Category: HERstory Lesson

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HERstory Lesson: Sir Lady Java

Carleen Loney/THE CONCORDIAN @shloneys

How she fought against the transphobic Rule Number 9

Sir Lady Java is an American transgender rights activist and performer. She performed in the Los Angeles area from the mid-1960s to 1970s.

Java was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1943 and transitioned at a young age with the support of her mother.

After singing and dancing in local clubs, she moved to Los Angeles to further her career and by 1965, performed in a nightclub owned by Comedian Redd Foxx that welcomed other great entertainers of the time like Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Pryor, Flip Wilson, Rudy Ray Moore, LaWanda Page, and Don Rickles.

In September 1967, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) ordered Redd Foxx’s club to cancel Java’s performances, but they didn’t comply. The LAPD then threatened to fine the club and arrest Foxx if they continued hosting her, using a city ordinance against cross-dressing.

Before today’s war on drag shows and the fight to ban them, there existed laws like Rule Number 9. The city ordinance in Los Angeles, California, stated, “No entertainment shall be conducted in which any performer impersonates by means of costume or dress a person of the opposite sex, unless by special permit issued by the Board of Police Commissioners.”

As part of the rule, performers had to wear a minimum of three “properly gendered” items on them.

Even though any form of public gender nonconformity had been outlawed in Los Angeles since 1898, the Board of Police Commissioners developed Rule Number 9 in 1940 to require bar owners to get special permission to host entertainment which included any sort of cross-dressing.

As a response to LAPD’s crackdown, Foxx’s club applied for a permit to host Lady Java in October 1967, but was refused.

On October 21, Java protested against the rule by picketing in front of Foxx’s club advocating for her right to work. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), she challenged Rule Number 9 as unconstitutional in court.

The court rejected her case, stating only club or bar owners could sue the police department. Java and the ACLU could not find any owner willing to join them in their fight.

In 1969, Rule Number 9 was ultimately struck down by the California Supreme Court in a separate case. Although Java’s case was not the one to dissipate the transphobic rule, she is recognized as a trailblazer for transgender performers and drag queens.

As stated on the ACLU’s website, police at the time were not just cracking down on a couple of drag queens — their fight against “deviant” activities actually targeted the whole LGBTQ+ community. 

“They were attacking drag performers in order to target bars and clubs that often served as the only public places where gays and lesbians could gather. The police made no real distinction between gay people and transgender folks,” reads the website.

With today’s political climate in the US directly targeting the drag community, it is important to remember Lady Java’s activism and fight against Rule Number 9.

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HERstory Lesson: Julia Butterfly Hill

Carleen Loney/THE CONCORDIAN @shloneys

From saving forests one tree at a time, to redirecting taxes

Julia Lorraine Hill is an American activist and environmentalist, known for living in a tree for over two years as a protest against deforestation.

Hill adopted the nickname “Butterfly” from the age of 7, when a butterfly landed on her finger during a hike and stayed there for the duration of the walk.

At age 22, she survived a major car crash involving a drunk driver who hit her car from behind, which resulted in the steering wheel penetrating her skull. Her injuries required to re-learn how to walk and talk.

“As I recovered, I realized that my whole life had been out of balance… I had graduated high school at 16, and had been working nonstop since then, first as a waitress, then as a restaurant manager. I had been obsessed by my career, success, and material things. The crash woke me up to the importance of the moment, and doing whatever I could to make a positive impact on the future,” she said in a biography.

This is what made Hill embark on a spiritual journey that made her more aware of the environmental crisis, specifically the deforestation of redwood forests in Stafford, California. 

She told the Washington Post in 2004 that “the steering wheel in my head, both figuratively and literally, steered me in a new direction in my life.”

Shortly after recovering from her accident, Hill attended a fundraiser in Humboldt County, California to save the forests.

At the time, the Pacific Lumber Company was clear-cutting the redwood forest, a forestry practice which results in most (if not all) trees in a forest to be cut down. On New Year’s Eve 1996, their practices left the community of Stafford buried in mud and tree debris after it had fallen down due to a landslide.

This is when the community demanded action and asked for a volunteer to tree-sit for a week in protest of the clear-cutting. According to Hill, she was the only one willing to do so.

