Trollheart

Yes, in a perfect world there would be little or no distinction between the sexes, certainly no bias on one side or the other, but sadly we don’t live in a perfect world, nor are we ever likely to, and our world has been, like it or not, male dominated ever since, well, forever really. If you’re a Christian, this sense of entitlement is drilled into you from a young age through the Bible, and the story of the Garden of Eden, where we’re told that the weak woman Eve was responsible for getting her and her hubby thrown out of Paradise by an irked God who snapped “Didn’t I tell you to leave that fucking tree alone? Didn’t I? You think I planted the Tree of Knowledge just so you two losers could benefit from it, and make yourselves as me? Fuck off out of my garden! Go on, do one!” (Actual quote).

This fantasy has given us men the mistaken belief that we are better than women, and has instilled in our gender as literally God-given fact that we are the masters of the Earth. If it wasn’t for damn women listening to suspicious serpents, we could still be running around in the nip, eating fruit and completely unaware of words like mortgage, heart attack and cancer. And so Man’s superiority is established from the moment we can understand what we’re told, and we see the result of this all around us, even today, where, despite having made major advances in the last century, women are still struggling to be treated as equals.

And history is no better. Well, given that it’s almost all been written by men, what would you expect? Reading through a history book, apart from the obvious ones we can’t ignore or airbrush out, like Queen Elizabeth I, Marie Curie, Joan of Arc, Margaret Thatcher and others, we have, as men, done our level best to ignore, push to one side or bury entirely the contribution our opposite sex has made to our civilisation. There are certain things we have to acknowledge, but where we can, we have always shoved the troublesome woman into a dark room and locked the door, walked away with the key whistling innocently.

But though women remained silent for centuries, hardly even given a voice to use in their lives, seen as property or at best an inconvenience by their husbands or other male counterparts, the silence has been broken recently and a whole slew of books now trumpet the stories of the women time forgot, who have been all but erased from history. This journal will not be concentrating solely on them, because as the title says, it’s a story of the good, bad and forgotten women who have helped make our world what it is today. Many of these brave and pioneering women you will all be familiar with: those mentioned above, as well as writers like Jane Austen and the Brontes, leaders like Cleopatra, Mary Queen of Scots and Hilary Clinton (um) as well as less salubrious characters such as Ruth Ellis, Ma Barker and Aileen Wournos, though in general I am going to try to avoid any unnecessary crossover with my Serial Killers or Most Evil journals. I’m sure there’ll be plenty to go around.

But did you know that the person to pioneer the practice of defence counsel in the USA was a woman? Or that a woman held together the fragmenting French court during the worst years of the religious wars that raged across Europe in the sixteenth century? Were you aware Hollywood screen queen Hedy Lamarr was responsible for creating radar - well, part of it - and that her work led to what we know today as GPS and Bluetooth? These are the kind of stories that, while it would be unfair and inaccurate to say have all been buried by historians, don’t tend to really be known unless you go looking for them. And you can’t go looking for something unless you know to, well, go looking for it.

So here is where I will try, in my poor, inadequate way, to redress the balance as much as I can, by telling you not only about the famous and infamous women in history, about whom most if not all of us know, but the unsung heroes, the buried secrets, the figures pushed into the background, the forgotten women of humanity’s history. I’m sure some of you ladies out there are saying it’s not my place to write such a journal, and you know, it’s probably not. But I reckon I’m the only one who would undertake such a project, so I guess you’re stuck with me. Hopefully I can do you proud, or at least not completely fuck it up. I guess we’ll see.

This journal will not run on any sort of a timeline, nor will it really be organised in any significant way. My intention is to hop, skip and jump through history, going maybe back to the fifth century BC and then jumping to World War II, coming up to date before heading back to the Napoleonic Wars. So all over the place, really. It doesn’t matter, because no matter what century or era you lived in, women were there, doing what they do. It’s just that for the better part of our history, we as men have ignored and kept them down, laughed at or ignored their achievements (or in some cases, stolen them as our own) and shook our heads at how such silly, pretty things could ever consider that they would find their own place in history without us.

Well, that ends now.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018