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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon
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Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women (34 page)
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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After a year, though, Diego urged her to remarry him and she finally agreed, but under two conditions: she wanted to be financially independent, and she would no longer sleep with him. They were remarried on Diego’s birthday in December 1940. Frida moved into Casa Azul, her childhood home, while Diego lived in a flat in San Ángel. Frida now mothered Diego; he was not only husband, friend, lover, but the child that she longed for but could never have, which was fine by Diego. Despite his inability to keep his pants zipped, Frida loved Diego and knew he loved her. A good friend said of the remarriage, “He gave her something solid to lean on.”
Frida started teaching at the School of Painting and Sculpture three days a week. Instead of just teaching about technique, she took her students on adventures to the market, to shantytowns, archeological sights, even to bars. She wanted to put them in touch with life. But Frida’s body was breaking down, and soon it became impossible for her to stand or sit. The treatments seemed to just make things worse. She had sandbags attached to her feet while being suspended in a vertical position, she had bone grafts, and she spent a year in a Mexico City hospital, but nothing worked. Some biographers speculate that the majority of her operations were unnecessary, that they were a way for Frida to get Diego’s attention. To keep up her spirits, Frida would treat her plaster corsets like works of art. In
The Broken Column
(1944), Frida’s nude body, encased in a medical corset pierced by nails, is cracked open to show a shattered column, as pale tears pour down her face. Her paintings became a vehicle for channeling and expressing her pain.
The Broken Column
(1944), Frida’s nude body, encased in a medical corset pierced by nails, is cracked open to show a shattered column, as pale tears pour down her face. Her paintings became a vehicle for channeling and expressing her pain.
In 1953, her friend Lola Álvarez Bravo decided to arrange a one-woman show for Frida at the Galería de Arte Contemporáneo. Although doctors informed her that she was too ill to attend, Frida was not about to miss her moment. Diego arranged for her four-poster bed to be put up in the middle of the gallery. Frida arrived by ambulance like Cleopatra on her barge. She lay in the center, absorbing all the attention, exultant but racked with pain.
Frida fell into a deep depression when her right leg had to be amputated below the knee due to gangrene. She wrote in her diary that she knew the end was near. “I hope the exit is joyful . . . I hope never to come back.” She got her wish on the morning of July 13, 1954. It was a few days after her forty-seventh birthday.
While Diego Rivera was more famous during their lifetimes, the tide began to turn posthumously in the 1980s with the rise of neo-Mexicanism. Kahlo has become more prominent as feminists have taken her up as an icon. Fridamania has taken hold as her likeness now appears on everything from mouse pads to tea towels. In 2008, as part of the centennial celebration of her birth, a major exhibition of her work traveled across the United States. Kahlo’s legacy as one of the most important and original artists of the twentieth century is assured.
SEVEN
Amazing Adventuresses
Who doesn’t love a tale about pirates, swashbuckling stories of adventure on the high seas, where men were men, and women were the naughty figureheads on the ships? Well, among the most notorious pirates of the eighteenth century were two women. If you ride the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disneyland, you’ll see portraits of them on the wall: Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Some might call them feminists who chose piracy as a way of rebelling against a male-dominated world. Others might see them as tomboys who just never grew up. Whatever their reasons, Anne Bonny and Mary Read became two of history’s most notorious pirates, male or female.
Anne Bonny was probably born in County Cork in about 1698 to a lawyer named William Cormac and his maid, Mary Brennan. Cormac was married and the resulting scandal (apparently Mrs. Cormac was not of a forgiving nature) led him to flee Ireland with Anne’s mother. They settled in South Carolina, where William managed to amass enough money as a lawyer to buy a small plantation, where they lived respectably as husband and wife.
Anne, however, was not interested in the social life of a wealthy planter’s daughter. She craved adventure and excitement. From childhood, she was headstrong and determined, with a fierce temper. There is a story that Anne beat the crap out of a man who dared to make unwanted advances toward her, injuring him so badly that he couldn’t get out of bed for weeks. She also supposedly once stabbed a kitchen maid with a knife. She was clearly not a woman you wanted to have on your bad side.
Instead of making a good marriage, at the age of sixteen Anne ran off with a small-time pirate named James Bonny, whom she had met in Charleston, a well-known pirate haunt of the day. When her father found out, he was furious and disowned her; he had already planned to marry her off to a medical student. Anne’s lack of inheritance was not part of Bonny’s plan; it appears that he had only wanted Anne because of her father’s estate. She soon found out that not only did James suck as a pirate but he was also spineless. After they settled in New Providence (present-day Nassau in the Bahamas, and at the time an ideal haven for pirates until the British sent in an ex-privateer, Woodes Rogers, to clean it up), James, rather than working for a living, spent his time turning in his fellow pirates in order to collect the “king’s pardon” (reward money) from the governor of the island.