She ascended the 200-foot tall and 1,000-year- old tree, later nicknamed Luna, on December 10, 1997. The week-long protest turned into a 738-day one, where Hill lived on a small platform. A support crew would often come to provide her with food, medicine and necessary survival gear.

During her time in the air, she endured the harsh weather conditions with only a sleeping bag to keep her warm and was harassed and intimidated by the Pacific Lumber Company.

Hill and the Pacific Lumber Company came to an agreement in 1999 for them to not cut down Luna and preserve all other trees within a 200-meter radius, in exchange for Hill to evacuate the tree. As part of the agreement, the $50,000 that was collected by the environmental groups supporting Hill’s tree-sit were also donated to Humboldt State University to support research into sustainable forestry.

Luna is now protected under the non-profit Sanctuary Forest and a team of experts is constantly looking after her.

Hill’s history of civil disobedience does not stop there. In 2003, she started redirecting her taxes to places she believed “our tax money should be going.”

Tax redirection is a form of direct action that takes place through refusal to pay taxes, and in Hill’s case, redirecting that money to different causes. She gave $150,000 to different environmental and social programs that work to provide solutions such as alternatives to incarceration.

After years of dedication to various social causes, Hill seems to have retired her activism career, as her website reads she is “no longer available for anything at all relating to me being Julia Butterfly Hill.” She still leaves behind a legacy of important and concrete actions.

As our world is in an ever-growing climate crisis and younger generations seem more discouraged than ever, Hill’s story is a perfect example of the overworked environmental activist burnout.
“People forgot there was only one of me and tens upon tens of thousands of everyone wanting, needing, asking, hoping, and demanding,” she said.

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HERstory Lesson: Billie Jean King

Carleen Loney/THE CONCORDIAN @shloneys

How she humbled a male athlete’s ego in a post-second-wave feminist climate

Billie Jean King is a former American tennis player and six-time Wimbledon champion. Active from the 1970s to the 1990s, she also won seven Federation Cups, the international team competition for women’s tennis, now named after her. She is considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time.

Despite all of this, King is mostly remembered for a match she played against a 55-year-old man when she was 29.

Dubbed the ‘Battle of the Sexes,’ the match was initiated by top men’s tennis player Bobby Riggs, who claimed “there’s no way a woman can play tennis with a good man tennis player.”

Riggs, who played in the 1930s and 1940s, said he could beat any woman in tennis and challenged King to play for $100,000 on Sept. 20, 1973.

King, who campaigned for gender equality in women’s sports, first rejected the challenge. However, after Riggs challenged and beat Margaret Court, she accepted.

Coming out of the second-wave feminist movement, one that focused on equality and discrimination, this match held important cultural significance on the gender politics that reflected the social climate at the time.

Riggs said it best himself in a Tonight Show interview, where he said that he planned to “set back [the] women’s lib movement about another 20 years.”

When asked by host Johnny Carson if he liked women, Riggs replied “I like them real good in the bedroom, the kitchen and when they bring you the slippers and the pipe.” Interrupted by a mix of cheers and boos, he continued and said: “I really think the best way to handle women is to keep them pregnant and this way, they don’t worry about getting out in the men’s world and competing for jobs and trying to get equal money and all that baloney.”

Although some might say that Riggs was just playing into a character to bring hype to the game, we cannot deny that comments like these would not pass on any of today’s prime-time television talk shows, jokes or not.

Whether an intimidation tactic or not, it worked as King said “I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn’t win that match. It would ruin the women’s tour and affect all women’s self-esteem.”

90 million viewers tuned in from 37 countries to watch the Battle of the Sexes go down in Houston Astrodome. To put it into perspective, the Super Bowl that year received 53 million viewers on average.

It was in front of this large audience that King beat Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3, which makes this statement by Riggs even more delightful: “Would you believe that she said she could take the pressure and play for the money as well as I can?” Yes, Bobby, yes, she can.

This was more than just a tennis match — it was a significant cultural event that helped garner greater respect and recognition of female athletes.

Although King recognized the importance of this match, she said that “to beat a 55-year-old guy was no thrill for me. The thrill was exposing a lot of new people to tennis.”

Indeed, it is important not to forget that King did so much more than just win against an old misogynist at tennis. She was at the forefront of the Women’s Tennis Association, convincing her colleagues to form a players’ union. She founded the WomenSports magazine and Women’s Sports Foundation, an organization promoting the advancement of women and young girls in sports.

