(A series brought to you by Feminist Global Resistance)
The Series:
Patriarchy ensures that male (almost exclusively white colonizer) history is remembered though a few women shine through or are given a twisted footnote.
More often, women are relegated to lost tomes and forgotten lore. Some shine through in song and tales while others, more recently, are beginning to have their stories told (progress?)
Throughout history, women around the world have stood to fight patriarchy, some winning, some losing, but they often brought revolution and change, their lives given for the just causes of freedom, liberty and justice.
This series will focus on the stories of some of those women who have stood up to patriarchy fighting oppression and colonization; confronting violence and abuse; And sacrificing everything in a fight for freedom, justice, and human rights. There have been many. I have chosen just a few of those who inspire me by their bravery and resolve.
Learn their names, learn from them, let them inspire you to do great things.
Part 1: The Druid Queen
Queen Boudicca, Boudica, Boadicea (Buddug) (Approx. 30 C.E. to 60/61 C.E, aka, 1st Century AD)
Queen Boudicca ruled the Celtic Iceni tribe of East Anglia alongside her husband, King Prasutagus. (Located in what is now Norfolk County, England, United Kingdom, and surrounding area).
She is a rarity in history since she was not and should never be forgotten. She is said to have inspired both Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria ….
HER story…
As the Roman armies, ordered by Roman Emperor Nero, came to pillage and colonize the British Isles, King Prasutagus, in a hope of appeasing the Romans and protect his lands, made Nero co-heir along with his two daughters, to all his holdings. History notes he may have been one of eleven kings who capitulated to Claudius following the Roman Conquest of 43 C.E. or he may have come to power after the rebellion of the Iceni in 47 C.E. His life was not well documented but what happened after his death is our story.
Upon the King’s death, the Nero appointed Roman Governor of Britain, Suetonius Paulinus, ignored the king’s Will and sent his army to subjugate the Iceni, stealing their lands and plundering the kingdom. The Druid Queen Boudicca and her daughters were flogged, beaten, tortured, and raped by the Romans.
As described by Greek historian, Cassius Dio, Queen Boudicca was “a Briton woman of the royal family and possessed of greater intelligence than often belongs to women.” (Ah, Patriarchy)
Being “of greater intelligence than often belongs to women.”, Boudicca didn’t just submit to the Roman authority. She plotted her revenge. She assembled an army of 120,000 and grew it to 260,000 warriors as she appealed to other tribes of Britons. In her appeal to Britons people, she is quoted as saying:
“…But, to speak the plain truth, it is we who have made ourselves responsible for all these evils, in that we allowed them to set foot on the island in the first place instead of expelling them at once as we did their famous Julius Caesar, — yes, and in that we did not deal with them while they were still far away as we dealt with Augustus and with Gaius Caligula and make even the attempt to sail hither a formidable thing. As a consequence, although we inhabit so large an island, or rather a continent, one might say, that is encircled by the sea, and although we possess a veritable world of our own and are so separated by the ocean from all the rest of mankind that we have been believed to dwell on a different earth and under a different sky, and that some of the outside world, aye, even their wisest men, have not hitherto known for a certainty even by what name we are called, we have, notwithstanding all this, been despised and trampled underfoot by men who know nothing else than how to secure gain. However, even at this late day, though we have not done so before, let us, my countrymen and friends and kinsmen, — for I consider you all kinsmen, seeing that you inhabit a single island and are called by one common name, — let us, I say, do our duty while we still remember what freedom is, that we may leave to our children not only its appellation but also its reality. For, if we utterly forget the happy state in which we were born and bred, what, pray, will they do, reared in bondage?”
Boudicca went to war against the Romans, destroying two Roman cities, before suffering a final loss to the army of Suetonius Paulinus. She is said to have died, either by her own hand or due to illness after her defeat.
As a result of her rebellion, the Romans increased their presence in the land but loosened their oppression of the native peoples of Britain (they wanted no more rebellions).
This Druid Queen of the Britons is one of the earliest chronicled feminists. She was (and still is) an inspiration for women fighting oppression and colonization at the hands of foreign nations.
#Women #WomensRights #Revolution