Hell Hath No Fury (14 page)

It is clear that the greater the institutionalized violence and the violation of basic rights under an imperial or colonial system of rule, the less likely it is that far-reaching, permanent changes in women's status, condition, and lives will occur. Indeed, women can lose precious hard-won rights that they had secured earlier due to invasion or imperial interventions—as events in United States–occupied Iraq have demonstrated.

Algeria remains an outstanding paradox of women's participation in colonial and nationalist struggles, whereby the new regime they have struggled to form with such suffering and sacrifice then makes them the first target of renewed oppression. The distinguished sociologist professor Marnia Lazreg comments: “Algeria is the only nation in the Middle East where women are killed as women because they are women. Women have lost their lives for not wearing the veil, as well as wearing it.”

Reference: Marnia Lazreg,
The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question,
1994; and Alistair Horne,
A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962,
1996. The bombing mission of September 30, 1956, was re-created with chilling accuracy in Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 movie
The Battle of Algiers,
in which Saadi Yacef played himself as well as acting as coproducer.

LAKSHMI BAI, RANI OF JHANSI

Indian Nationalist Fighter, b. 1835, d. 1857

Born a noblewoman in Benares (now Varanasi), the daughter of a Brahmin father and a cultivated mother who died when her little girl was only four, Lakshmi Bai practiced the arts of war from childhood. Later she enjoyed power and status as the wife of the raja of Jhansi, and as a reluctant but immensely able warrior queen she drew on her upbringing for the skills she needed as a military leader. She died fighting at the head of her troops.

Brought up in a predominantly male household, Lakshmi Bai received an equestrian and martial training. Her birthplace, on the holy river Ganges, was later to give the rani an important religious significance when she turned on the heathen British, prompting Sir Hugh Rose, the man who defeated her in battle, to dub her “a sort of Indian
Joan of Arc
” (see Chapter 3).

In 1842 she married the raja of Jhansi, a small, prosperous, independent, and pro-British state. In 1853, after the death of the raja, Lord Dalhousie, the governor-general of British India, refused to recognize the raja's declared heir, his adopted son Damodar Rao, and annexed the state. The decision was hotly contested in the British courts by the raja's widow but her petitions were rejected. Insult was added to injury when the British authorities took punitive action against the rani by confiscating the state jewels, deducting her husband's debts from her annual pension, and ordering her to quit the fort at Jhansi.

The rani remained in Jhansi and retired into private life. Jhansi was considered a backwater, and the British withdrew the greater part of the garrison there. This was shown to be a mistake in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, when native troops besieged Jhansi's Red Star Fort and then massacred the Europeans sheltering there after they had been promised safe conduct. The rani, who had succeeded up to this point in sitting out the mutiny, was not responsible for the act of treachery, but the British believed otherwise and later convinced themselves that she had been a prime mover in the mutiny itself.

For the next few months, however, the British were content to allow her to function as the effective ruler of Jhansi. She cut an impressive figure, dressing as a combination of warrior and queen in jodhpurs and silk blouse with a jeweled sword and two silver pistols in her belt. Her daily routine included riding and target practice with her pistols.

But time was running out for the rani. The British had now quelled the mutiny and were mopping up the last pockets of resistance. She had been tarred with the blame for the massacre of the defenders of the Red Fort, and her days in Jhansi were numbered. She decided that she had nothing to lose if she took up arms against the British.

She strengthened the defenses of the fort and assembled a volunteer army, fourteen thousand strong, including women who had been given military training. The siege of Jhansi began on March 20, 1858. The women who had been trained by the rani were seen by the British frantically working the batteries, hauling ammunition, and bringing food and water to the soldiers. The rani was everywhere. Men of the Fourteenth Light Dragoons, laying siege to the fort, recalled her as “a perfect Amazon in bravery…just the sort of daredevil woman soldiers admire.”

