Brief Biographies of Badass Bitches: Women You Should Know More About But Probably Don't

By Lisa Lee Curtis

You may know who this actor is, and yes, you may really love this musician. Or, hey, you may actually despise them.

But do you know about her contributions to civil rights causes?

Or to science?

Or what they've overcome just to survive in a world that saw them as lesser because of the body they were born with?

Did you know that the "Me too" movement was started by a Black woman years before we finally started seeing the social media hashtag #metoo when we loudly declared that was enough was enough?

Have you heard of this paleontologist who wasn't allowed in the Geological Society of London, where she made many unprecedented contributions to, simply because she was a woman?

Did you know that this television chef was, not only in the United States Navy, but held a top-secret clearance and created a shark repellant that is still used today?

Join me in discovering more about women you may have already heard of, and many more that you might not have.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Uppertown Press
• Release date: May 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223166481

Book preview

Content Warning

First of all, this book contains swear words if you haven’t already figured this out. I make no apologies for the way I utilize language, and if the fuck-word gives you the vapors, you might want to tap out right about now. I don’t use colorful metaphors (live long and prosper, motherfucker) to be edgy, this is just how I speak, and I’ve grown fully disinterested in censoring myself for puritanical idealism.

Secondly, if you haven’t tapped out, you should know that this book contains references to suicide, domestic violence, and probably a hundred references, give or take, to sexual assault. And that’s because this book is about women: cis women, trans women, women of color, women who glow-in-the-dark, etc., and way too fucking many of us, as girls and as adults, have been on the receiving end of everything from harassment to full on violent sexual battery at the hands of terrible fucking people, mostly men. #mefuckingtoo

According to www.rainn.org:

1 out of every 6 American women have been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime.

82% of all juvenile victims are female. 90% of adult rape victims are female.

Females ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.

Women ages 18-24 who are college students are 3 times more likely than women in general to experience sexual violence. Females of the same age who are not enrolled in college are 4 times more likely.

21% of TGQN (transgender, genderqueer, nonconforming) college students have been sexually assaulted, compared to 18% of non-TGQN females.

And these are just American statistics.

From www.endsexualviolence.org :

Women of color appear to be at greatest risk for rape. A nationally representative survey indicates that while almost 18% of white women and 7% of Asian/Pacific Islander women will be raped in their lifetimes, almost 19% of black women, 24% of mixed-race women, and 34% of American Indian and Alaska Native women will be raped during their lifetimes.

Additionally, undocumented immigrant women who are raped often cannot turn to the authorities because they fear deportation. Moreover, they often lack linguistically appropriate and culturally relevant victim services within their communities.

So what I’m saying is this: This book highlights those who are at the greatest risk of sexual assault. And for many of these women, while the act does not define them, it is a part of their stories, stories of overcoming adversity and thriving in a world that absolutely did not want them to thrive. And I chose to include the violence these women suffered at the hands of men in their stories because we’ve been expected to shut the fuck up about it for waaaaay too long and we’re done shutting up.

If men are so fucking worried about people speaking out about their rapes and their rapists, they should probably consider not raping people. Just a thought.

Introduction

Let’s use this quick Q&A here as the introduction to this book full of badass bitches, expletives, and what is clearly my opinion on a few things. Most of these questions came from folks who have commented on the social media posts I’ve made about these women over the last few years, mostly dudes who thought I should care about their opinions and/or genitals. Or when I was super lucky, they felt it necessary to bless me with direct messages or email – sometimes complete with pictures of their favorite body parts. And a few are questions that I anticipated and, you know how sometimes you have fights in your head and you’re voicing both parties as if you’ve got a form of Multiple Personality Disorder? Please tell me you know. Anyway yeah . . . that.

Q. This is so cool; did you interview any of these people?

A. No, I’m a fucking weirdo from the upper left corner of the United States who doesn’t have the cred to interview anyone, really. Also, some of these women are dead, and I assure you that I definitely don’t have that level of cred (yet).

Q. Are these bios in order of significance?

A. No, these bios are in absolutely no order. A few favorite badasses aren’t even in this volume. In fact, as I’m writing this, I just realized I meant to put someone in this volume and she’s not here. Whoops. Maybe the next one.

