Wild Women:
Crusaders, Curmudgeons and Completely Corsetless Ladies in the Otherwise Virtuous Victorian Era
By Autumn Stephens
Conari Press, 250 pages, $12.95
Know any wild women? If you do, have a look at the book “Wild Women.” It’s a wonderful volume that offers thumbnail sketches, winningly written, of 150 “independent, iconoclastic and utterly outrageous foremothers.” Sprinkled throughout are spicy quotes from those women.
Listen to these chapter headings: “Flamboyant Flirts and Lascivious Libertines,” “Brazen Brides and Wicked Wives,” “Utterly Fearless Frontierswomen,” “Alarmingly Litigious Ladies” and “Scandalous Socialites and Hellraising Heiresses.”
Among the women Stephens writes about are:
– Pauline Cushman, an actress and a spy taken prisoner in the Civil War by Confederate soldiers.
– Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who ran away from her family to a life of freedom and later proclaimed, “Life is a verb!”
– Maria Mitchell, an amateur astronomer who discovered a comet that had eluded legions of professional (read “male”) scientists.
– Elisabet Ney, touted as “the founder of art in Texas.”
Why concern yourself with women who lived more than 100 years ago?
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Here’s why: Reading about women who rejected conventional lives during a particularly repressive era serves as inspiration for those who fret over what others might think and provides affirmation for those who live boldly regardless of what anyone thinks.
Or you can simply consider “Wild Women” a history lesson, one long overdue.
For instance, do you know about Delia Bacon (no relative of Francis), who wrote a 700-page book in 1857 denouncing William Shakespeare as a fraud? What about Sarah Winnemucca, a Piute who served as an Native American language interpreter and scout for the U.S. government?
And who knew about Lillian Blair, a San Francisco shop clerk who sued the former president of Guatemala in 1897 for “breach of proper dating protocol”?
Some of the women profiled in the book are better known than others. Included are Harriet Tubman (whom Stephens calls “conductor-in-chief of the Underground Railway”), Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary “Mother” Jones, Sojourner Truth, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Blackwell.
My personal favorites are here: Nellie Bly, the spunky reporter for the New York World who went around the world faster than Phileas Fogg, and Loie Fuller, who danced swathed in silk, revolutionized theatrical lighting and inspired artistes Nouveau.
As the title suggests, not every woman in the book was noted for doing great deeds.
Isabella Stewart Gardner, for instance, entertained legions of dashing gents. In her later years, when she established the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston as a repository for her art collection, she demanded that it be staffed only by handsome Harvard men.
The last page of “Wild Women” offers information on how to join the Wild Women Association. For a stamped, self-addressed envelope, the sender receives a membership card and a “Wild Woman” button.
I’ve got mine. And I’ll bet my button that the wild women in your life would enjoy this book.