The British captured the citadel after a two-week siege and took a terrible revenge. Thomas Lowe, an army doctor, witnessed the scene and recorded that the enemy dead lay in their “puffed-up thousands” in the blazing sun. “Such was the retribution meted out to this Jezebel Ranee and her people.”

The rani escaped with four companions, including her father, and rode hard to Kalpi, more than a hundred miles away, to join the rulers still holding out against the British. On June 1 she participated in the capture of the fortress at Gwalior, which was held by Indian allies of the British, and was rewarded with a fabulous pearl necklace from the treasury there.

On June 16 the British counterattacked, and in the fierce fighting that followed, the rani was killed at the head of her troops, clubbed and shot by two British soldiers. Her dying words were to beg that the British should not touch her body, and her own men bore her corpse to a nearby haystack and set it alight. Her father was captured and shot a few days later. Her adopted son was granted a pension by the British but never recovered his inheritance.

In the Indian independence movement of the twentieth century, Rani Lakshmi Bai became a rallying figure for nationalists. Two statues have been raised to her, depicting her in dashing equestrian mode and with raised sword, in Gwalior and Jhansi. She is also remembered in many popular ballads, one of which hymns her courage:

How valiantly like a man fought she,

The Rhani of Jhansi

On every parapet a gun she set

Raining fire of hell,

How well like a man fought the Rhani of Jhansi

How valiantly and well!

Reference: Karl Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac,
Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Asia,
1999.

LONG MARCH

China, 1934–35

In the Long March, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its armed forces made an eight-thousand-mile trek from their bases in southeast China, which had been encircled by the Nationalist forces of the Kuomintang, to a new stronghold in the northwest. As comrades in arms, lovers, and porters, women sustained the troops in the ordeal of this strategic retreat, during which Mao Tse-tung emerged as the party's supreme leader.

Mao's First Front Army, which set off from Jiangxi Province in October 1934, consisted of 86,000 men and some 30 women. The Fourth Front Army, which struck out from Sichuan in March 1935, had about 2,000 women in its ranks. The Second Front Army, formed by a merger of the Second and Sixth Army Groups and containing about 25 women, began its own march from a mountain base near the border of Hunan almost a year after the First Front Army set out.

Before the First Front Army began its march, the decision was taken to leave all the children behind. Mothers had to find local families willing to adopt their children. Children born on the march would also have to be placed among local populations. Few of these women ever saw their children again.

Most of the CCP leaders were with the First Front Army, and the women traveled with them. Women who had been peasants before the march and accustomed to heavy work in the fields carried supply and medicine boxes and undertook stretcher work. Educated women performed propaganda and recruitment roles, seeking out short-term transport workers who traveled with the army for several days before returning home (see also
Vietnam Women Fighters,
Chapter 4, for women fulfilling the same light and heavy work).

These workers were of crucial importance because the First Front Army had no motor vehicles and a severe shortage of pack animals. Kang Keqing (1912–1993), the wife of the Communist commander-in-chief, Chu Teh, marched with the military headquarters as a political instructor. She was also armed and carried out the same tasks as the other women on the march. Liu Ying (later an assistant foreign minister for the People's Republic of China, 1954–59) worked with the First Front Army's logistics department, dealing with everything from money and guns to uniforms and printing presses.

Also traveling with the First Front Army was Mao's second wife, He Zizhen, who was pregnant when the march began and gave birth in the spring of 1935. She had to give the child away. This was the third time she had been forced to abandon a child. Her first child with Mao, a girl, was given to a peasant woman when she and Mao had to flee their guerrilla base. A second, a two-year-old boy, had been left in the care of her sister before the march began. He Zizhen later suffered a mental breakdown and spent many years in a sanatorium in the Soviet Union, an exile engineered by Mao's third wife, Jiang Qing, a former bit-part film actress who had not been on the Long March. He Zizhen died in Shanghai in 1984.