Q. You know anyone can just go online and find this stuff.

A. No shit, Kevin, that’s what I did. These bios are literally an elaborate set of book reports with shit I found on the internet. Fun fact: My nerd-ass’s favorite assignments ever starting in the 5th grade when I did a biography on Clara Barton were book reports. This shit’s my jam. I literally sat here for every one of these and Googled the shit out of their names until I found enough info to slap together a halfway decent bio. If I couldn’t find enough info give a bio any life, I didn’t write it. If I could, I did.

Q. Why are some of these so long and others are so short?

A. Are we still talking about the bios . . . ?

Anyway, the reason is because when I started this project, I was trying to keep the word count to 800 words per bio. I scrapped that pretty fucking quickly. And I decided that forcing them into some sort of pretty conformity after the fact didn’t work for me.

Q. So why should I buy your book when I can go find this information online?

A. You shouldn’t. Go sit in a dark room until 4 a.m. every night for hundreds of nights (so far), going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole digging up info on these ladies. It’s especially fun if you have to get up in a few hours for work. Do it. Go nuts. Make sure you drink a lot because your liver should also suffer. Make sure your browser history ends up really fuckin’ questionable while you’re at it. Expect a knock on your door from the FBI.

Here, let me help you out. Start here:

www.wikipedia.org

www.michigan.gov

www.biography.com

www.blackexcellence.com

www.history.com

www.herself360.com

www.theguardian.com

www.npr.com

www.brittannica.com

www.deadline.com

www.newworldencyclopedia.org

www.people.com

www.blackpast.org

www.atlasobscura.com

www.teenvogue.com

www.womenshistory.org

www.huffpost.com

www.achievement.org

www.rollingstone.com

www.womenshistory.org

Q. Mayo or Miracle Whip?

A. Are you fucking kidding me right now? Best Foods/Hellman’s Mayo forever. Miracle whip is [redacted].

Q. Did Best Foods/Hellman’s pay you for that statement?

A. No, but now that you mention it, they should.

Q. You forgot to write about some of the guys she’s been linked to.

A. No, I absolutely did not forget.

Q. You didn’t mention her children.

A. Man, nothing gets past you, does it?

Q. Why did you skip over this detail of her life that I find important?

A. Because these are Brief biographies, not their entire life story. I could have gone on forever about some of these women, and it pained me to edit.

Q. I don’t think you should be glorifying behaviors like this (and yes, I’ve gotten this complaint the most) in these bios. It really seems like you’re condoning or encouraging drug use and sex and violence and other things I don’t like.

A. Big whoop. Also, that’s not a question.

Q. Seriously, why did you bother writing this book?

A. Because I would have liked a book like this when I was younger. I for sure needed a book like this shoved into my face by someone well-meaning who would say, Hey, look…women have done a lot of cool shit. Even this one you thought you knew from a bullshit headline. No really, check this out.

In my twenties, I was still such an internally misogynistic cool girl who thought feminism was just angry women—not realizing that I should have been angry about a lot of shit myself—and didn’t care to learn about the history of women and what they did to even SURVIVE before carving out a place for themselves in this patriarchal shit show. Yeah, it would have been nice to have an earlier nudge into deprogramming my own default behavior of assuming the masculine in professions like doctor, firefighter, soldier, attorney, astronaut—behavior which, of course, was cemented as a child with the audio and visuals we were peppered with, the stories we devoured. Men were the default. He is even in our language for the otherwise innocuous.

Maybe it would have made me aware of how I unconsciously fell into step with male expectations and perceptions of the feminine.

Q. Isn’t the word bitch derogatory? Seems kind of hypocritical for you to use this word if you’re a so-called feminist.

A. Ah, and there it is. Yeah, to be honest, I warred with this a smidge, especially while coming up for the name of the column that has morphed into this book; not because I personally take issue with the word bitch but because I knew there might be women out there who aren’t comfortable with it.

Look, I’ve long been in the Gloria Steinem camp where, when someone blurts out the word bitch in a pathetic attempt to take me down, especially when it’s a man wielding it as a weapon, I’ll just say Yup, thanks. That’s me. Because it’s nearly exclusively used when a woman has done something that’s threatened their delicate masculine sensitivities. But a great many of us have reclaimed that word, and in doing so, it’s taken the power away from the pejorative. When I hear the term badass bitch, I hear nothing but kudos, baby.

