Men Start Fights, but Ladies Finish Them: So Who Done It?

Dear readers,

I have been pondering this for a long while. IS it necessary to say that “patriarchs build societies” while “matriarchs don’t?” No offense, but most of the worst disasters in history were ignored and or perpetrated by patriarchal figures. However, women and queens and queendom leaders have been known (with the exception perhaps of the Elizabeths in England, maybe a couple crazy scientists and some sadists), but the good queens they’ve done some peaceable things. I can come up with a few. Here’s a list, however, of the guys who started fights, and then we’ll cover the ladies, who finished fights, perhaps defended castles, and had prosperous queendoms. And yes, leadership outside queendom/kingdom lands.

1. We can begin with Ancient Egypt. LEt’s explore all the pharaohs, and see which one might have caused the worst catastrophes in Cairo and other places in Egypt, but in this ancient kingdom, it was Memphis. No, don’t get that mixed up with the state of Tennessee. LEt’s go over the worst Pharaoh, Ramses II, otherwise known as Ramses the Great, or the Tyrant, depending on how you look at him. With a harem of over 200 wives, and predictably, about 150 plus kids, this guy was pretty busy. Who knew what he was doing! Ancient religious texts say that Ramses II, the Pharaoh in the B.C.E. Exodus era, was responsible for the enslavement and captivity of the entire, not half or quarter, but the entire Hebrew population. His dad, though not quite as bad, was still bad. Ramses’ dad was responsible for an Egyptian decree that said all the little boys in the Hebrew tribes had to be killed, but only girls would live. We all know Moses’s birth story. His mother and sister put him in a basket, for those unfamiliar with this story, and a lady from Pharaoh’s own household picked him up and raised him as hers, but paid the original mom to have the kid nursed to full health. Good job, more on that later. But Ramses didn’t like Moses much after it was discovered he was helping the Hebrews, and when Moses says to the Pharaoh the famous words in the book of Exodus, better we say them now, “Let my people go,” Ramses said no. HE tried to justify the complete enslavement of a whole entire race of people, the destruction of the same people, and so on and so forth. HE didn’t perpetrate the ten plagues, as it says in the texts, but he was asking for all of them. I won’t take the time to name them all. Ramses II tried to recapture the Hebrews post Exodus, but nope, he didn’t make it. Oops, that was horrible, right? So let’s move on.
2. Going forth in the Biblical texts, we have a bunch of folks known as Romans, the Romans were also famous for lots of building things. The men had this thought that killing their daughters’ boyfriends was a good idea, right? Well, further along we have a people who had the pleasure, or the bad luck perhaps, of conquering same said Hebrew people, now living in Judaea, like what’s now Israel, and the Emperors, known as Caesars, would conquer them at this point in time. The Emperor of Rome would knowingly and willfully allow his soldiers to rape the conquered peoples’ women. And among which, we had Caesar Augustus, no doubt he was pretty bad. The Christmas story starts probably with a Roman Legionaire perhaps raping a young Judaean maiden, a fourteen-year-old Mary, in Aramaic, her name Marium, and she gave birth to a son. While the story does have some bends and twists because of the culture at the time, there is a possibility that Mary was raped, and the big thing is that since her people were conquered, I think that’s a high possibility. This stuff goes back to Ancient Greece, even. But in Rome, I think we had a special desire to take over the world. Caesar Augustus also decreed that everybody go to an ancestral home for a census, and … you know the rest. While Jesus, son of Mary, taught us to love our neighbor, probably never touched a lady or got married, etc., you had Caesar Augustus and his heirs causing mayhem among the Jewish people. They also handed Jesus over to another patriarch we’ll discuss later on.
3. King Herod, same time same place, wanted to actually kill Mary’s son because of the Judaea’s’ so called promise of a king, and if you forget the Biblical story, I’ll summarize it here. Even in Xmas songs, Herod the King is known to have wanted to slay ALL of the Jewish boys, including infants, but like they had to be two years and under. I saw a claymation, or some recreation in a movie about this long ago in school, but truthfully I thought Herod was awful. Yes, he built some marvelous buildings, Archaeologists say, but society isn’t just a marble palace. Herod’s buildings housed some awful stuff, including perhaps the dungeon I’ll discuss in a second where John the Baptist, yes, a Biblical story again, was held before his head was cut off and given to Herod’s spoiled evil princess of a daughter. I will not bother discussing her.
4. LEt’s discuss a further down historical guy who wasn’t quite a king, but let’s call this guy Pilate. Governor Pilate in Judaea was the very man who decided that a perfectly good guy had to be put to death. He wasn’t Jewish, he was Roman, a governor who believed in the Roman gods and such. Jesus was declared a heretic because of this guy, and was subsequently crucified. I won’t discuss the stations or the whole passion here, but this is what Pilate is responsible for. Not his wife, who would have said Jesus was a gift to this world, and she’s right.
5. Further along, we have some pretty unfit weird kings in the Medieval times. Sometimes you had queens, Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example, who bore King John, don’t get me started on Robin Hood the outlaw. We won’t go too far there. However, let’s just say that the Medieval kings weren’t the greatest, and certain ones who ruled in the Holy Roman Empire were kind of out there. Through these times, you had some Popes too who broke their own rules and laws in their own church. I heard a story once of a Pope who tried to pass a bull, which is like a decree but Roman Catholic style and done by a Pontiff only, that said a certain girl he was messing with had been and is a virgin, and he was just way the heck out of line with the orders he should have followed. The minute a Roman Catholic priest takes Holy Orders, he does not get to touch any sexual flesh, including those of women and boys and even his fellow guys. No sex, period. He can’t just earn millions either. I’ll go there in another post, but the point is that Medieval popes have been kind of out there, and it didn’t help that Bloody Mary Tudor was in line with one such. I can’t remember every pope’s name, but he inspired, this pope I’m thinking of, he inspired Mary Tudor to commit acts of violence against Protestant people. She’s one of the most sadistic English queens I could name, and she died of a tumor in her womb. Don’t know what to say there.
