Hell Hath No Fury (10 page)

The precarious maintenance of order was accompanied by the cautious Westernization of China, with the establishing of foreign-language schools, the creation of modern customs services, and the reform of the army and navy. Simultaneously, Tz'u-hsi gathered more power into her own hands, since the official wife, Tz'uan, was not interested in affairs of state. In 1873, when her son came of age, Tz'u-hsi refused to give up the regency. She declined a second time when he died in 1875 (he had begun to resent her, and there was a strong suspicion that his mother arranged his death). Instead, she flouted all precedents for the succession, adopted her three-year-old nephew as her son, and made him the new emperor Kuang-hsu. In 1881 Tz'u-an died, possibly from poisoning, and the late emperor's brother Prince Kung was removed in 1884.

In her fifties, Tz'u-hsi ostensibly retired to her sumptuous Summer Palace outside Peking (now Beijing), the rebuilding of which was funded by siphoning off revenue intended for the Chinese navy. The palace boasted a huge room filled with ingenious mechanical toys and dolls, an entire wing stocked with fabulous dresses, and another stuffed with jewels—she was obsessed with pearls and jade. She officially handed over power in 1889 but kept herself exceptionally well informed while making a fortune peddling influence.

In the 1890s, China was faced with a new regional military power in the form of Japan, which in 1894–95 expelled the Chinese from Korea. The blow to Chinese morale led Emperor Kuang-hsu to implement a new series of reforms designed to deal with the stifling corruption of China's bureaucracy. He also determined to confine Tz'u-hsi to the Summer Palace. His adoptive mother reacted swiftly. She rallied the support of conservative mandarins by moving reliable army units to Peking to replace guards loyal to Kuang-hsu. She then descended on the Forbidden City, with a train of eunuchs scurrying in her wake, to confront the quaking Son of Heaven and strike him full in the face with her fan, the only physical blow delivered in this remarkable coup. After compelling the emperor to issue an edict proclaiming her regent, she confined him to a palace where he could do no harm. The most dangerous reformers were beheaded or strangled, and Tz'u-hsi once again gathered up the reins of power.

That power, and the remnants of China's integrity, were now increasingly compromised by the encroachment of European powers seeking to divide the spoils of the decaying Manchu dynasty. Tz'u-hsi sent an imperial message to all the Chinese provinces: “The present situation is becoming daily more difficult. The various Powers cast upon us looks of tiger-like voracity, jostling each other to be first to seize our innermost territories…. Let us not think about making peace.”

The result was the Boxer Uprising, in which Chinese nationalists, encouraged by the empress, rose up against the foreigners. When the Boxers marched on Peking, the empress assured nervous diplomats that the Chinese army would crush the “rebels.” When they entered the capital, she did nothing. While the foreigners were besieged in their compounds outside the walls of Peking, the empress slipped away disguised as a peasant.

By the time she returned in 1901, the power of the Manchu dynasty had been destroyed utterly. The empress came back on terms dictated by the foreign powers, whose punitive expeditionary force had relieved a two-month siege and had crushed the Boxers. Measures reluctantly introduced by the empress included the ending of foot binding and the opening of state schools to girls. Railways were constructed, opium growing was suppressed, and the centuries-old civil service exams ended; work began on writing a constitution. The modern world that she had kept at bay for so long had finally broken in.

Nevertheless, she retained her ruthlessness to the end. When she was dying, she ensured that her adoptive son, Emperor Kuang-hsu, was poisoned. Tz'u-hsi had wielded greater direct power than Queen Victoria (whom she greatly admired) but in so doing had destroyed any lingering hope for a modernized imperial China. In a life largely spent shut away in Peking's Forbidden City, where the emperors of China lived among a colossal retinue of officials, eunuchs, concubines, and servants, she was unable to gain any insight into the workings of the modern world, something that historians have usually described as a disadvantage. However, when combined with her steely will and force of character, these were probably the factors that enabled the Dragon Lady, as she became known, to function as the virtual ruler of a vast and chaotic empire for almost fifty years.

Reference: Fascinating glimpses of life in Tz'u-hsi's court can be found in
Two Years in the Forbidden City
(1911), written by one of her ladies-in-waiting, Princess Der-ling.

3

RUNAWAYS AND ROARING GIRLS

Mavericks, Misfits, Malcontents, and Wild Ones—Women Seizing the Chance of War to Live and Fight as Men

You, young woman, only you can comprehend my rapture, only you can value my happiness! You, who must account for every step, who cannot go fifteen feet without supervision and correction…only you can comprehend the joyous sensations that filled my heart.

—Nadezhda Durova, who disguised herself as a man and became a Polish cavalry officer between about 1793 and 1816

F
ROM
Z
ENOBIA TO
M
ARGARET
T
HATCHER
,
THE CAPTAINS AND
the queens who held command in time of war were either born into power and wealth or else made their way up the social scale by turning the ruling system to their account. For others, war has always offered a unique opportunity to break out of the existing structures and make a new life elsewhere. Far from shunning warfare, for centuries some women ran toward it, fleeing their homes and families in their determination to escape their fate as females, whatever the cost, because the discomfort and danger of war was preferable to what they faced at home.

