Marie Marvingt at the controls
The 4th quarter 2016 We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now WHTM pledge drive continues! Please send MONEY please? SERIOUS THANKS!
Marie Marvingt was a world-class badass, by almost anyone’s standards. Just reading Wikipedia’s capsule biography of the women who became known in her native France as “la fiancée du danger” makes me a little tired. Born in 1875, Mlle Marvingt was, variously, an
athlete, mountaineer, aviator and journalist. She won numerous prizes for her sporting achievements including those of swimming, cycling, mountain climbing, winter sports, ballooning, flying, riding, gymnastics, athletics, rifle shooting and fencing. She was the first woman to climb many of the peaks in the French and Swiss Alps. She was a record-breaking balloonist, an aviator and during World War I became the first woman to fly missions during conflict as a pilot. She was also a qualified surgical nurse, was the first trained and certified Flight Nurse in the world, and worked for the establishment of air ambulance services throughout the world.
Marvingt was also, sad to say, an early example of what feminists today call a “chill girl.” She was an accomplished woman who didn’t, apparently, think that most women could accomplish much of anything, at least in the overwhelmingly male-dominated arenas in which she herself had had so much success.
A friend of We Hunted the Mammoth passed along this newspaper clipping from 1910 in which the famed “woman aviator” explains that aviation isn’t really suitable for most women:
You can see the original article in context in the December 5th edition of The Coffeyville [Kansas] Daily Journal here.
H/T — Susan Barnum, aka @megalibrarygirl
I wouldn’t think 25% of men would be qualified, either. Interesting article, at any rate.
If the quote is accurate, then even someone as awesome as Marie Marvingt was unable to transcend the prejudices of her time. However, after a century of social progress, today’s Manospherians don’t have that excuse.
^^^
Anyways, I love the idea of having an occasional “cool woman” article. Blemishes and all, Marie’s pretty awesome.
Cool in all 3 senses of the word
1)she did lotsa interesting and badass stuff
2)she had metric tonnes of internalized misogyny
3)New Year’s Eve is a cold day to go flying
Hopped, skipped, jumped right over the line
But Marie couldn’t see the light divine
Flash to present day and present time
And look upon the skyline
Imperfect, such as it is
But it’s proven that not only can a woman be a whiz
But it’s not uncommon for them to succeed
And with a little more of a push we could take the lead
Ooh, ooh! *fidgets and sticks hand in air*
Edith Garrud please.
If we’re making suggestions…
http://www.dailypress.com/news/science/dp-nws-nasa-hidden-figures-20161122-story.html
oh! This looks like a great link!
http://www.themarysue.com/history-women-in-animation/
I can’t wait to read through it, you don’t hear about ladies in the animation industry, aside from Mary Blair, very often.
Mary Anning.
(What’s that, the female palaeontologist who specialises in marine life idolises another female palaeontologist who specialised in marine life? Holy shit, I never would have guessed.)
@ SFHC
Love me some paleontology! Strictly a hobby for me, I draw pictures of heavy equipment for a living.
Speaking of remarkable women, one from my neck of the woods is being honoured. Viola Desmond, who has been called Canada’s Rosa Parks, will be on the front of the new $10 note. Here’s a link to the CBC story.
I also recommend that you watch the “Heritage Minute” video at the bottom of the article.
They picked Viola Desmond?
eeeeeeeeeee
Joan of Arc did not allow women in her army. Despite this, i still consider her to be pretty awesome. Just like this woman.
It seems like people are listing cool girls not Cool Girls tm.
@Scildfreja – I know, right? I was rooting for her too.
@ weird eddie
You could apply for a job on that building site where Fred Flintstone works.
@ Alan
*snerk*
re: Viola Desmond; The U.S. Treasury is being* dragged kicking and screaming into putting a woman on a currency note… we AGAIN show ourselves to be a world leader in being late to the dance….
* was being… with The Trumpening, that’s likely all over, now
Y’all know about “rejected princesses”? An excellent collection of awesome women, real or fantasy, from around the world.
When it comes to badass ladies, I like Julie d’Aubigny, bisexual opera singer and swordswoman, known for her outrageous-at-the-time lifestyle.
I always wonder if they do that as a survival/success mechanism for getting accepted by the sexist people who would otherwise shut them out.
“No no, it’s cool! She may have a vagina, but she’s still one of us!”
To me, the most inspirational woman is Irena Sendler.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler
She was fiercely brave and fiercely kind.
I nominate this woman:
Marta Vieira da Silva
She is arguably one of the greatest athletes of all time. Her senior career started in 2000, when she was 14 years old. Brazil, a country world renowned for its football/soccer, didn’t have a national women’s league until 2013. Therefore, Marta played for local teams until moving to Sweden as a professional football player in 2004. At this time, she had already played for the Brazil national team for two years, winning both the Pan American Games and the Sudamericano Femenino (South America cup of nations) in 2003, as well as being named best player in the Under 20 World Cup.
