learned all sorts of spy skills—combat, codes, and communications. Here her disability

was an asset: as a woman, an American, walking with a limp, she could move freely and

without suspicion. For the SOE she established networks, facilitated daring escapes, and

set up safe houses throughout the war. After the war ended, she worked in Italy

gathering intelligence about the burgeoning communist movement there. She joined the

CIA in the United States in 1951 and assisted the agency in covert actions—although,

unfortunately, mostly from behind a desk—until her mandatory retirement in 1966.

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Audrey

Munson

Badass Rating:

• America’s first supermodel

• First American star to appear fully

nude on film

• Born: June 8, 1891

• Died: February 20, 1996 (age 104)

• Country of origin: United States

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You probably haven’t heard of Audrey Munson, but you may have seen her image.

Munson’s likeness is carved in some two dozen sculptures in New York City alone, not

to mention the films she performed in and the photographs that were taken of her.

She was known as the “American Venus” and the “Perfect Woman,” but her star

faded early in her career.

As a teen, Munson moved with her mother to New York City to pursue a career as an

actress. There she was scouted by a photographer, which helped her land a job

posing for sculptor Isidore Konti, who convinced her to pose nude. The New York arts

scene soon went wild for her figure. She posed for numerous painters and sculptors,

some of the most famous of her time, and was the subject of more than half the

sculptures at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.

That year she began appearing in a series of films, including Inspiration (1915), in

which she was nude; it is thought that Munson was the first woman to be filmed

nude in a non-pornographic motion picture. Munson was outspoken about women’s

issues and the sometimes fraught relationships between artists and muses. She

wrote a series of 20 articles for the New York American, in which she discussed the

collaborative artistic process between model and artist as well as sexism and salary

inequality in the arts industry.

Unfortunately, Munson’s time in the spotlight came to an early end. In 1919 her

landlord murdered his wife, claiming it was because he wanted to marry Munson. She

denied any romantic relationship with him, and no evidence was found of such, but

public opinion of her was tarnished. In 1922, according to Munson, a Broadway

producer made a sexual advance toward her in a dressing room, and she spurned

him. The production was abruptly canceled, and Munson struggled to find work

afterward. That same year she attempted suicide. In 1931 she was committed to St.

Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane, where she stayed for 65 years, until her death

in 1996 at age 104.

Lakshmi

Bai

Badass Rating:

• Warrior Queen of India

• Maybe fought with her adopted

son strapped to her back?

• Born: November 19, 1835

• Died: June 17, 1858 (age 22)

• Country of origin: India

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Lakshmi Bai was raised by her father, who was a court advisor, after her mother died

when she was a child. Rather than raise her in the boring way ladies of the time were

usually raised, he raised her to be a badass. Lakshmi Bai learned sword fighting,

horseback riding, archery, and self-defense. And she put these to good use too.

In 1842 Lakshmi Bai was married to the maharaja of Jhansi, which made her a rani—

basically, a queen. Several years after their marriage, she had a son, who died at

about four months old. The rani and maharaja adopted a boy to take his place, but

the maharaja died shortly thereafter, leaving Lakshmi Bai and her adopted son on

their own. She was 18 years old at the time. Unfortunately for Lakshmi Bai and her

son, it just so happened that the British East India Company—the most powerful arm

of British colonization in India at the time—had a rule that they could exploit in this

instance, the “doctrine of lapse.” According to this doctrine, the East India Company

could annex a territory where there was no legal male heir. At first Lakshmi Bai tried

to take the high road: she appealed in court to keep her son’s claim to Jhansi. The

courts, as you might have guessed, were controlled by the British and ruled against

her. So she got feisty.

After the outbreak of the rebellion known in India as the First War of Independence

(elsewhere known as the Indian Mutiny of 1857), Lakshmi Bai organized troops—

both men and women—against the British. They fought valiantly, and she refused to

surrender even when her forces were overwhelmed. Some say she dual-wielded

swords with her son strapped to her back. Eventually forced to retreat, she led

another fierce battle but died in combat on June 17, 1858. Many in India view her as a

martyr for their freedom, and there have been many songs, books, and films

celebrating her life.

Elizabeth

Báthory

Badass Rating:

• Serial murdering countess

• Possibly a vampire?

• Born: August 7, 1560

• Died: August 21, 1614 (age 54)

• Country of origin: Hungary

If the stories about Elizabeth Báthory are true, she was one of history’s most prolific

serial killers—perhaps the most prolific murderer in the world. Modern scholarship

contends that she was a victim of politically motivated slander, but, nevertheless, the

stories of her alleged cruelty have earned her a place in history as the “Blood

Countess”.