From earliest times, folklore and legend abound with stories of female runaways who took flight to avoid an enforced marriage, seclusion in a nunnery, or some other predetermined but unwelcome fate. Denied freedom and autonomy, they took their lives into their hands to avoid male control. Disguising themselves as men and losing themselves and any pursuers in the chaos of war was an obvious escape route. As the Middle Ages lurched toward a recognizably modern world, an unparalleled chance of freedom was offered to any woman who chafed against domesticity when the urge for adventure was beating in her heart. We will never know how many young women of the past saw the redcoats marching through their town, heard the irresistible call of the fife and drum, and ran after them, dazzled by brass and scarlet.

Men, too, could be easily seduced by the glamour of a martial life. A strong narrative thread in the stories of the women dubbed “she-soldiers” in the seventeenth century involves their search for husbands who had unwisely enlisted in a fit of enthusiasm, or had been forcibly press-ganged.

But countless men suffered this fate without wifely intervention. The women who chose to follow their men in disguise wanted the freedom of passing as a man, taking the risks of life as an adventurous man, and actively seeking conflict in an all-too-corseted women's world. From the seventeenth century onward, as the modern era dawned, their struggles mirrored the convulsions of the wider society, when women were beginning to reach for the personal freedoms denied them for thousands of years.

In their day, almost all these women, like
Deborah Sampson
(see Chapter 3), could not fit into their world as it was. Outsize personalities, they were women of action, aggression, physical resource, and fighting skill. Today they could be athletes, astronauts, or entrepreneurs, but in centuries past, warfare was the only opening they had. Accordingly, like the captains and the queens, they pushed the boundaries of their female roles to the limits of tolerance. Too fiery and volatile for conventional society, they had to find a wider arena for their verve and drive.

Undoubtedly some were mavericks and oddballs, a category into which many cross-dressing military women of all nationalities fell. In the fifteenth century,
Joan of Arc
(see Chapter 3) made her place in history as the quintessential woman fighter, the virgin warrior clad in fine armor and mounted on a horse. But the peasant Jeanne had no connection with war before she heard her voices from God telling her to dress and act as a man in order to drive the English out of France. Jeanne chose to die rather than to give up wearing men's clothes, a capital offense at the time. Without the cloak of patriotism and “divine inspiration,” her teenage rejection of her lot, her identity crisis, her hallucinations and delusions, can clearly be seen for what they were.

There are many reasons why women chose to dress and live as men. The longing to impress a father or to work off the stigma of being born a girl surfaces clearly in the story of
Nadezhda Durova
(see Chapter 3), a well-born runaway who served in the Russian army in the Napoleonic Wars, and who wistfully described herself as “wanting to be a son to my father.”

Another little-discussed motivation for female runaways is the desire to avoid not only marriage and domesticity but also childbirth. In an era before contraception, when married women had no right to refuse sex, giving birth often meant death. In these circumstances, the decision to adopt a man's lifestyle looks less like craziness than like simple common sense.

Yet anger is almost a prerequisite for a life apart, and the stories of these runaways and roaring girls carry recurrent themes of madness and women on the edge. Many of their careers were propelled by dreadful childhoods, by loss and bereavement in adulthood, or by both. Losing her husband and all three of her children drove the Civil War soldier
Loreta Janeta Velazquez
into action (see Chapter 3). War provided a vast and forgiving arena for such unconventional, disturbed, and alienated women to give some shape and purpose to their lives, or else to lose themselves in action when life itself became too much to bear.

And it is not all tragedy. Many of the more remarkable individuals who trod this path have found their lives commemorated in the literature of warfare. Some, like Nadezhda Durova and Deborah Sampson, enjoyed a measure of celebrity in their own lifetimes. Others, like
Flora Sandes
(see Chapter 3), carved out a life of action and fulfillment beyond their wildest dreams.

Whatever their individual reasons, women through the ages have taken this path. As the first standing armies were created from the seventeenth century onward, numbers of women donned uniforms and served in the ranks as men, establishing a tradition that lasted well into the nineteenth century.

With the advent of written records, their stories become easier to trace. Between 1550 and 1840, 119 women are known to have enlisted in the Dutch armed forces. The women represented a range of nationalities, and most were between sixteen and twenty-five years old. About half of them were sailors, who spent at least part of their service in disguise before being discovered.

The information we have about them comes from the military proceedings that followed their exposure. As they spent most of their lives masquerading as men, they must have been haunted by the fear of discovery every day. How did they handle the problems of urination, defecation, or menstruation under the rough-and-ready conditions of former times, especially within the confines of a ship? Inevitably very few were flamboyant, preferring to keep their heads down and maintain a low profile, like Miranda Stuart, better known as
James Barry
(see Chapter 3). As a military doctor, Barry was unusual in maintaining a professional career for an entire lifetime without her true identity coming to light.