As King said it best, “In the ’70s, we had to make it acceptable for people to accept girls and women as athletes. We had to make it OK for them to be active. Those were much scarier times for females in sports.”

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There were scarier times indeed, as even King’s sexual orientation became a subject of headlines in the 1980s. After a palimony suit was brought forth by one of her lovers, King had to come out publicly as bisexual, which made her lose $2 million in commercial endorsements.

At the end of the day, I think her story, despite being heroic and bad-ass, goes to show just how much women need to prove themselves outside of their sport in order to make an impact outside of it.

In a 1984 interview with Parade Magazine, King said, “My only regret is that I had to do too much off the court. Deep down, I wonder how good I really could have been if I [had] concentrated just on tennis.”

This only opens the door to one question: what are we waiting for to recognize women athletes as athletes and stop expecting them to also be advocates and publicists for their own sports?

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HERstory Lesson: Athénaïs de Montespan

Amelia Hart/THE CONCORDIAN @ameliaohart

The crazy life of Louis XIV’s number one mistress

Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, Marquise of Montespan was born in 1640 from many different royal ancestries. At the age of 20, due to her parents’ status and royalty, she was made maid-of-honor to the king’s sister-in-law, Princess Henrietta Anne of England, and was appointed lady-in-waiting, a female personal assistant, to Queen Maria Theresa of Spain.

In 1663, she married Louis Henri de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis of Montespan. The title of Marquis designates a nobleman of hereditary rank (in Britain, it’s below a duke, but above an earl). Together, they had two children and lived close to the court so that Madame could carry out her duties as lady-in-waiting. 

She had everything going for her: she was beautiful, cultured and politically-aware. She knew her worth. As per her memoir, confidence was not something she lacked: “I was not slow to perceive that there was in my person something slightly superior to the average intelligence — certain qualities of distinction which drew upon me the attention and the sympathy of men of taste.”

In 1666, Madame de Montespan was in her mid-twenties and trying to replace Louise de La Vallière’s as Louis XIV’s main mistress. At the time, it was common for the king to have two wives: the queen for political affairs, and the maîtresse-en-titre that would serve as a social companion. Madame de Montespan got closer to La Vallière and even became her confidant, all while still keeping a close relationship with Queen Maria Theresa.

While both women were pregnant, she cleverly started to entertain the king in private. It is said she purposefully showed him her ankle (big hoe move for the 17th century) while getting out of a carriage. This led to the beginning of their relationship. Apparently, she would mock people in order to make the king laugh and her sarcasm hurt so much that courtiers feared it. It is also said that another way she seduced Louis XIV was by “accidently” dropping her towel while he was spying on her showering.

La Vallière was then reduced to second mistress. She was so humiliated that she retreated to a convent.

Madame de Montespan’s husband, enraged to learn of her infidelity, made a scandal at court and even made a symbolic funeral in front of the children (talk about childhood trauma). He was then imprisoned and exiled. Madame de Montespan became the favourite, but was still not recognized as the official mistress due to her marriage.

Her beauty and new position made her popular with men, but not so much with the church. They didn’t like her adultery and despite the king’s demand to give her absolution, the church did not yield.

They still went on to have seven children, to which Madame de Montespan did not tend. They hired a governess to look after them, named Madame de Maintenon.

Madame de Montespan became more than just a mistress. She had so many means of influencing the mind of the king that many ministers and courtiers submitted to her: her advice was asked for and followed. This also meant she knew a lot of state secrets.

Madame de Montespan became jealous when Louis XIV started an affair with none other than the governess looking over their children, Madame de Maintenon.

It was another affair with yet another mistress that sent Madame de Montespan into a downward spiral. Indeed, Louis XIV also took interest in another noblewoman named Madame de Fontanges, only 17 years old at the start of the affair. She became pregnant with the king’s child quickly, but gave birth prematurely and died not long after.

However, this all unfolded during the infamous Affaire des poisons, a major murder scandal in France near the end of the 17th century where multiple members of the aristocracy were accused and sentenced for charges of poisoning and witchcraft.

