Elizabeth ("Emily") Mary Burrup (nee Tudway, later Levick)

Another woman who was involved in the Zambezi Expedition was Elizabeth Mary Burrup (nee Tudway, later Levick). Her interesting story can be read here on my other history blog as part of the project covering the lesser-known individuals connected with David Livingstone in his controversial and failed expedition of the Zambezi River.

Women of the Zambezi Expedition

Stories about the women who were part of David Livingstone's Zambezi Expedition have been posted to my other more general history blog, Digging the Dust.

Click here for the story of Anne Mackenzie, sister of Bishop Charles Mackenzie.

Look out for the Bomb Girls!

A Canadian historical television series that deserves a wider audience is Bomb Girls. It was only by accident that I discovered a DVD of the first series in my local library because it certainly has never been shown or promoted here in Australia to my knowledge and I am sure it would find a lot of fans Down-Under.

As soon as I watched the first couple of episodes I was hooked and I'm currently watching the second series. Although the producers, Global TV have a website on which subscribers can watch episodes, it is probably not accessible to viewers in other countries. 

Set in a Canadian factory that employs many women on its production line of munitions for World War II, the series has its fair share of dramas and personal conflicts, but is never predictable and is handled beautifully by the excellent cast of actors – all of whom are most convincing in the roles they inhabit. 

What is particularly good is that the series tackles the era and the real history taking place in the background in an accurate fashion, the dialogue doesn't jar with too many modernisms and the women have real bodies under the authentic 1940s fashions. 

Apparently the series was canned in Canada and fans started a website to Save the Bomb Girls and it seems a new movie length version is in the pipeline.

Do catch it if you can!

Women at Waterloo

With the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo upon us, historical novelist David Ebsworth has written an excellent blog about cantinières and vivandières, the women who supported the Napoleonic army. Click here.

It makes one wonder how many other stories are still waiting to be discovered about females on battlefields of past wars. Unfortunately, the English terminology often used for these women is "camp followers", which has gained a somewhat less attractive connotation and doesn't always acknowledge their bravery.

Here is another blog original from Military History magazine about women at Waterloo and also a story about the mystery "twins of Waterloo" can be read on my other blog here.

History written by the losers

They say that history is usually written by the winners, but if the losers become powerful there is also the good chance they can re-write it to suit themselves.

Following on from an earlier blog about what really happened during the Rape of Nanking, this article by author Isobel Wolff recently appeared in BBC magazine online about the female prisoners of war in the Far East who never get the coverage that their male counterparts do in literature.  The article also drew attention to the fact that British politician Nick Clegg's mother suffered imprisonment as a child. Daily Mail article here.

Several years ago, there was the excellent TV series Tenko and also the Australian film Paradise Road which was inspired by extraordinary women like Margaret Dryburgh and Betty Jeffrey which didn't receive the recognition it deserved, partly because distributors were cagey about offending Japan. See this 1997 article from the Los Angeles Times for comments about the film.

So, is it fine to keep alive the memories of some event like the Holocaust, but less politic to remember other outrages against humanity because of causing offence as a result of changing diplomatic alliances, trade and economics?

A Russian childhood friend of my mother, whom she last saw in Surabaya in 1941, disappeared into a Japanese POW camp somewhere in Java and was never heard of again. Maybe by some miracle she did survive the ordeal, but does what she suffer matter less than what happened to the survivors of Auschwitz or other similar camps in Europe?

There has been the occasional flurry of petitions and media reports into the "comfort women" of the Japanese, but these stories soon seem to disappear from the front pages. Why? One might go so far as to detect some sort of racism at play here because the majority of victims were Asian women and perhaps if a lot more Western women other than the Dutch had suffered, the international campaign for justice might have been more vigorously pursued. Read here about Jan Ruff O'Herne.  There are various Youtube videos available about her, such as this one.

Just yesterday, this article appeared in the Yomiuri Shimbun regarding "errors" in an American history text book that "dishonor" Japan in which it is stated:

' ... References to comfort women in the textbook read: “The Japanese army forcibly recruited, conscripted, and dragooned as many as two hundred thousand women age fourteen to twenty ...” and “The army presented the women to the troops as a gift from the emperor ...” These descriptions disregard historical facts.

The recruitment of comfort women took place mainly through private-sector business operators. Investigations by the Japanese government have discovered no document that proves women were forcibly taken away by the wartime army to serve as comfort women. ...'

Sadly, there is no justice forthcoming for those very elderly women, most of them in Korea, Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere, still hoping for a genuine apology and compensation from Japan. 

It seems the "historical facts" of the Japanese nation remain different from those of their victims. Once the first-hand accounts are no more, will these women then be written out of history altogether?

For anyone interested in this topic, Google searches will find many articles and some confronting images on the controversies surrounding comfort women. 

It is difficult to find a really good list of books about women who were imprisoned by the Japanese or forced into being comfort women, but here are a few:

Surviving Tenko, the Story of Margaret Turner

The Real Tenko

A Woman's War

On Radji Beach (about the massacre of Australian nurses, with only one survivor, Vivian Bullwinkel whose biography is Bullwinkel)

White Coolies

Song of Survival

The Comfort Women

Comfort Woman

A dark and stormy marriage - legacy of a woman of courage

“It was a dark and stormy night ...” is one of the most famous parodies of opening lines in literature and was originally coined by author Edward Bulwer Lytton. He is also the author of other famous phrases such as “the almighty dollar”, “the great unwashed” and that famous one much used in recent weeks as a result of tragic events in France, “the pen is mightier than the sword”. 