Discovery did not always mean automatic discharge from the service. Durova's secret was revealed after she incautiously contacted her father, telling him of her new life. Significantly, perhaps, the Russians seemed to be more relaxed than other nations about the presence of women in the ranks. This led to the formation in World War I of the women's Battalion of Death, a unique female fighting formation (see
Bochkareva, Maria,
Chapter 4). In World War II, the Soviet Union was the only nation to commit women to air combat (see
Night Witches,
Chapter 7).

Exposure often came when the women were wounded, obliging them to treat their own injuries rather than submit to the ministrations of army doctors. Whatever their war history, the time came when all these women could no longer fight. Most of them finally settled down to a quiet life and, like all old soldiers (see
Michel, Louise
, Chapter 3), simply faded away.

BARRY, JAMES

Miranda Stuart, British Army Doctor, b. 1795, d. 1865

“James Barry” had a distinguished but turbulent career as a military doctor in the British colonies, rising to the position of Inspector-General of Military Hospitals in Canada. He would certainly have remained a footnote to medical history but for the fact that after his death, it was discovered that the eminent army surgeon was a woman.

Barry's origins are obscure—she was an orphan—but it has been suggested that she was related to the distinguished artist James Barry. At the age of fifteen she enrolled at the University of Edinburgh as James Barry, a “frail-looking young man” with the “form, manners and voice of a woman,” to study literature and medicine. This may have been the reason for her masquerade, since all forms of higher education were barred to women in the British Isles at the time, and she would never have been admitted to study as a woman. She took her medical degree in 1812 and, following a period of study in London, joined the army in 1813 as a medical assistant.

In 1816 she was posted to the garrison at Cape Town in South Africa as an assistant surgeon. Here Barry assumed a wide range of responsibilities, including the regulation of the sale of drugs and the inspection of jails, and acquired a reputation for decisiveness and great speed in difficult operations, an essential skill in the days before anesthesia. However, the speedy surgeon was also a peppery and disputatious character, and she lost her civil role in the Cape Colony in 1825.

Barry later served as a staff surgeon in Mauritius and Jamaica before becoming principal medical officer on the island of St. Helena, a posting that saw more disputes with her colleagues and superiors, and from which she was returned to England under arrest. The maintenance of a male mask must have imposed an acute strain—Barry is known to have fought at least one duel and sought many more. Nevertheless, she survived these setbacks, possibly through the influence of friends in high places, and went on to serve as principal medical officer in Trinidad, Malta, and Corfu, where she provided medical facilities for servicemen wounded in the Crimean War.

In her medical career she is known to have performed at least one caesarean section and never to have shrunk from making controversial decisions about sanitation and the diet and accommodation of her patients. She clashed with
Florence Nightingale
(see Chapter 8) over the treatment of the Crimean wounded and wrote a report on the treatment of syphilis and gonorrhea with a plant from the Cape of Good Hope.

In 1857 Barry was posted to Canada as inspector general of military hospitals. She fell ill with influenza in the spring of 1859 and, after being treated by Dr. George William Campbell, later dean of the medical faculty at McGill University, returned to England on half pay. During her life it is thought that her gender was known to the high command of the British Army and at least one fellow physician. After her death, rumors about her identity rapidly spread and the registrar general ordered an autopsy on Barry. When it was concluded that she was female, her military funeral was canceled. However, recent research has indicated that Barry might have been a male hermaphrodite who had feminine breast development and external genitalia.

Reference: Rachel Holmes,
The Secret Life of Dr. James Barry: Victorian England's Most Eminent Surgeon,
2000.

DAHOMEY, WARRIOR WOMEN OF

1600–1900

The warrior women of Dahomey, an ancient kingdom in West Africa and present-day Benin, first came to the attention of European travelers in the latter half of the sixteenth century. A German book published in 1598,
Vera Descriptio Regni Africani,
describes an African royal court whose palace guard consisted of women, and similar royal formations occurred elsewhere in the world from ancient times, particularly in the East. The kings of ancient Persia had female bodyguards, as did a prince of Java.

As late as the nineteenth century, the king of Siam, now Thailand, was guarded by a battalion of four hundred women armed with spears. They were said to perform drills better than male soldiers and were crack spear-throwers. Women in general were regarded as more loyal and trustworthy bodyguards than men, because they were less likely to be bribed or suborned; many rulers chose female bodyguards for this reason.

But the women of Dahomey outclassed them all. More than 250 years after the first reference, we catch sight of them again in the high summer of the British Empire when the British general Sir Garnet Wolseley, in a report on his successful campaign against the Ashanti (1873–74), compared his energetic and disciplined Fanti female porters to the king of Dahomey's “corps of Amazons.”

Eighteenth-century accounts of Dahomey by European merchants and slave traders—slavery was the basis of the kingdom's wealth—paint a picture of a colorful feudal world whose kings were surrounded by hundreds of serving girls and guarded by armed women. One of Dahomey's kings, Bossa Ahadee, would march in ceremonial procession accompanied by several hundred wives, surrounded by female messengers and slaves, and escorted by a guard of 120 men armed with blunderbusses and 90 armed women.