Báthory, a daughter of nobility, was born in a place you might have heard of:

Transylvania. She had a lot of power, and contemporary accounts say she definitely

abused it. The stories of her supposed acts are truly wild and, hopefully, at least

somewhat exaggerated, if not completely made up. Báthory throughout her life is

said to have tortured and killed more than 600 girls, many of them servants in her

home. By some accounts, she bathed in or drank their blood in order to preserve her

own vitality. According to others, she would bite off chunks of her victims’ flesh. Her

alleged crimes were ignored until late 1609, when she and some servants accused of

assisting her were arrested. After a 1611 trial, three of the servants were executed.

Báthory herself was confined to her chambers in her castle, where she died in 1614.

Though contemporary sources may have believed the tales of her cruelty, modern

scholarship has posited that the acts attributed to her were actually fabricated in

order to allow her relatives to appropriate her lands. According to some scholars,

that slander may have inspired the central character of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

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Stormé

DeLarverie

Badass Rating:

• Singer, cross-dresser, and bouncer

• “The Rosa Parks of the gay

community”

• Born: December 24, 1920

• Died: May 24, 2014 (age 93)

• Country of origin: United States

Stormé DeLarverie was a biracial lesbian with a larger-than-life personality. She has

been described as “the Rosa Parks of the gay community,” and one of her friends

said that she “walked the streets of downtown Manhattan like a gay superhero.”

Many—including DeLarverie herself—believed that she was the “Stonewall lesbian”

who (after being clubbed by a police officer) threw the first punch at the uprising at

the Stonewall Inn in June 1969, an event that gave rise to the gay rights movement.

The daughter of a wealthy white man and a black woman who worked in his home in

the segregated South, young DeLarverie faced bullying and harassment from

neighborhood kids. As a teen, she ran away with the circus, performing on horseback

for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. DeLarverie also started singing around this

time, first dressed as a woman and then dressed as a man. She was the cross-dressing

emcee of the Jewel Box Revue, a renowned show in which all the other performers

were female impersonators, and appeared at such famous venues as the Apollo

Theater and Radio City Music Hall. She wore masculine clothing in her off-hours too,

which may have inspired others in New York City’s lesbian community to adopt that

style. That fateful night at the Stonewall Inn, a gathering place for people in the LGBT

community, she described being clubbed by a police officer who may have mistaken

her for a man and returning his blow with a punch to the face. The incident sparked a

scuffle later known as the Stonewall riots, or Stonewall uprising, which helped push

the LGBT community into campaigning for their civil rights.

A protector of New York City’s gay community, DeLarverie worked as a bouncer at

lesbian bars into her 80s and patrolled the streets looking for what she called

“ugly”—any type of discrimination or harassment. Though she had no family of her

own, she called the gay and lesbian youth of New York City her “children” and

dedicated her time to looking out for them.

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Carolyn

Keene

Badass Rating:

• Wrote hundreds of Nancy Drew

books

• Was not actually a real person

• Born: ?

• Died: ?

• Country of origin: United States?

Carolyn Keene’s name has graced the cover of hundreds of books about girl detective

Nancy Drew. How does one author write so many books, you might ask? In this case

she doesn’t. Carolyn Keene was actually a pseudonym used by several people. They

were paid $125 per book and signed away their rights to royalties and personal

recognition. Publisher Edward Stratemeyer was the inventor of the Nancy Drew

series. He wrote the outlines and sent them to writers. But one writer, it can be

argued, was the inventor of Nancy Drew herself—the creator of her personality.

Mildred Benson wrote 23 of the initial 30 Nancy Drew stories, including the first four

published in 1930. She strove to create Nancy as a strong and self-possessed young

woman girls could look up to, different from the stereotyped heroines of the day.

However, her identity as the original Carolyn Keene was a mystery for many years.

She did not come forward as an author of the series until a 1980 lawsuit against the

publisher, Stratemeyer Syndicate, and even after that was not known as the author

of the first books until the Nancy Drew Conference at the University of Iowa—from

which Benson had been the first person to graduate with a master’s degree in

journalism—in 1993.

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Claudette

Colvin

Badass Rating:

• Rosa Parks before Rosa Parks

• Teenage civil rights pioneer

• Born: September 5, 1939

• Country of origin: United States

Nine months before Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her bus seat to a white

passenger in the segregated American South, Claudette Colvin did the same thing—

except she was only 15 years old at the time.

On March 2, 1955, Colvin was riding a Montgomery, Alabama, bus when the driver

requested that she and three other African American teenagers give up their seats so

that a white woman could sit down. Remembering famous activists she had been

studying in school—Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth—Colvin refused and

remained in her seat. The driver stopped the bus at a junction, where Colvin was

arrested and taken to an adult jail rather than juvenile detention. Her mother and

pastor bailed her out, and then community members guarded her house during the

night for fear of retaliation; her father stayed up all night with a shotgun in hand.

Colvin stayed quiet about the affair until she had retired many years later in New

York.