In June 1935, the First Front joined hands with the Fourth Front Army, whose two thousand female soldiers had been able to travel with their children and husbands. The older children were taken on as orderlies, messengers, and buglers. The Fourth Front fielded a women's factory battalion responsible for clothing, and an independent battalion, later a regiment. The principal factor in the larger role played by women in the Fourth Front Army was opium, a staple crop in Sichuan. The high rate of male dependency on the drug meant that the Fourth Front had no choice but to recruit women.

In the Fourth Front Army, strict rules prohibited male soldiers from mixing with the female units. On the whole, discipline was maintained, but the Front's female troops suffered badly if they fell into the hands of hostile forces. Many were captured and raped by the private armies of the Muslim warlords of northwest China. The armies on the Long March also incorporated teenage recruits who were dubbed “the Little Red Devils.” It is estimated that there were about 5,000 in the 100,000-strong Fourth Front Army, many of them young girls. Conditions on the Long March were grueling in the extreme. Moving at a punishing pace and often under both ground and air attack by the Nationalists, the columns crossed and recrossed freezing rivers, mountain ranges, and treacherous swampy grasslands. Battle casualties, disease, desertion, and political purges took a heavy toll. In October 1935, the First Front Army arrived in Yenan, its final destination, with its strength reduced to some 8,000.

Of the 30 women who began the march with the First Front Army, nineteen survived. The enormous privations suffered by the women of the First and Fourth Front Armies rendered many of the survivors infertile. One survivor observed of her sacrifice, “It was a small price to pay for the revolution.” The observation reflects how Mao alchemized a seemingly wretched defeat into the founding myth of modern China.

In the 1980s, Kang Keqing became chairperson of the Chinese Communist Party. The vengeful Jiang Qing, who had seized power during Mao's dotage, was overthrown in 1976, imprisoned, and sentenced to death. “I was Chairman Mao's dog,” she protested. “Whoever he told me to bite, I bit.” Her sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1991, diagnosed with throat cancer, she hanged herself in the hospital at the age of seventy-seven.

Reference: Sun Shuyun,
The Long March,
2006.

MOLLY PITCHER

Thought to Be Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley, Iconic Figure in the US War of Independence, b. 1754, d. 1832

A water bearer to the troops in one of the hardest-fought battles of the American Revolution, a woman nicknamed Molly Pitcher became famous when she took the place of a fallen artillery gunner, her husband, and continued the fight. Her story abounds in vivid detail, including chatting with George Washington, but some historians question its authenticity and doubt that she existed as described.

The woman with whom Molly Pitcher is usually identified, Mary Ludwig, was born to German immigrants in Trenton, New Jersey, on October 13, 1754. She moved to the Pennsylvania town of Carlisle and began her connection with the army at the age of fifteen as a servant to Dr. William Irvine, later a brigadier general in the colonial army. Her first husband, John Hays, enlisted in the First Pennsylvania Artillery in 1775 at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and she soon joined him in the field with the permission of his regimental commander (for women accompanying their soldier husbands, see
Camp Followers,
Chapter 5,
Soldaderas,
Chapter 5, and
Vivandières,
Chapter 5).

During the Battle of Monmouth on June 28, 1778, according to contemporary accounts a broiling hot day, Mary is said to have earned her nickname by returning to the battle lines again and again with pitchers of water for her husband and his fellow artillery gunners, who were dying of heat and thirst. “Molly” was a common form of “Mary,” and “Pitcher” commemorated the number of times the welcome water appeared at the front in her hands. As she watched, Hays, now an artillery sergeant, was knocked unconscious in the bombardment, and the order was given to remove his piece from the field. Without hesitation Molly came forward and seized the rammer staff from her fallen husband's hands. She kept the cannon firing for the remainder of the battle and continued to fight till the close of day.

Other legends grew up around Molly's service. While tending the wounded, she is supposed to have carried a crippled soldier “on her strong, young back” out of reach of a furious British charge. Another soldier, Joseph Plumb Martin of Connecticut, told this sexually tinted story of her coolness under fire: