Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (23 page)

The issue that nearly got Anne Royall dunked was separation of church and state, a favorite cause of hers. She’d exposed a plan by a prominent local minister to undermine it by pushing for the election of certain Christian candidates (a problem you might recall from, oh,
every
election you’ve ever voted in; it’s why at least half of Congress spontaneously combusts when you mention Planned Parenthood) and protested the use of a firehouse—a federal building—to hold religious services. This sort of thing reduces Bill O’Reilly to blithering rage well into the twenty-first century. It was far less popular at the dawn of the nineteenth: People surrounded her house, taunted her, and threw pebbles at the windows until she stuck out her head and swore at them, hence the “scold” ruling. Strangely, this wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to Anne Royall at the hands of a disgruntled reader. One religious shopkeeper pushed her down a flight of stairs. Her opinions on religious zealotry were not significantly changed by the experience.

Which is to say: If John Quincy Adams was afraid of Anne Royall, he had good reason to be. The woman was a goddamn Terminator. She could not be scared, and she could not be stopped: Court rulings, public harassment, and attempts on her life notwithstanding, she kept publishing until her death at the age of eighty-five. She wasn’t always right, or even admirable—she was on the wrong side of abolition, for one thing—but she was a historically formidable human being. And (Alice Morse Earle doesn’t even mention this) she was quite probably the first female journalist in the United States.

And yet, for all that, she was remembered by successive generations as a crazy bitch who almost got thrown into a river. If it can happen to Anne Royall, who left a larger-than-average paper trail, one wonders how many other women’s stories have been lost to us, through the strategic application of “insanity” diagnoses or public humiliation. How many firsts are still waiting for us, in those moldy, decaying old books, needing only a little careful dusting-off to come back to life?

“You say that this book is about trainwrecks,” my friend Annette told me, when I’d been gushing a little too much about Mary Wollstonecraft again, “but these women don’t seem wrecked. They seem
triumphant
.”

It’s true: Dig a little into even the most abject-seeming
wrecks and you usually find something to celebrate; some unique bit of ingenuity, or intelligence, hiding inside the official record of downfall and disgrace. Louise Augustine Gleizes, the much-photographed poster girl for hysteria, managed to escape La Salpêtrière in the middle of the night dressed as a boy and was never seen again; for all the time people spent staring at her face, nobody recognized it in a different context. Blanche Wittman’s second act is even stranger: After Charcot died, and the staff of La Salpêtrière was regrettably forced to admit that she’d been sane all this time, she found work in their X-ray department. From there, she went on to befriend a woman by the name of Marie Curie, and became her lab assistant. The first Nobel Prize ever awarded to a woman would not have been possible without the work of someone whom art history has immortalized as a voluptuous, half-dressed lunatic.

But, more than that, writing about the trainwrecks of history gives the strange sensation of history itself becoming fluid. These women, almost to a one, seem as if they would fit into the twenty-first century more easily than their virtuous counterparts and critics; they seem like women dislocated in time.

Most obviously, Mary Wollstonecraft’s scandalous sex life is now, by and large, the norm; not only are live-in relationships completely unremarkable, and late marriages (“late” here meaning “after age twenty-five”) more common than ever, but the number of women who
never
marry
has been rising steadily (
8 percent in 1960 versus 17 percent in 2012), and single motherhood is increasingly something that women choose for themselves. The average mother today is older, more educated, and more single than she would have been even twenty years ago. In 2008, 41 percent of new mothers were unmarried (
as compared to 28 percent in 1990) and, most significantly, this does not appear to be any kind of tragedy: 87 percent of all parents, single parents included, said that they chose to carry the pregnancy to term because of
“the joy of having children.” What made you a “prostitute” and a free-love radical in Wollstonecraft’s time now just makes you a mom.

Likewise for Charlotte’s forbidden crush, Plath’s divorce, or even Valerie and Billie’s fluid sexuality and relationships with women; all these things used to tar a woman as a deviant (and still might, in some evangelical churches) but increasingly, they’re just part of life. Lindsay Lohan was scorned, laughed at, and subject to vile curiosity and speculation for dating Sam Ronson, but Miley Cyrus coming out of the closet might have been the one moment when the Internet
did
approve of her. Where
South Park
was able to release an episode like “Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset” in 2004 without fearing that America would rise up to defend Paris Hilton’s virtue, its 2015 premiere, “Stunning and Brave,” took as its premise the idea that people were
too eager
to say nice things about fellow reality-show diva Caitlyn Jenner. Yesterday’s unforgivable transgressions are
today’s normal lives, and—unless we make our living out of saying hateful things about women, in which case, we might do some public complaining—we register them without a blink.

But the fact that sexual and political standards trend leftward over time is not news. In fact, some of the women who seemed boldest and most frightening in their time strike us as conservative now. When writing them up, I’ve tried to stress the ways they were ahead of the curve (it’s hardly difficult to find negative coverage, after all) but it’s easier for a modern reader to note that Wollstonecraft and Brontë failed to deal seriously with slavery, or to recoil from Solanas’s crude, cruel caricatures of transgender women, than to see how strange they were in their historical moment. Time moves on, and the edges of gender theory now are miles away from anything that even our own consciousness-raising mothers and grandmothers imagined.

So it’s particularly thrilling to bump into these women at the edges: to realize that some of them still have things to teach us today, might be right in ways we haven’t even figured out yet.

In 2015, Mary Mitchell published an op-ed in the
Chicago Sun-Times
, arguing that prostitutes could not be raped:
“When you agree to meet a strange man in a strange place for the purpose of having strange sex for money, you are putting yourself at risk for harm,” she wrote. “It’s tough to see this unidentified prostitute as a victim. And because this
incident is being charged as a criminal sexual assault—when it’s actually more like theft of services—it minimizes the act of rape.”

I became aware of this article, not on its own merits, but because of the huge blowback surrounding it. One of the many nice things about feminism’s evolution over the years is the fact that, by now, most forward-thinking people regard sex workers as human beings, and rape as a crime.
Salon
,
Jezebel, The Huffington Post
, and the other usual suspects all weighed in to disabuse Mitchell of her beliefs to the contrary.

“All survivors of rape—no matter who they are or what they do—deserve our support,” wrote Anne Theriault at the
Daily Dot
, summing up the basic points of the response. “Rape is rape, whether or not you fit someone’s profile of what a perfect victim looks like.”

Strangely, this all came along just as I was reading up on Billie Holiday—who was, early in her life, a sex worker—and came upon this bit from
Lady Sings the Blues
:

“Even if you’re a whore, you don’t want to be raped,” she had said. “A bitch can turn twenty-five hundred tricks a day, and she still don’t want nobody to rape her.”

It was the strangest thing. A couple of sentences, transcribed in 1956, had floated into my life, and they managed to sound exactly contemporary. Maybe, at the time, this had been part of the “harsh” language and “bitterness” that turned reviewers’ stomachs, but every word of this (including,
yes, Billie’s casual use of “bitch” to mean “woman”—it was such a point of contention with her editors that she resorted to outright trolling them, writing
“change ‘bitch’ to ‘whore’ ” on one page of the manuscript) could show up on somebody’s Twitter or Tumblr dashboard today.

If this keeps happening—if the disgraced women of history keep turning out to exist outside it, waiting for us on the road of progress decades or centuries ahead of where we expected them to stand—then one wonders what we’ll discover about all the women we hate today: whether attracting scorn and disgrace is not a problem, but a distinction; whether every woman who viscerally upsets us is not in fact moving a bit faster than the rest of us, standing so far ahead we can’t yet see her clearly, waiting for the world to catch up with what she knows.