6. Among the Medieval Scottish and English kings, let’s meet Edward the Longshanks. This guy? He was crazy enough to introduce a decree that went something like this: Whenever a Scottish girl gets married, we English people get to take the girl into the beds of our lords and have the guys there have sex with her. Um, Latin phrase here, prima nocte which probably translates to “first night.” It’s a horrific practice that you would see clearly if watching Braveheart, sorry Mel Gibson, but it was Edward the Longshanks, a really old guy, who decreed that Scottish brides get to be raped by British lords, and it had a lot to do with taxes and such, and he was upset that the Scotts weren’t paying their fair share of taxes. Okay, there are a thousand ways to ensure you get taxes, right guys?
7. Further down the road, let’s jump to the Colonies. Yeah, I don’t want to discuss too many King Jameses and such. I do want to discuss George III. This guy was kinda messy. Well, to put that mildly, he was a big mess. King George III taxed the colonists for no reason, and he instigated a lot of people to write some really deep and powerful pamphlets, including Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence. While these were both written by very famous guys, this English king was awful. HE tried to force the Colonists to pay up, and he may have done nothing about the slavery going on in the ancient United States, as it were, the colonies already had been trading in people for some time. It was this third king George who tried to be nice, tried to put on a show but the colonists saw through his foolishness, and the revolutionary war came on and … the U.S. was born. Big mistake number one: don’t agitate your subjects if you want them to stay.
8. While the kings of Europe are a messy lineup to deal with, I can think of some crazier people. Before the Revolutionary War, we also had Oliver Cromwell, who tried to mess up things for the Britons. Oliver being as high and mighty as he was tried to ban old holidays, and his dictatorship was like a poor sorry Afghanistan in ancient times, but maybe that isn’t a fair comparison. Mr. Cromwell inspired Puritans to either thrive or leave. I never learned too much, but I had the gut feeling he was a ruthless one. He banned Christmas at one time, like who bans that holiday? It could have been worse.
9. Okay, so let’s skip ahead again, to the United States, and let’s meet George Washington. While he led the Continental Army, he also was a slave owner. Not good. Martha Custis Washington wasn’t much better, she owned a slave or something. I came across that information looking for some books. So what if Washington didn’t tell a lie? I am not lying when I say Washington was not much better than the next guy you’ll soon meet.
10. Thomas Jefferson wasn’t much better. I don’t know what to say because while he did free Sally Hemmings and her kids, it had to do with favors and his late wife Martha. Slaves were often entangled in white families, seen it too many times with a repeated surname in Louisiana, Hebert being my own maternal family, and because of this, there’s a child of a slave in my lineage. There you have it. But Mr. Jefferson was pretty sorry, but I will give him credit for one thing and one thing only: he had a Qur’an, and he had a Bible. He wasn’t just one religion, and he was a pretty spacious ball of wisdom in that regard. But that’s about it. Not like the next guy you’ll meet. Read on.
11. Andrew Jackson, oh boy, I’m on a roll here, had a school named after him in my locale in Florida. Jackson did some pretty stupid things, including remove all the Native and Indigenous nations and what have you from their land, and he was responsible, wholeheartedly, for the near destruction of the Cherokee Nation, the Trail of Tears, bless this nation because they didn’t deserve that. He also was responsible, if you dig deeper into Florida history, for the Seminole Wars, god bless Chief Osceola, and others, but Jackson was a jealous little brother who wanted to take all the sisters and brothers’ toys. That’s what these guys think like, but in a larger scale and in a grown up sense. Imagine you’re sitting on a couch, living in a house with a group of your friends, when a big group of people who don’t even speak your language walk to your door and demand you get the fuck out of your house. Or they could kill you. That’s what happened. Then you get thrown out of your own shelter, your stuff gets trashed, and your furnishings demolished. That’s what Jackson allowed. He was Florida Territory’s first and worst governor. I wonder why Florida is as funny as it is now.
12. I could go on and on about the American government officials who would likely own slaves, side with slaveholding states, and many other problematic peoples who were white who did a number of atrocities in the nineteenth century, but let’s go on. There’s many dictators we are seeing in the twentieth and current centuries that I wish people would take a closer look at. LEt’s say that when the Kaiser of Germany during WWI tried to be all high and mighty, he got his lands taken away, and then came Adolf Hitler. Hitler has a body count that stands at more than six million, some twisted writings, and worse, he had all kinds of problematic doctrines and philosophies. At the cost of so many lives, he tried to “build” a society based on the superior Germany he wanted. Oops, he committed suicide along with his little buddy Joseph Goebbels and Joseph’s wife, Magda, and who knew what happened to Magda’s little kids? I saw this documentary about Magda Goebbels, and she was a mess too.