Her first season of professional football, she was the league’s top scorer and named the world’s third best player as her team Umeå lost the league title by 1 point. However, she led the team to the title in the UEFA Women’s Cup, the most prestiguous club team tournament in women’s football, by scoring 3 goals in the final against Frankfurt. In the next few years, Umeå won the Swedish league four consecutive times, as well as grabbing a Swedish Cup title in 2007, as Marta led the league in scoring in 2005 and 2008. In these four years, she was named the world’s second best player in 2005 before winning the title three years in a row 2006-08. In 2007 she participated in another Pan American Games for Brazil, and won the title again.
In 2007 she led Brazil to a historic silver medal in the FIFA Women’s World Cup, with Marta becoming the top scorer and named best player of the tournament.
In 2009, Marta moved to the USA to play in the short-lived WPS league. The league existed for only three seasons, during which Marta played for three different teams, becoming the top scorer all three years while leading two teams to the title and a third team to a narrow loss in the post-season final.
As if that weren’t impressive enough, she actually went on a three month loan during the American off-season to join Santos in Brazil, where she competed in, and won, both the Copa do Brasil and the Copa Libertadores, which is the South American equivalent to the UEFA Women’s cup/Champions League. Marta scored 26 goals in 14 games for Santos, including 1 in the Libertadores final and 2 in the Brazilian Cup final.
She was again named the world’s best player in 2009 and 2010, extending her streak to 5 consecutive years as the world number one. In 2010 she won another title in Sudamericano Femenino while becoming top scorer with 9 goals in 7 games.
Following the collapse of the WPS in 2012, Marta moved back to Sweden to play for Tyresö, winning the league in her first season and finishing second in the Women’s Champions League the following year. She was the runner-up for world player of the year in 2011, 2012 and 2014, while finishing third in 2013.
As Tyresö went bankrupt in 2014, Marta was made a free agent and signed for Rosengård, where she went on to win the Swedish league title in 2014 and 2015.
Marta is now 30 years old. Looking back at her career, she was named among the top 3 players in the world in 11 consecutive seasons. She has scored 106 goals in 115 games for the Brazil national team, beating the second best scorer by 21, and the third best by 65 goals. Her 0.92 goals/game is far higher than any other Brazilian player, with the next best keeping an average of 0.78.
During her most successful years, the early days in Umeå, Marta scored an unbelievable 210 goals in 103 games, in other words averaging more than 2 goals/game over 4 years. She has won the Swedish league 7 times with 3 different teams. She is the all-time top scorer in the Women’s World Cup, despite playing for a team that has never won the competition.
Two years younger than me. :/
I’ve followed Marta’s career since the early 2000s, and I’ve seen her transform women’s football almost single-handedly. The biggest star before Marta was Birgit Prinz, who was a tall and powerful striker of the old, old, old school, relying on physical superiority rather than technique and skill. Mia Hamm was a fore-runner as a skilled, multi-faceted player, but Marta took it to a different level in a time where women’s football as a whole became more competitive. In Mia Hamm’s day, there wasn’t even an American professional league except for a few years in the early 00s. I truly believe that Marta’s immense success made it impossible/embarrassing for Brazil to continue without a professional national women’s league.
Marta! She was amazing. Still is.
My favorite inspiring athlete is Oksana Chusovitna. She’s a gymnast that has been around so long that she used to be on the Soviet team. Now she’s competing for her native Uzbekistan. She’s in her forties doing a sport most retire from in their early twenties. Not just competing, but kicking ass at it. She’s consistently made vault finals at the Olympics or world championships each season. She does more difficult vaults than a lot of the teenagers do. She rocks.
@wwth
Surely you mean U-becky-becky-becky-becky-stan-stan?
@Makroth – Agent of the Great Degeneracy
cf the fifth strip:
My awesome woman nominee:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl
I read that earlier, I think she’s a great choice! I also read many of the comments, but I could only get so far before disgust overwhelmed me.
@Hashtag Ravenclaw
If we’re just citing badass women from history, I’m gonna mention Grainne ni Mhaille (often Anglicized to Grace O’Malley), Sea-Queen of Connemara. She took command of one of her father’s ships at an early age, and eventually parlayed that into command of a whole fleet, with which she spent the next half century alternating between trading in Spain, France, Scotland and Ireland, running guns and mercenaries to Irish rebels, and robbing English shipping. She negotiated in person with Queen Elizabeth (the basic outcome of which was that Elizabeth agreed to let her sons out of prison and not hang them, in exchange for which Grainne would refrain from financing rebellions in the Pale (the English controlled portion of Ireland at the time).
Viola Desmond! Beat Rosa Parks to standing up by sitting down and integrating a segregated space, by nearly a decade. (As usual, Canadians get no credit, and often too late even at home, but hey.)
Ahem: must de-lurk to put in a pitch for Katya Budanova. (Can’t vouch for how good Wikipedia article is, but it seems at least a good intro. In its favor, it does cite the best scholarly monograph covering Budanova: Reina Pennington’s Wings, Women and War: Soviet Airwomen of World War II and Korea (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001)…..so whatever the source, Budanova is awesome. Mention Soviet women pilots and everybody usually just thinks of the “Night Witches” and that’s it…and *they* were indeed badasses!….but for badass awesome women VVS ***fighter ace*** Budanova (and Lilya Litvyak too) deserve to be up there!!! And she did it all in a Yak-1 and later freakin’ P-39 Aircobra. Neither were horrible fighter aircraft but think of the Fascists she would have shot down in a La-5, P-51D20, etc.!!!!!
@bina and other Canadians
http://www.deebrasseur.com
[early R.C.A.F. fighter pilot]
It seems like Ms. Marvingt flew in the Coupe Femina in 1910 in a wing-warping Antoinette aircraft, so I’m not surprised that she’d consider that no one who hadn’t been in sports all their life could fly any airplane. (Wing warping distorts the shape of the entire wing in order to shift the plane — and she had to do it with no hydraulics.) So I’m inclined not to argue with her on the physical front. She’d have needed muscle and endurance, but apparently she didn’t have enough. She lost the 1910 Coupe Femina to Hélène Dutrieu, who flew almost four times as far (167 km to Marvingt’s 45 km) in about three times her flight time (161 min to 53 min).
And she lost the cup again to Ms. Dutrieu in 1911, this time by only 6 km. That was the last time she competed in the Coupe, and it was discontinued during the war.
Her remarks about sang froid and decision making are total bull, on the other hand.
Has anyone mentioned Ching Shih yet? Who went from prostitute to pirate widow to ruler of a huge pirate army, undefeated by the Chinese, Portugese, and British navy, was eventually offered amnesty and retired on her terms, keeping all her loot, opened her own gambling house and died in old age.
At a panel discussing Kameron Hurley’s essay ‘We have always fought’, I asked whether anyone had done any academic work on historic women military leaders (like Joan of Arc, Ching Shih, and Grainne ni Mhaille, as well as Zenobia, Cleopatra, Queen Christina, Catherine the Great, Alexandra Kudasheva, Boudicca, the Trưng Sisters, and who knows how many others).
I’m interested in knowing how they presented themselves (as ‘honorary men’, as sexless, or as women), how they interacted with superiors, fellow commanders and their troops, how they overcame any obstacles to commanding men, what they may or may not have in common (it seems many of them led insurgencies or attacks on the status quo) and what differences and similarities we might see between men and women military leaders in terms of strategy, leadership style, handling information, etc.
As far as anyone knows no one has done anything like this, and it’s way outside my area of historical expertise (though I’ve recently been asked to look at some aspects of military management), so I’m hoping someone picks up this idea someday.
Edit window closed before I could add Deborah 🙁
A very long list of known women who fought in battles and duels from ancient times to about WW2 (after that there’s too many to keep track of. :))
A good jumping off point for more research (From ‘Rejected Princesses’).
The Master List of Historical Women in Combat
@wwth – Oksana Chusovitna is awesome! I saw her vaulting routine this past Olympics, and it was one of the ones that stood out for me.
@Dalillama – Grainne ni Mhaille/Grace O’Malley is a fascinating character. There’s a section about her in Finnegans Wake. If anyone’s interested, it’s pp. 21-22 – James Joyce calls her “grace o’malice”, “prankquean”, “ribberrobber” (i.e. river robber, but the rib thing is also a reference to Eve).
About Marie Marvingt and her special-snowflake attitude: from reading various things, I get the impression that essentialism flourished in the Victorian and modernist eras; “men are like THIS and women are like THAT” statements abounded, and differences were classed as exceptions. It wasn’t only gender essentialism – there were also a whole lot of pseudoscientific justifications for racism and classism.
Hi folks,
What’s the difference between a Chill girl and a Cool girl? Is there a difference?
Thanks
As far as I know, they’re the same thing.
Marie Marvingt did more for women than just about anyone of her era. I’ve just finished writing a biography of her, and I use that very article, where she basically says only 1/4 of women would make good pilots, to show how things get distorted. All the headlines about her remark generalized to “Women Not Good Flyers” (The Washington Herald), “Flying Not the Sport for Women” (El Paso Herald), “Says Women Will Not Excel in Air” (Trenton Evening Times), “Not Suitable for Women” (New Castle [Pennsylvania] Herald). Ha! As some percipient commenters have noted, the same is true of men. Marie was a literal woman — when they asked her about women, she told it like it was. Neither 100% of men OR women would make good pilots. I can hardly wait for y’all to read the book and see how, for one thing, she used her position as a journalist to illuminate women’s accomplishments and how, for another, she gave hundreds and hundreds of talks to schoolchildren, urging both girls and boys to take up sports, to consider aviation, to reach for the sky, and how, in the third place, she broke barriers and changed the face of sports for women (along with other good women, to be sure).