Given the general mistrust at the time due to the Affaire, it was not long before suspicion grew that Madame de Montespan’s jealousy could lead her to murder. This is why many believed her to be responsible for the death of Madame de Fontanges by poisoning her, although it was later confirmed she died of eclampsia, a condition where high blood pressure results in seizures during pregnancy.

During the Affaire des poisons, Madame de Montespan’s name was dropped in court by several accused and convicted as being a customer of Madame Catherine Monvoisin, also called Lavoisin, a potion maker. Montespan was accused of giving Louis XIV a love potion and participating in Black Masses with Lavoisin where infants were sacrificed.

It is important to note that Lavoisin allegedly provided midwife services and performed abortions, which at the time was seen as witchcraft was the source of the child sacrifice rumour. 

Despite the state of frenzy at the time of the Affaire, Madame de Montespan was never put on trial or convicted for the accusations. It is believed the king either believed her to be innocent or wanted to avoid the humiliation for his children.

Madame de Montespan later retreated to a convent and died in 1707.

HERstory Lesson is a column presenting all the “bad girls” in history, or the ultimate girlboss summit.

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HERstory Lesson: Nellie Bly

Carleen Loney/THE CONCORDIAN @shloneys

From Ten Days in a Mad-House to touring the world in high heels

A girlboss of her time, Nellie Bly — born Elizabeth Cochrane — was an American journalist who was famous for her investigative undercover work.

She was born in 1864 and went to school until the age of 15, but struggled to find work, even more than her brothers who were less educated than her.

In 1885, she wrote a response to an editor at the Pittsburgh Dispatch after they published an article titled “What Girls Are Good For” that criticized the presence of women in the workforce. In her response to the column, she argued for more opportunities for women in the public sphere. The editor was impressed by her writing, and this kick-started her career as a reporter. 

When she started working for the Dispatch, she began writing under the pseudonym Nellie Bly because it was considered inappropriate for women to write under their own name. So, it only made sense that all of the men in the newsroom came together to find her a “catchy” nom de plume, which turned out to be inspired by a racist form of entertainment.

Although Nellie Bly made the name a feminist reference today, it is actually the misspelled version of the minstrel song Nelly Bly by Stephen Foster. Minstrel songs were made specifically for minstrel shows, a racist form of theater that was prominent in the 19th century.

Despite bringing great reporting on the conditions of working women at the Dispatch, Bly’s editors confined her to writing on women’s issues. In a time where women were hired as reporters mainly for the “women pages,” Bly wanted to do investigative work.

To be less restricted, she moved to New York in 1886, but struggled to find work as a woman reporter. A year later, Bly stormed into the office of none other than Joseph Pulitzer and asked to report on immigrants in the United States. Although he refused her pitch, he challenged her to look into the Blackwell’s Island mental asylum for New York World.

Not only did Bly accept the challenge, she committed herself to that piece by faking mental illness to get herself admitted into the institution. During her time there, Bly investigated claims of abuse and neglect in the women’s unit. She also dropped her act and started acting “normal,” even asking to be let go, but to no avail. After ten days of trying to convince the staff that she was a reporter, the New York World had to come rescue her from the asylum.

Bly’s discoveries were published in a series of articles in the paper, followed by a book called Ten Days in a Mad-House. Not only did her investigative reporting lead to a grand jury investigation of the asylum and brought more funding for the Department of Public Charities and Corrections, it also became one of the most iconic pieces of undercover journalism. 

The ease with which she was able to trick doctors into thinking she was insane also ensured future examinations to be more thorough.

She continued to publish regular exposés on corruption in the legislature and jails, as well as continuing to advocate for the working class.

In 1889, she was inspired by Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days to beat fictional character Phileas Fogg’s record travel. Bly read the book and was inspired to beat Fogg’s record.

The New York World published daily updates of her journey, even running a contest where readers could guess how much time it would take her to travel the world. Bly travelled the world by train, boat and horse, wearing a full gown, heeled boots and corset, the traditional attire for women at the time.

She completed the tour in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds, setting a new world record. It didn’t take long, however, for a businessman to take her glory and complete the challenge in 67 days.

Nellie Bly was a pioneer in her field as an investigative journalist and continues to be an inspiration for women today.

HERstory Lesson is a new column presenting all the “bad girls” in history, or the ultimate girlboss summit.

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