For the women it bristles (your opinion here doesn’t matter to me, Chad, run along), I apologize. But from one so-called feminist bitch to another, I’m going to keep that word around for a bit.

Q. I’m sorry, but I don’t understand all the swearing and blue language and think that maybe this is a bad example for young women. Why don’t you write a book without all the vulgarity?

A. I dunno, man. Why don’t you go fuck yourself? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

CHAPTER ONE

In the beginning...

At this point in the game of life, anyone who is conscious and breathing oxygen on planet Earth is painfully aware that everything, when at all feasible (and often when not), will end up being the woman’s fault in any given scenario that’s even remotely woman-adjacent. What’s great about this fact of life is that misogynistic shitlords, incels, and garden-variety manbabies will have internal conflicts as to whether this concept is an outright lie, or if it’s absolutely true because obviously women are the cause of all their problems. Oh, the dilemma.

Seriously, it’s quite literally tale as old as time that has carried forward to the current day with much gusto. To wit:

A professional sports-ball player has a lousy showing at a sports-ball game? Well, clearly, it’s the new girlfriend’s fault. He was a goddamn athletic GIFT before she came along. What did she do to him??

Your favorite band collapses? Obviously, a woman fucked up their whole dynamic by having the audacity to date the lead singer. Her heroin-laced pussy has bewitched this once-focused minstrel and steered him into the depths of irrelevance. He was once a hit-maker, and now he writes songs about twigs and housefly oppression.

This latter potential catastrophe has even been named for a real woman: They refer to it as being Yokoed.

Yoko Ono’s only offense was that she existed. Oh, and tricking John Lennon into falling in love with her, thereby splitting up The Beatles and breaking many fan boys’ and girls’ hearts.

Sure, OK. That makes sense.

Yeah, women have been scapegoats for-fucking-ever, being blamed for men’s behavior, blamed for their failures while, strangely enough, oh-so-rarely given credit for their successes, even when they were the ones doing the actual work he was being lauded for, and historically blamed for a myriad of calamities in the most asinine ways.

Hey—we’re so blameworthy that we often get blamed for our own assaults and murders.

But the original feminine scapegoat?

I mean you could say the O.G. is Eve since she allegedly ate a damn apple which, for some reason, caused an eternity of sin and guilt. FOR EATING A FUCKING APPLE.

She also apparently tricked poor, feeble-minded Adam into eating the apple as well. He couldn’t help it; Eve said it was OK! 100% HER fault.

Way to take responsibility for your own actions, Adam, you ridiculous child.

And let’s go ahead and throw a talking snake into the story to prop up the believability factor.

Oh yeah, and Eve’s whorish apple-eating is also the reason it hurts like a motherfucker to give birth.

Unto the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.

Cool, Christian-god. You sound like an abusive, narcissistic prick.

But even before Eve ruined everything for everyone who would ever exist ever, another woman walked the earth being wicked and evil and wrong—and did I mention wicked?

Meet Lilith.

While Eve was supposedly created directly from Adam’s rib (let me tell you, super-possessive dudes and otherwise misogynistic and conveniently Christian-when-it-suits-them guys fucking love that part), many versions of Lilith’s origin story say that she was the woman implied in Christian-bible’s Book of Genesis and that she sprang forth from the same soil Adam did, as well as other random origin stories because no one can get their stories straight for some reason.

What a lot of the stories DO have in common is that Lilith refused to be subservient or submissive in any way to her boy, Adam, and he got salty about it. Lilith was like yeah, tough, and he subsequently threw a fit.

And, as legend has it, Adam really didn’t want her getting on top for sexy-time. He’s like I’m banging you like a Labrador Retriever, and she’s like no, I’d like to actually enjoy this, you ridiculous ape, and Adam threw a mantrum about that as well.

Not wanting to stick around for said mantrum, Lilith was all, you know what, to literal hell with this. She noped-the-fuck out and away from Adam and the so-called perfection of Eden blah blah blah, then told everyone, including but not limited to the three angels who were sent by Christian-god to retrieve her—after Adam cried to his daddy of course—to go forth and get bent. She took her two children, moved far, far away, and lived happily ever after.