Disgusted with her husband’s traitorous ways, Anne spent more and more of her time hanging out with the pirates in the local saloons, including one owned by Pierre Bouspeut, aka Pierre the Pansy Pirate. Pierre owned a coffee shop, hair salon, and dressmaking business. Anne may have started her career as a pirate as one of Pierre’s crew. Legend has it that they managed to take hold of a French merchant ship by dressing up an abandoned wreck with a dressmaker’s dummy in the bow, suitably done up as a victim. When the French crew got one look at the sight of Anne standing with an ax over the faux bloody corpse, they quickly turned over their cargo without a fight.
Anne soon left James for Calico Jack Rackham.
24
He was nicknamed Calico Jack because of his flamboyant dress, favoring calico coats and britches. Rackham took Anne the same way he did any ship that he had plundered, with “no time wasted, straight up alongside, every gun brought to play, and the prize boarded.” Jack offered to buy Anne (who protested at being treated like a piece of property) in a divorce from James, who refused, taking the matter before Governor Rogers, who declared that Anne should be flogged and returned to James. Then Rogers passed a court order forbidding the two from seeing each other.
24
He was nicknamed Calico Jack because of his flamboyant dress, favoring calico coats and britches. Rackham took Anne the same way he did any ship that he had plundered, with “no time wasted, straight up alongside, every gun brought to play, and the prize boarded.” Jack offered to buy Anne (who protested at being treated like a piece of property) in a divorce from James, who refused, taking the matter before Governor Rogers, who declared that Anne should be flogged and returned to James. Then Rogers passed a court order forbidding the two from seeing each other.
Instead the two escaped on Jack’s ship, the
Revenge
. Contrary to popular belief Anne didn’t disguise herself as a man. Another story has it that when one of the crew members objected to her presence, as it was considered bad luck to have a woman aboard, she stabbed him through the heart. Anne soon found herself pregnant with Jack’s child. When he found out, he dropped her off in Cuba to deliver the baby. No one knows what really happened to the child, a baby girl. There is some speculation that she just abandoned her. Others think that she left the baby with a foster family to raise it, or that the baby died at birth.
Revenge
. Contrary to popular belief Anne didn’t disguise herself as a man. Another story has it that when one of the crew members objected to her presence, as it was considered bad luck to have a woman aboard, she stabbed him through the heart. Anne soon found herself pregnant with Jack’s child. When he found out, he dropped her off in Cuba to deliver the baby. No one knows what really happened to the child, a baby girl. There is some speculation that she just abandoned her. Others think that she left the baby with a foster family to raise it, or that the baby died at birth.
In any event, when Anne returned to the ship, she met the woman who would soon become coupled with her in infamy, Mary Read. Local lore has it that Anne became smitten with the new lad on board ship. When she made advances, the “lad” revealed himself to be a woman. (Again, most likely this story is false and Mary didn’t disguise her gender.) Since Mary was the only other woman on the ship, the two became fast friends, although there was some speculation that they were lovers as well, or in a ménage à trois with Jack. There is, of course, no way of knowing for sure whether or not they were lovers, since it wasn’t exactly like Hogarth was under the bed sketching.
25
25
Mary Read was born in Devon, England, sometime around 1695. Like many of our scandalous women, she had a rough childhood. Her father, who was a sailor, went off to sea soon after she was born, and her half brother, Mark, passed away soon afterward. Mary and her mother waited for years for her father to return but to no avail. In desperation, Mary’s mother disguised her as a boy in order to keep her paternal grandmother supporting them. It seems Grandma preferred boys to girls. Mary spent her early childhood pretending to be her dead half brother.
When Mary turned thirteen her grandmother finally passed away. Needing to find work, Mary (still disguised as a boy) managed to find employment as a footboy to a wealthy Frenchwoman who lived in London. After a few months, Mary was bored and left, finding work on a man-of-war. After a few years, she became bored again and joined the army, where she met her future husband, a Flemish soldier whose name is lost to history. After confessing her gender to him, they left the army and opened an inn, called the Three Horseshoes, near Castle Breda in Holland. Unfortunately, Mary’s husband died after a few months. Despondent, and unable to go back to the army since it was peacetime, Mary joined a Dutch ship on its way to the Caribbean, where it was attacked by Calico Jack. The captured crew was forced to become pirates, a way of life that turned out to suit Mary just fine.
