Infinite Women

We know for a fact that multiple women reigned over the centuries in ancient Egypt, but understandably, the further back we go, the less clear the records get - because there simply isn’t much documentation left after thousands of years. Apart from the natural causes of materials being lost, damaged or destroyed over time, there were also instances of deliberate attempts to erase women from history, like when one of Hatshepsut’s successors had her statues destroyed, her monuments defaced, and many of her achievements attributed to other pharaohs, trying to undermine her more than 20-year reign. Based on this, the vandalisation of Setibhor’s tomb has been used to suggest the 24th-century queen may have been more than a consort. In other cases, women rulers have been maligned by political enemies, as seen in much of the Roman accounts of Cleopatra.But while Cleopatra and, to a lesser extent, Hatshepsut may be the best-known female pharaohs, they were definitely not the first.Neithhotep may have been the first recorded female monarch in world history, circa 3,000 to 3200 BC. She is believed to have been married to either the first or second pharaoh of unified Egypt, and when her large tomb was discovered, with royal hieroglyphs surrounding her name, she was originally assumed to have been a male ruler. The nature of her tomb and evidence that she exercised powers a mere consort would not have had indicate that she was a co-ruler, and may also have acted as a regent for her son before he came of age.However, because the evidence is inconclusive about her possible regency, it can be argued that Neithhotep may have only been a co-ruler, instead of reigning a sole pharaoh. If that’s the case, the next candidate is Merneith, who ruled circa 2950. She may also have been a regent for her son after the death of her husband, and, like Neithhotep, the supporting evidence largely comes from her tomb, as well as that of her son.It can also be asserted that, even assuming both Neithhotep and Merneith ruled as regents, this was a temporary role until their sons came of age. Sobekneferu is believed to be the first female Pharaoh to rule Egypt in her own right, to claim to full titles of a pharaoh, and is also the first woman listed in the Turin King List, an ancient papyrus scroll compiled during the reign of Rameses II in the 1200s BC of all the pharaohs that came before. That being said, it must be noted that the list was seriously fragmented as the result of poor handling after it was discovered in 1820, and historians have discovered discrepancies between the list and other sources. So while valuable, it is not a definitive source of information.Disclaimers aside, we know that Sobekneferu ruled for almost four years in the 18th century BC. But she may not have been Egypt’s first queen regnant (meaning a queen who rules in her own right rather than as the wife or mother of a male ruler). Nitocris is a woman who may have ruled Egypt in the 22nd century BC, or who may have been a literary invention centuries later. According to Herodotus, she lured her brother’s murderers into a banquet hall and then killed them by diverting the waters of the Nile to flood the room. Historians have since suggested that Nitocris never existed, that the name was conflated with a misspelling of a male ruler from the time. While that’s probably true based on the current evidence - it’s still a great story.And of course there’s always the possibility of powerful women whose legacy was erased more completely than Hatshepsut’s and Setibhor’s, to the point that they have truly been lost to history. There may also be pharaohs who were assumed to be male but were actually female, as rulers like Sobekneferu and Hatshepsut are depicted wearing male clothing. But while we may not know for certain who the first female pharaoh was, we do know there were plenty of women who held power in ancient Egypt.

In this episode, we're joined by Evelien de Bruijn, a glass artist from the Netherlands, to discuss biases in how women’s lives are documented, and the impact this has on future generations.Read the interview transcript

Dr. Ides Wong, a program manager at CSIRO, joins us to talk about 18th century Chinese astronomer, mathematician, and poet Wang Zhenyi. Read more about Wang Zhenyi on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/wang-zhenyi/

Known as the Lioness of Brittany, Jeanne de Clisson turned to piracy to avenge her husband, who the French king had had executed for treason. Olivier de Clisson was her third of four husbands, the first having died and the second marriage having been annulled. Together, they had ruled part of Brittany, but following the Breton War of Succession, he was accused of not defending his city vigorously enough; he was beheaded in 1343. Jeanne was then charged, because she had tried to bribe a sergeant to free her husband. Thanks to powerful friends, she avoided the banishment and confiscation of property that she was sentenced with.She then swore vengeance upon the French King Philip VI and the duke who had accused her husband of treason. She sold her estates, raised a fighting force of 400 loyal men and started attacking. One of her early targets was a castle at Touffou, where the officer in charge recognised her and let her in, at which point her men massacred the entire garrison, save one person. This was a precursor to her practice of leaving only one or a few sailors alive when she attacked ships, to carry word to the King of France.With the help of the English king and Breton sympathisers, she started building her Black Fleet, outfitting three warships painted black, with red sails. She named her flagship My Revenge. She started attacking ships in the Bay of Biscay but soon escalated to hunting down French commerce ships in the English Channel. She is also said to have attacked villages along the Norman coast.At one point, the French were able to sink her flagship and Jeanne and two of her sons were adrift for five days, with her son Guillaume dying of exposure while Jeanne and her other son Olivier were eventually rescued, and resumed their piracy. All told, she was active for over a decade in her 40s and 50s, from around 1343 to 1356.Jeanne is sometimes referred to as a privateer, meaning her piracy was sanctioned by the English crown, which was a common practice at the time. Although no official documentation of this exists, she did work with the English, including using her ships to supply their forces.Jeanne remarried for the fourth and final time in the 1350s, to one of the English king’s deputies, and later settled at the Castle of Hennebont, on the Brittany coast. Husband and wife died a few weeks apart in 1359, when Jeanne was 59.