Okay, and the patriarchs we want to hail as the builders of society could go on and on, but I’ll go back and analyze a few good women who’ve done a multitude of things.

1. LEt’s start with queens in ancient times. Greece didn’t have much of that, but I will give a shout out to the descendants of Spartan women. Yeah, the boys were vicious, but these girls had every right except the vote. But no queens here.
2. There was an ancient woman in Egypt who was discouraged from ruling in her own name, see the Woman King if you haven’t already, Hatshepsut, a queen in Egypt, ruled in peace and did a lot for the country. She had a lot set up, and as far as I could see, she wasn’t doing any harm to Hebrews, but she was also tutoring her daughter and thought that would work. Point is she ruled, and Egypt in that time period did awesomely and prospered in a lot of things. She had diplomacy all over and she worked together with people, inciting good trade and good agreements that helped the country thrive.
3. Could I add that while I’m not too big a fan of the Elizabeths in England, both were pretty all right. While both had some issues with colonial crap, I won’t go there because it is covered in many of the black media, I will say that at least Elizabeth II didn’t start fights. She would do as ladies often do, finish them. Elizabeth I, way back in the Medieval period, she had an offer from this weirdo king in Spain, “Oh, will you marry me?” Um, if this queen says no, you better not mess with her. She fended off what looked like an Invincible Armada, not so fast right? The Spanish fleet was defeated by the Queen’s armies, and she ended up pretty much stating her claim. “No, sir, I won’t marry you.” She also did some diplomatic dealings for the good of her people.
4. Whenever a female leader is in charge of a place for good reasons, there is usually calm and peace around her. I can name a few Latin American females out there. However, I think there are tons more. I will say that there was a good Ancient Chinese empress, I can’t remember her name off hand, but under her, ancient China had it all. This queendom survived while the lady was at the helm because all the people were very creative, she tolerated folks, and she did a lot to do what her people wanted. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of wartime shenanigans.

I could name some women who did great things, women who take part in Council in cities and towns across the U.S., and they build and prosper places. Men are good strong carpenters, builders in physical things, but sometimes you have the sadists, both men and women, who try to destroy the good in those buildings of marble and wood.

I could go on and on but I’ll throw in a few notables.