Some writings say Lilith’s offspring were sired by Adam, but others have written that an archangel named Samael was the true baby-daddy of her spawn (Adam, you are NOT the father). These sweet babies are sometimes identified as incubi and succubi because obviously anything that comes from a disobedient woman’s womb is monstrous and will most certainly bleed you dry. I’m almost surprised that the phrase gold digger isn’t found anywhere in the Old Testament.

A personal favorite little ditty of mine is from Isaiah 34:

Her castles shall be overgrown with thorns, her fortresses with thistles and briers. She shall become an abode for jackals and a haunt for ostriches.

Well, that’s got some heavy incel energy. Can’t you just let her move on? No, of course not.

(Wait… ostriches? What the actual fuck.)

The Talmud, an equally whimsical Jewish text, states that it is forbidden for a man to sleep alone in a house, lest Lilith get hold of him, as Lilith is said to fertilize herself with male sperm to give birth to oodles of demons.

(Excited Oprah Voice) YOU GET A DEMON! AND YOU GET A DEMON! AND YOU GET A…

Ah yes. Lilith is the not-to-be denied temptress who lures men into being sinful and then poops out demon babies! Yay!

What a lovely story to strip men of all accountability. Your poor, feeble-minded husbands can’t control themselves around Lilith’s vagina devil magic! It’s not their fault, their wieners just could not be STOPPED. They were basically hoovered into Lilith’s baby-hole by a cosmic genital tractor beam.

She’s also known as Lilith: She who weakens the children of men. Kind of wordy and lacking originality and flair, but fine. OK.

There are stories that reveal that, when "Lilith: SWWTCOM refused the three angels’ demands to go back so that Adam could lord over her—excuse me, try and immediately FAIL to lord over her—she, in an effort to get them to leave her the eff alone, agreed to let hundreds of her children die" because I guess Adam was *that* horrible to live with. I mean I get it, but I just divorced the guy when I was in her shoes.

Which of course that meant that Christian-god was doing the killing of the babies but blaming it on Lilith.

"Sorry, gotta smite these infants into oblivion, maybe feed one to a goat. Made a deal with Lilith, gotta follow-through *shrugs* I’m just God, so…

Yeah, that checks out. This, as you know, is the same Christian-god who can do all the stuff and the things but, for some reason, can’t protect children from school shootings because we’ve kicked God out of schools.

Is he liiiike… a vampire? Does he have to be invited back? I’m never quite sure of his limitations, especially after reading the words God is omnipresent. I saw that on a T-shirt at the grocery store the other day. And, predictably, the dude was also open-carrying his pew pew gun because the omnipresent Christian-god can’t be relied on, I guess?

I got off topic, where was I… oh yes, Lilith and her vagina devil magic.

So, in summation: Lilith wouldn’t do as she was told, she hated bangin’ missionary style, she (still?) makes your men stick their wieners in strangers (THE WIENERS CANNOT BE STOPPED), she pooped out demons, she killed a bunch of babies—FEMINAZI, AMIRIGHT?

It’s pretty clear that the men who crafted biblical works of multiple origins in multiple religions really hated women and felt the need to create a feminine scapegoat for a plethora of tragedies and inconveniences alike, and it’s been a trend that’s just never quite died.

Honestly, like every other inconsistent religious text, there are a buttload of other angles on the perils of men faced by the presence of women, content totally dependent on which angry fuckboy wrote it, but they all basically say the same shit:

Disobedient women, who are the weaker sex, are somehow also the ruination of men. They are godless hussies who will absolutely murder all the babies, and they most definitely yeet demons from their vaginas to assist in wreaking havoc upon the world. Oh, and the big, strong males are powerless to stop any of these things from happening, not even Christian-god.

If you ask me, that all sounds pretty rad, so my personal takeaway from is this?

Be more like Lilith.

CHAPTER TWO

Tarana Burke

She was born in 1973 in The Bronx and raised nearby in a low-income housing project, developing a passion for activism and community organizing at an early age.

A survivor of sexual assault as a child, as a teenager, and as an adult, years later she inadvertently planted the seed for an international movement after realizing that a mere two-word reply to someone who was, like her, a survivor of sexual assault could make all the difference:

Meet Tarana Burke.