CSIRO’s Dr. Denis Bauer, whose work focuses on improving human health by applying cloud-computing technology to better understanding the genome, joins us to discuss both her own work and one of Dr. Bauer’s scientific forebears - Rosalind Franklin.Read the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Dr.-Denis-Bauer-on-Rosalind-Franklin.pdfRead more about Franklin on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/rosalind-franklin/

Kimberly Hess, author of the 2021 biography, A Lesser Mortal: The Unexpected Life of Sarah B. Cochran, joins us to discuss the philanthropist and businesswoman who rose from housemaid to head of a coal empire. Sarah was also a suffragist and builder of not one but two National Register-listed buildings.Read Sarah's entry on Infinite Women, written by Kimberly for the National Women's History MuseumRead the interview transcript

Dr. Brandy Schillace, Editor in Chief of Medical Humanities for the British Medical Journal, joins us to discuss women and Autism. For context, both Dr. Schillace and host Allison Tyra are Autistic.https://brandyschillace.com/Read the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Dr-Brandy-Schillace-on-Women-and-Autism.pdf

In the late 1860s, Russian mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya needed permission from her father or husband to study abroad, so at age 18 she entered into a fake marriage with another student so they could move to Germany and continue their education. In 1874, she became the first woman to earn a modern doctorate in mathematics and published papers on topics that are far beyond my understanding. After the death of her husband in 1875, Sofya moved to Sweden to take a position at Stockholm University, where she later became the first woman appointed to a full professorship at a European university since the physicist Laura Bassi and mathematician and philosopher Maria Gaetana Agnesi had done so in Italy in the 1700s. In Stockholm, Sofya met Swedish author and women’s dress reform activist Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler. The two began a close relationship that would continue until Sofya’s untimely death at age 41 in 1891. Among her novels, plays and other writing, Anne’s final work was a biography of Sofya published in 1892 before Anne passed away that same year. Modern interpretations have suggested their relationship ventured beyond friendship into the romantic, not least because Sofya referred to it as a “romantic friendship”. It should be noted that although both entered into marriages of convenience, Sofya is documented as having romantic relationships with men and Anne was married twice, making it more likely that the women were bisexual rather than lesbians.Read more about Sofya on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/sofia-kovalevskaya/Read more about Anne on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/anne-charlotte-edgren-leffler/

Denise Mimmocchi, senior curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, joins us to talk about Australian modernist painter Grace Cossington Smith.Read the interview transcriptSee Grace Cossington Smith's work on the Art Galley of New South Wales website

Before she became one of the most successful pirates in world history, it is believed that Ching Shih likely worked in a brothel. In her mid-20s, she married the pirate Zheng Yi, becoming an equal partner and, after he died, taking over the confederation of pirates that they had built together. Ching Shih is awesome and I’ve dedicated her own episode to her incredible career, so let’s move on to two other famed criminals. Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh were infamous underworld figures in Sydney for decades, from the 1920s to the ‘50s. They each had their own territories for the brothels they ran, with Tillie the so-called ‘Queen of Woolloomooloo’ and Kate known as the ‘Queen of Surry Hills’. Ironically, the NSW Vagrancy Act 1905 prohibited men from running brothels. Tilly and Kate diversified their crimes into drugs, illicit alcohol known as “sly grog”, gambling and other ventures. The turf wars between the women and their other competitors were fierce and violent, including physical fights between the two women themselves. Although rivals, both were among the richest women in the country in their time, and both were eventually taken down by the taxation office for unpaid taxes. Interestingly, one of their key nemeses on the local police force was also a woman, the pioneering law enforcement officer Lillian May Armfield. Less well-known is Germaine Guérin, a madam who used her position and connections to become a valuable asset to the French Resistance during World War II. As her brothel in Lyons was popular with the occupying German forces, she was frequently in contact with powerful men and was able to pass on useful intelligence. Germaine also deliberately had her workers spread venereal disease among the Germans and offer them illicit drugs. She also sheltered Jews who had been forced into hiding, along with helping to save hundreds of people including Allied pilots, spies, radio operators, and refugees. She was later betrayed by a French Nazi collaborator. Germaine was arrested and sent to the infamous Ravensbruck death camp, but survived and returned home after the war. There are also countless stories in history of concubines who attained great power, like Empress Dowager Cixi ruling China, as well as courtesans like the Byzantine empress and saint Theodora, so stay tuned for more on their stories.