1. I’ll start with the backward order. Maybe I could skip around, but the Hellferinen jump out at me first. They were Hitler’s female Nazi attachment in the army, and they were responsible for all kinds of mayhem and … btw, Germany still paid a price.
2. There’s this Irma Greese woman who worked in concentration camps. This lady was responsible in part for Hitler’s body count. She was sentenced to hang at the Nuremberg trials. Oops, poor girl. Her last words were some ruthless German phrase I can’t recall.
3. There was a lady known as the Stamping Mare. Why did they call her that? She would stamp her feet all over the heads and bodies of victims, which gave her that nickname. She hid for a long while, but was captured and tried as a Nazi war criminal. This lady was put in jail for her roles in the killings of so many. Sorry, but when you do bad things, you have to pay the piper, even if the piper is in Germany.
4. Lindy England tag teamed with some guys in her regiment/brigade at Abu Ghraib prison, and you could see that poor sap of a lady dragging an Iraqi prisoner on a leash. Like, I was mortified about this part.
5. LEt’s not forget Mary Tudor, Bloody Mary, whose name has become synonymous with haunting mirrors, a drink, and worse, her role in the killings of Heretics and Protestants being considered so. Queen Mary Tudor was a bad lot. She had a husband who was out a lot, but worse, she thought we’d be happy she was supposedly with child, oops, she wasn’t. Mary died of a big fat tumor in her womb as mentioned before. She was awful, barely missed by the British perhaps, and this Mary was the daughter of a guy who wasn’t too happy he had to kill all the women he divorced, but he established the Church of England. We all know him, Henry VIII.
6. While I have covered queens, I should perhaps tell you about scientists and other occupations where women made a bigger difference. Both the good and the bad should be noted. One scientist that jumps out at me for the good side is someone I read about years ago. Rosalyn S. Yalow, a Nobel Laureate, and she did some pretty important things. There were women who discovered DNA, DNA! for crying out loud, and Rosalyn was among those. Malala Yousafzai is my favorite Nobel Prize winner of all, because she may not be a cautious or caustic science major, but she really wants girls in school. Who doesn’t? Well, okay, the Taliban 2.0 is kinda out there too. The girls education initiative things that Malala is doing currently blow a lot of us off our feet. LEt’s hear it for her. There are many Kamlaris, young girls in Nepal who end up as housemaids to masters, who break the cycle. Then you have Haitians like Hope, who end up calling the right people at a time she was desperate to get out of a horrible human trafficking situation involving a guy she was forced to live with. You’ve got Harriet Tubman, who freed thousands from captivity in the American South, and then you have lots of the women in places like Nigeria and Moldova and the Eastern European bloc who work tirelessly and run far and wide to escape things like the trafficking, forced marriage, and a multitude of abuses. These women are courageous and strong. I don’t hate the men who do these policies, but the policies themselves allowing such abuse should be duly noted.
7. There are sadists among women, but they quickly get outed. Dr. Germ, the nickname of one such, she’s one to watch out for in replicas like this other MIT scientist known as Lady Al Qaeda. Both of them are a mess to look at from the inside out. Both tried to use their intellect for evil, not good. Then you have all those Jihadi Janes out there in Syria, the ones who point firearms at women for not veiling. I can go on and on, and there were European women and American ones too who would be lacking the empathy and energy to do something about slavery. More on that later.
8. As for the women who were for abolishing slavery, we have a lot to name. LEt’s start with my favorite. Harriet A. Jacobs, born in Edenton, NC, she was pretty badass for escaping a cruel and sex hungry master who just wanted to do nothing good in the lives of the women he supposedly owned. She took her kids, was concealed for seven years, and fled. She alone could protect her kids, and she did what she could for her children in a time when a lot of families like hers were separated. She occupied body space with a white lawyer, against the master’s wishes of course, and said she wasn’t gonna put up with him at all. Dr. James Norcomb gets to be on my patriarch wall of shame for this and many things he was doing to perpetuate the enslavement of Ms. Jacobs and her family. Harriet herself went into hiding, went north, and while she didn’t do as huge a splash as Harriet Tubman, she still created a big ripple. She was able to take a little girl she was caring for to England, and at the behest of a young Quaker lady and a bishop, one in Philadelphia, she wrote her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, perhaps making a bigger splash over a longer period of time. She also reframed people’s thoughts on what a woman and her body are worth, even going on to warn others of what slave women endure. Her narrative is the most durable of that done by any female slave or freed slave. This book she wrote is probably the most definitive and complete of any female slave narrative I’ve ever read. I’m proud of this work, she told all.
9. Before I close here, I also want to remind you guys, not every man is bad, not every woman is bad. I don’t think all men build societies the way we expect. While many ancient kings built their castles of marble and stone, wood and iron, they probably would never have guessed who truly built the inside parts of society. A house is built by the hands of a strong man, but a home is where the heart is, and oftentimes behind every builder, there is a person who is either male or female who puts the insides of the house together, making it more homey. Okay, so even if the ancient kings did one thing, the ancient queens finished off the things the kings did.
10. I hope this brings a little more light in the dark, but for now, I’m headed off to dreaming world.
11. Beth