As a teenager in the 1980s, Burke joined a youth-focused organization called 21st Century, which primarily put the emphasis on youth enrichment and development. During her involvement with the group, Burke headed campaigns to spotlight racism, economic injustices, and housing inequality. She chose to enroll at Alabama State University, a historically Black learning institution, to further develop her skills at organizing and launching social justice initiatives. Her leadership and advocacy remained a huge part of her life throughout her college career.

After graduating, she moved to Selma, Alabama, to work for 21st Century again, this time as an adult. Burke, in her day-to-day interactions at the organization, encountered many young women of color that were survivors of sexual violence and abuse.

Burke was also a survivor. She had been raped at the age of six by the child of a friend of her mother’s. She was molested several times over the course of a few years by a teenager from her neighborhood. And she was raped on a first date as an adult. And, Burke says, that tally doesn’t include all the harassment she experienced while just walking down the street.

She recalled a moment when she was talking to a young woman who confided that her mother’s boyfriend had been sexually abusing her. Burke was overcome with memories of her own past assaults that she had not effectively dealt with, and she wasn’t able to respond, instead essentially cutting this young woman off. She couldn’t offer the comfort that this woman was seeking, and she felt terrible. Looking back on that incident, Burke stated that all this woman truly needed at that moment in time was to hear the words, me too.

Burke attempted to enlist help from a local rape-crisis center but was informed that they weren’t willing to work with the victims unless they were referred from the local police department after filing a police report.

She knew in her heart that this was utter bullshit, mostly due to the fear many women, especially women of color, had when it came to seeking out help from the cops. So, in 2003, Burke started Just Be Inc., a nonprofit that helps women heal from sexual assault, and, during her work there, she began to use the now very recognizable term, me too, thus starting the movement in 2007.

Burke began her mission to help young women of color, providing resources and safe spaces for these women to share their individual but all-too-common stories.

The work is really about survivors talking to each other and saying, I see you. I support you. I get it," Burke says.

On October 15, 2017, not long after the New York Times article that shed light on the predator that is Harvey Weinstein, as well as the multiple allegations of sexual abuse lodged against him, actress Alyssa Milano employed #MeToo as a hashtag in a social media post. She encouraged women to also say me too if they, like she and a horrifyingly high percentage of women, had experienced sexual harassment or assault.

Burke’s friends caught wind of Milano’s post and notified her that the me too hashtag was gaining momentum out of nowhere. In no time at all, social media platforms were flooded with women’s stories, most concluding with #MeToo. A massive number of folks on social media responded to Milano’s tweet directly, and more than twelve million more used the hashtag across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, as many survivors now felt that they had the words and platform to tell their stories.

Burke was floored by Milano’s initial tweet and even more so by the overnight following it garnered, never having dreamt that her work from over a decade ago would end up helping millions of survivors worldwide.

Burke stepped up to help shape the movement that she herself had started years before to make it about empowermental empathy.

Time magazine named Burke, among a group of other prominent female activists dubbed the silence breakers, as a Time Person of the Year for 2017.

During the interview with Time Burke said, This is just the start. I’ve been saying from the beginning it’s not just a moment, it’s a movement. Now the work really begins.

Burke received the 2018 Prize for Courage from The Ridenhour Prizes, which is awarded to individuals who demonstrate courageous defense of the public interest and passionate commitment to social justice. The award was bestowed for giving legs to the phrase me too as a way to connect and empathize with the survivors of sexual assault.

Burke, who serves as Senior Director at Girls for Gender Equity in Brooklyn, engages in speaking events across the country to promote support for sexual assault survivors and calling for reform on how these cases are addressed as they happen.

She has also launched Me Too, Act Too, a crowd-sourced web presence that provides survivors, advocates and allies tools to work toward a world free of sexual violence, according to the organization.

One of the mistakes that we make on the movement side is that there’s so much judgment around what it means to be an activist or what it means to be active. And if you’re not doing it a certain way, then you’re not really contributing. And that’s not true, Burke asserts.

MTAT’s website was built with the intention of providing an accessible tool for folks without the ability to devote large chunks of time to activism, but who still want to contribute in a meaningful way.

If you are an armchair activist who is only able to post things on Twitter or Instagram or who only has an hour a week to contribute, but you do still feel passionate right now, you can do this, Burke says.

#MeToo

CHAPTER THREE

Betty White

The only child of Tess, a homemaker, and Horace, an