Colvin actually knew Rosa Parks—they lived in the same community, and Colvin

attended Parks’s youth group at Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church. Parks experienced a

situation very similar to Colvin’s, but, in the eyes of community leaders, Parks’s status

in the community and work with the NAACP made her a better face for the civil rights

movement. (Complicating matters for Colvin was also the fact that she became

pregnant in the year following her pioneering protest.) The Montgomery bus boycott

kicked off in earnest later that year, and in December 1956 bus segregation was

finally ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. That was also thanks in part

to Colvin, who was one of four women who testified in front of a U.S. district court

about their experiences on segregated buses.

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Annie Edson

Taylor

Badass Rating:

• First person to survive going over Niagara

Falls in a barrel

• (Which is apparently something people had

been trying to do?)

• After sending her cat on a trial run, of course

• Born: October 24, 1838

• Died: April 29, 1921 (age 82)

• Country of origin: United States

Annie Edson Taylor was a 63-year-old schoolteacher on a mission: she wanted to

become rich and famous quickly. The best way to do this, she reasoned, was to travel

over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

The Pan-American Exposition had drawn a crowd to Buffalo, New York, and Taylor

believed that the news of her scheduled stunt would attract an audience. On October

24, 1901—her 63rd birthday—Taylor got into a barrel and was towed to the main

stream of the Niagara River. (Several days prior she had sent her cat over in the barrel

for a test run…like ya do.) Her barrel went over the Horseshoe Falls (some 190 feet)

and was retrieved on the Canadian shore. Spectators were amazed as she emerged

relatively unscathed, with only some bruising and a gash on her forehead to show for

her death-defying feat. After the stunt, Taylor did make some money selling

autographs and memorabilia, but her fame waned, and she unfortunately lived most

of her final years in poverty.

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Alice Bradley Sheldon/

James Tiptree, Jr.

Badass Rating:

• Science fiction writer who inspired an award

for work that “expands or explores our

understanding of gender”

• Had a complicated relationship with her male

alter ego

• Born: August 24, 1915

• Died: May 19, 1987 (age 71)

• Country of origin: United States

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Alice Bradley Sheldon was a sci-fi writer with a life that was stranger than fiction. As a

child, she went on several trips with her parents to Africa and illustrated children’s

books that her mother, Mary Bradley, wrote about Alice and her adventures there.

After a brief young marriage, an attempt at college, and stints as a painter and an art

critic, she joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942, and in 1943 she was hired

by the Pentagon. And that’s just the beginning.

After World War II ended, in 1945, Alice was transferred to a new unit and soon

married her commanding officer, Col. Huntington Sheldon. In 1952 they both joined

the CIA. Alice left the CIA in 1955…and used her intelligence training to disappear

from her marriage, which she had become unsure about, for about a year. After

earning a college degree in 1959 she pursued graduate studies in experimental

psychology. While writing her dissertation, she also began writing science fiction

stories under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. Tiptree’s stories received several

awards and were praised by critics for their treatment of themes such as death and

gender and later for their feminist leanings. Tiptree corresponded extensively but

always closely guarded “his” personal life and identity. Sheldon felt that Tiptree was

not just a pseudonym but also part of her personality, a character she played.

The only detail Tiptree gave about his life was that his mother was an explorer from

Chicago. When Mary Bradley’s obituary was published in 1976, the sci-fi community

put the pieces together and figured out Alice Sheldon was Tiptree. This revelation

helped contradict assumptions within the sci-fi genre about perceived differences

between men’s and women’s writing. Sheldon, however, was deeply affected by the

loss of her alter ego. She continued to publish as Tiptree, but her work was never the

same. Having dealt with depression for much of her life, Sheldon shot her ailing

husband and then herself in 1987. In 1991 an award was established in her honor: the

James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award for work that “expands or explores our

understanding of gender.”

Ching

Shih

Badass Rating:

• Prostitute turned pirate queen

• Cut a deal with the Chinese

government to keep her loot

• Born: 1775

• Died: 1844 (age 68ish)

• Country of origin: China

There aren’t many stories about women pirates, for a variety of reasons (basically,

sexism). But Ching Shih was a woman pirate who couldn’t be ignored. By many

accounts, she was the most successful pirate who ever lived. Ever. Of any gender.

Little is known of her early life except that she was a prostitute, but in 1801 she was

captured by—and subsequently became the wife of—a pirate named Cheng Yi.

Together they sailed the China Seas and amassed a pirate army known as the Red

Flag Fleet. Upon Cheng Yi’s death in 1807, Ching Shih took command of the fleet,

which consisted of hundreds of ships and some 50,000 pirates. She kept them in line

with a strict code of conduct, most offenses being punished by beheading. The fleet

proved so unstoppable—sometimes even venturing upstream in smaller boats to hit

cities and towns that weren’t on the coast—that the admiral of the Chinese navy

committed suicide rather than be captured by her. In the end the Chinese

government couldn’t suppress her and offered her amnesty. She retired to the

countryside with her loot.

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10 Badass Women

of History