Infinite Women

Loretta Smith, author of A Spanner in the Works: The extraordinary story of Alice Anderson and Australia's first all-girl garage, joins us to talk about Alice's incredible, but tragically short, life. Buy the book: https://www.hachette.com.au/loretta-smith/a-spanner-in-the-works-the-extraordinary-story-of-alice-anderson-and-australias-first-all-girl-garageRead the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Loretta-Smith-on-Alice-Anderson-transcript.pdf

Dr. Carrie Gibson, author of Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day and El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, joins us to talk about Mary Prince, subject of one of the earliest slave narratives. With Prince as a starting point, we delve into the complexities of how the stories of enslaved and formerly enslaved women like Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Freeman were told - for better or worse - by white abolitionists, and how we can do justice to their stories today with questionable, scant documentation.Read more about Dr. Gibson: carriegibson.co.ukRead the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Carrie-Gibson-on-Mary-Prince-and-who-tells-black-womens-stories-.pdfImage: Sojourner Truth

Dr. Leah Redmond Chang, author of Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power, joins us for a conversation about the lives and relationships of Catherine de' Medici, her daughter-in-law Mary, Queen of Scots and her daughter Elisabeth de Valois, and how these women's experiences reflect larger patterns for royal women and women in general, even today.Read the interview transcript

CSIRO Communications Officer Morgan Gilbert joins us for a chat about women doctors of the ancient world, and how CSIRO's Mother app is helping pregnant people today.Learn more about the Mother app: https://vimeo.com/770947091Read the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Morgan-Gilbert-on-ancient-doctors-transcript.pdfRead more about Agdonice on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/agnodice/

Dr. Gwendolyn Collaço, Collections Curator at MIT's Aga Khan Documentation Center, joins us to talk about wedding trousseaus as curated collections that were meticulously displayed and evaluated before they were ever used in a household. Women played the part of artist, curator and performer in the creation and presentation of the trousseaus.Read the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Gwen-Collaco-on-Ottoman-wedding-trousseaus.pdfImage: Wedding procession on the Bosphorus, by Jean Baptiste Vanmour, Istanbul, c. 1720 - c. 1737. Rijksmuseum, SK-A-2000. (Photo: Public Domain)

Elizabeth Freeman, also known as MumBet, fought a legal battle for her freedom from slavery in 1700s Massachusetts. Elizabeth had been born into slavery around 1744, and was given to her owner’s daughter when she was just seven years old, remaining in that woman’s household for almost 30 years. In 1780, Elizabeth heard the newly ratified Massachusetts State Constitution, which included that “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.” With that in mind, she approached a lawyer and abolitionist, Theodore Sedgewick, who agreed to represent her in court. According to his daughter, Catherine, Elizabeth told him, "I heard that paper read yesterday, that says, all men are created equal, and that every man has a right to freedom. I'm not a dumb critter; won't the law give me my freedom?” That same year, she reportedly prevented her mistress from striking a servant girl with a heated shovel, receiving a deep wound on her own arm as she shielded the girl. She refused to hide the wound as it healed, displaying the evidence of abuse for all to see. Catharine Maria Sedgwick quotes Elizabeth as saying: "Madam never again laid her hand on Lizzy. I had a bad arm all winter, but Madam had the worst of it. I never covered the wound, and when people said to me, before Madam,—'Why, Betty! what ails your arm?' I only answered—'ask missis!' Which was the slave and which was the real mistress?" In 1781, Elizabeth and another slave in the household, named Brom, became the first African-Americans to file and win a freedom lawsuit in Massachusetts. The county court found slavery to be inconsistent with the new State Constitution, granting them their freedom. Their case was cited as a precedent later that year when another freedom suit, Quock Walker v. Jennison, came before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Elizabeth and Brom’s case laid the legal foundation for that court to essentially end slavery in the state. After gaining her freedom, Elizabeth took the name Elizabeth Freeman, chose to work as a paid and respected servant in Sedgewick’s home and earned a reputation as a healer, midwife and nurse. After she died at age 85, she was the only non-family member interred in the Sedgewick family plot, where the inscription on her tombstone included “She could neither read nor write, yet in her own sphere she had no superior or equal.”

Dr. Jess Bugeja, a CERC postdoctoral fellow in the CSIRO’s Australian eHealth Research Centre, Neurodevelopment and Plasticity team, joins us to talk about neuroplasticity pioneer Dr Marian Diamond, one of the founders of neuroscience. Read the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Interview-notes_-Jess-Bugeja-on-Dr-Marian-Diamond.pdf

Anacaona was a Taíno cacica (female cacique or chief), religious expert, poet and composer of Xaraguá, in what is now Haiti. Born into a family of caciques, she succeeded her brother as ruler of Xaragua after his death in 1500. Although she was famous for her poetry, songs, oral histories and traditional dances, little remains of her work today.In 1493, the Spanish had established a colony to mine for gold and other precious metals. The Taíno were kidnapped and enslaved; many Taíno women were raped and those who resisted the Spaniards were murdered. Anacaona had a political marriage to Caonabo, cacique of Maguana. In 1493, he was arrested for ordering the destruction of a Spanish colony and the slaughter of its people. He was sent to Spain and died in a shipwreck during the journey. When her husband was captured, Anacaona returned to Xaraguá and served as an advisor to her brother, Bohechío.In 1498, he was confronted by Spanish troops who wanted to conquer his territory to acquire gold. With his power weakened, Bohechío, advised by Anacaona, decided to accept the sovereignty of the Spanish monarchs. Instead of fighting, he committed to paying the tribute levied by the Spaniards with items like cotton, bread, corn and fish. Under Anacaona's rule after his death, the Spanish settlers and the Taínos of Xaraguá coexisted and intermarried.In 1503, Spanish governor Nicolás Ovando suspected an insurrection was brewing among the Taíno chiefs, including Anacaona. He gave the order for the caciques to be captured. Wanting to make an example of her, Ovando brought Anacaona to Santo Domingo and put her on public trial. Having tortured the other caciques to betray her before killing them, Ovando the “evidence” he needed to execute her. Anacaona was hanged in a public square in 1503.Anacaona is remembered in contemporary art and literature across the Caribbean.

CSIRO behavioural scientist Dr. Emily Brindal, who uses her understanding of human behavior to help people investigate and promote healthy lifestyles, joins us to chat about about philosopher and psychologist Dr Mary Whiton Calkins.Read the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Interview-notes_-Dr-Emily-Brindal-on-Mary-Whiton-Calkins.pdfRead more about Dr. Calkins on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/mary-whiton-calkins/

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.