Mary and Anne proved to be more than the equal of any of the men on board ship. Dressed in men’s clothing, Anne was often a member of the boarding party when they attacked a ship and, along with Mary, was responsible for the deaths of many sailors, including shipmates who crossed them the wrong way. A washerwoman named Dorothy Thomas who was detained by the pirates testified that the two women wore “men’s jackets and long trousers and handkerchiefs wrapped around their heads . . . a machete and pistol in their hands.” (When they weren’t fighting, they dressed in women’s clothing.)
Mary fell in love with one of the crew, a man named Tom Deane. Deane was not a natural pirate; like Mary he had been pressed into service when Calico Jack captured his ship. When he got into a quarrel with a more experienced crew member, Mary, knowing that her lover stood no chance against him in a duel, picked her own quarrel with the older man and challenged him to a duel that would take place prior to her lover’s duel. Mary killed the older man, but not before revealing to him her gender.
In October 1720, Captain Barnet, an ex-pirate who was now a commander in the British navy, attacked Rackham’s anchored ship. The ship was vulnerable to attack. Almost the entire crew on board was drunk, celebrating a victory, for they had captured a Spanish commercial ship. The fight was short because only Mary and Anne were sober enough to resist. The rest of the crew cowered down in the hold. Read, incensed at their cowardice, shot several rounds into the hole, killing one man.
The crew of the
Revenge
was taken to Port Royal to stand trial, which was a huge sensation due to the sex of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who were reviled for daring to step outside the proscriptive bounds for females. The women were tried separately from the men, who testified to their cruelties. They were the only two women ever convicted of piracy during its so-called golden age. During her trial, when Mary Read was asked why she had chosen the life of a pirate, she replied that “as to hanging, it is no great hardship, for were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn pirate and so unfit the seas that men of courage must starve.”
Revenge
was taken to Port Royal to stand trial, which was a huge sensation due to the sex of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who were reviled for daring to step outside the proscriptive bounds for females. The women were tried separately from the men, who testified to their cruelties. They were the only two women ever convicted of piracy during its so-called golden age. During her trial, when Mary Read was asked why she had chosen the life of a pirate, she replied that “as to hanging, it is no great hardship, for were it not for that, every cowardly fellow would turn pirate and so unfit the seas that men of courage must starve.”
Mary and Anne obtained stays of execution by claiming they were pregnant. While Anne may have escaped the hangman’s noose completely due to the influence of her father, Mary Read died in prison either from fever or in childbirth in 1721. She’s buried in St. Catherine Parish in Jamaica. What happened to Anne afterward is a matter of speculation. It’s possible that she went back to live with her father on his plantation in South Carolina. However, having had a taste of freedom from the restrictions of being a woman in the eighteenth century, wouldn’t she have been more likely to have either gone back to piracy or settled down somewhere on another of the islands?
The
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
entry on Anne states, “Evidence provided by the descendants of Anne Bonny suggests that her father managed to secure her release from gaol and bring her back to Charles Town, South Carolina, where she gave birth to Rackam’s [sic] second child. On 21 December 1721 she married a local man, Joseph Burleigh, and they had eight children. She died in South Carolina, a respectable woman, at the age of eighty-four and was buried on 25 April 1782.” Calico Jack wasn’t so lucky. On the day he was to hang, he asked for special permission to see Anne on his way to the gallows. Anne coldly told him, “I’m sorry to see you here, but had you fought like a man, you need not have been hanged like a dog.”Anne Bonny and Mary Read defied convention to live an adventurous life. So next time you’re on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, lift a glass of grog to celebrate the lives of these astonishing women.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
entry on Anne states, “Evidence provided by the descendants of Anne Bonny suggests that her father managed to secure her release from gaol and bring her back to Charles Town, South Carolina, where she gave birth to Rackam’s [sic] second child. On 21 December 1721 she married a local man, Joseph Burleigh, and they had eight children. She died in South Carolina, a respectable woman, at the age of eighty-four and was buried on 25 April 1782.” Calico Jack wasn’t so lucky. On the day he was to hang, he asked for special permission to see Anne on his way to the gallows. Anne coldly told him, “I’m sorry to see you here, but had you fought like a man, you need not have been hanged like a dog.”Anne Bonny and Mary Read defied convention to live an adventurous life. So next time you’re on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, lift a glass of grog to celebrate the lives of these astonishing women.
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
10.87Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
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