•

Anatomy of a Trainwreck

THEROIGNE DE MERICOURT & MARIE ANTOINETTE

She was a singer. An entertainer. She was not wealthy growing up, but she had learned piano, and could sing very well, and could support herself on the stage. As all entertainers do, she found herself in the eyeline of several men, some
powerful; one, an infantry officer, seduced her and vanished from her life. Their daughter died of smallpox. Another, an older man, a marquis, financed her lavishly on the condition that he kept complete control of her life. According to her, things were never physical. She fell in with other men, and the marquis became jealous, and she had to get rid of him.

All this came up as character evidence in her trial. Theroigne de Mericourt (a stage name; she was born Anne-Josephe Terwagne, in Marcourt) was being accused, among other things, of trying to overthrow the French government.

Nowadays, most of us think we know the French Revolution, if only on a rudimentary, seventh-grade-social-studies level. We know about the incompetent King Louis XIV; we know that the country was nearly bankrupt, and that the price of basic survival had gone up and up (bread, notoriously, was out of reach for most peasants); we know that, in the meantime, a group of idealistic young folks (journalists, law school students) had imbibed enough of the Enlightenment’s ideals to foment a massive uprising, to tear down the walls of the Bastille and free the prisoners inside, to kill the king and queen, to overthrow aristocracy. And we also know that the plan to “overthrow the aristocracy” fell apart, almost at once, into a new and even more chaotic form of tyranny: there were street riots that became massacres, laws against “counter-revolutionary” sentiments and thought crimes, show trials and politically convenient executions (Camille Desmoulins, the young writer whose impassioned
speech at a café launched the attack on the Bastille and therefore started the French Revolution proper, was executed early on for not being revolutionary enough), the infamous guillotine, and, ultimately, crazy old Robespierre, who not only tried to forge his own mandatory French religion, but also beheaded the very citizens he’d tried to free, sometimes just for saying things like “a fig for the Revolution!” (A charming expression from a more innocent time; today, we would say
“I don’t give a fuck.”)

The French Revolution is either the Enlightenment’s most glorious moment (to this day, left-wing magazines like
Jacobin
are named after Revolutionary factions; this is not unreasonable, given that the French Revolution invented the actual concept of “right” and “left” wings) or its most gruesome excess, depending on who you ask, and where they sit on the political spectrum. But one thing tends to remain the same, no matter who you’re talking to: Everyone sees it as the work of radical men.

We tend to forget that, at the time, one of the more scandalous and frightening things about the Revolution was that women—assassin Charlotte Corday, writer Olympe de Gouges, or the everyday women who stormed Versailles and were often the most enthusiastic members of the audience at public executions—were taking an unprecedented role in public life. We tend to forget that, when it was actually happening, those who opposed the Revolution thought it made sense to blame Theroigne.

As an idealistic young woman living in Paris, she had hosted salons, where Revolutionary thinkers—Camille Desmoulins was a good friend—came to chat, and sometimes meet with publicists. The fact that Theroigne apparently slept with none of them raised a few eyebrows: “I have seen a number of wise men, who are widely respected, becoming amorously disposed towards this little person,” wrote one newspaper, “although she rejected their advances with a Spartan pride, which they much laughed at subsequently, when they learned this exceedingly scrupulous beauty was simply a kept woman … The most innocent jests cause her to blush; the slightest provocation irritates her and yet she never spends her time in the company of anyone else but men.”

If Theroigne was not looking to find a new man in these salons, what on Earth could she be doing? Well, among other things, she was attempting to plot a revolution that gave women a full and equal voice in the new France. It was an important cause for her, and one for which she would catch quite a lot of hell later in life. But her feminist politics escaped the attention of the press at the time, for the same reason that they escaped the attention of her fellow revolutionaries; nobody really cared about them. Feminism just wasn’t on the agenda. It wasn’t done.

What people cared about—cared about passionately, excessively, to a degree that confounded both logic and common sense—was what she
looked
like. Theroigne, the
entertainer, had hit on the precise way to make her every statement both memorable and newsworthy: This strange, radical woman, people said, actually went around dressed as a
man
.