Some of his phrases can be adapted when it comes to describing the sufferings endured by his wife. Their dark and stormy marriage was often at the mercy of the almighty dollar and even mightier pens - in the courts as well as generating many columns in the press.

The lively and witty Rosina Anne Doyle was born in Limerick in 1802, the younger child of an Irish Baron and his wife, Anna Wheeler , a early advocate for feminism. Anna's marriage was a disaster and she abandoned her husband to live in Guernsey where her uncle was Governor. Rosina grew up in an extraordinary society, full of free-thinkers, Bohemians and exiles from the French Revolution. She had a few years of extra education in London before falling under the spell of a dandy with golden tangled curls and the tangled full name of Edward George Earl Lytton Bulwer Lytton (no wonder he became famous for purple prose). 

But the match was not approved of by Edward's mother, as she considered Rosina to be flighty and nothing but an “Irish adventuress”. According to some references, it was a wild, unbridled on-off affair and their marriage in 1827 was of the necessary shotgun variety. Edward's mother made good her threat, cancelled his allowance thus forcing him to earn a living by his writing. As they were both passionate and extravagant individuals, it was inevitable the marriage would buckle under financial stress and Edward's infidelities, although Rosina also instigated tit-for-tat flirtations. She is reputed to have said on one occasion:

“I went to my husband's rooms which he kept in order to have undisturbed communication with the Muse. I found the Muse in white satin seated on his knee.”

Worse, was the domestic violence that took place in their last home together, Berrymead Priory, Acton (see below for another interesting link to this house).

Rosina - from an image at Knebworth House, home of the Lytton family

Rosina apparently received a vicious kick in the side from Edward shortly before her daughter was born and was even bitten in the cheek by him. Divorce was not easily obtained during this era, but a separation agreement was drawn up. 

One of the cruel, tragic consequences of this arrangement was that Rosina was forced to part from her children. Between 1838 and her death in 1882 she saw her son Edward briefly once or twice and she had to request special dispensation even to visit her dying daughter Emily in 1848.

Edward - also from Knebworth House collection

For a woman used to a certain status in society, the money Rosina received from Edward was a pittance and she spent her life one step ahead of creditors and living in modest circumstances around the country. A study of the Census Returns bears this out, where she is often classified as a lodger in spite of being the wife of a baronet. The only way she could supplement her income was to become a writer herself, and many of her works were a form of revenge on her husband and his family. She wrote of the plight of separated wives and the ill treatment of women generally by their husbands.

Over the years the acrimony between the pair only worsened. When her husband was canvassing for re-election to parliament, she took to the hustings to vilify him. Humiliated and furious, Edward forced Rosina to be confined in Inverness Lodge, a “hospital for mentally defectives” (lunatic asylum). Only through the efforts of her friends and members of the public concerned by her treatment, was she eventually released.

In 1880, a book that was extremely scandalous for the times appeared, entitled A Blighted Life, Rosina's autobiography of everything cruel that was done to her. Edward had passed away some years before, but Rosina's son and the Lytton family were outraged. Rosina seems to have backtracked on its publication and issued a retraction with the long-winded title of Refutation of an audacious forgery of the Dowager Lady Lytton's name to a book of the publication of which she was totally ignorant. It probably made little difference.

Meanwhile, Rosina continued to write – essays and historical novels (under a male pseudonym) - until she died in 1882, isolated, in debt and unmourned by her family and the society which she had embarrassed by her actions. She left a paltry £405.10s. – compare that to her husband's estate of between £70,000-£80,000.

Rosina's grave remained unmarked until 1995 when her great-great-grandson, 2nd Baron Cobbold of Knebworth, arranged for a tombstone to be erected. It bears the inscription she wanted. “The Lord will give thee rest from thy sorrow, and from thy fear, and from the hard bondage wherein thou wast made to serve.”

There is no better summary of Rosina's legacy than that written by Marie Mulvey-Roberts in the Oxford Dictionary of Biography:

“Rosina had brought about her ‘hard bondage’ through her refusal to conform to the duties of a Victorian wife, which required women to ‘suffer and be silent’. By drawing attention to the plight of married women and separated wives through her novels, pamphlets, and journalism, Rosina contributed towards the mounting pressure that eventually brought about legislation designed to protect the interests of women. Rosina Bulwer Lytton represents far more than a case history of a hysteric or an unorthodox minor Victorian novelist. For her undoubted talent and extraordinary courage in speaking out against injustice she deserves a permanent place in women's history, as she has provided an often unrecognized source of inspiration to those who have followed. Her most immediate legacy was passed to her granddaughter Lady Constance Georgina Bulwer-Lytton (1869-1923), who became one of the heroines of the Edwardian women's suffrage movement.”

 A large number of works by and about Rosina Bulwer Lytton can be found at Internet Archive. 

Text of A Blighted Life here, although there is also a recent reprinting of it available via Amazon.

Note:  Most curiously, Berrymead Priory, this house of “sad memories” for Rosina and Edward, was also the brief marital home in the ensuing decade of another “Irish adventuress”, Lola Montez, and George Trafford Heald - another couple doomed by violent passions and blighted by the unjust divorce laws of the age in which they lived. I explore this relationship in some detail in my novel Her Fatal Touch: the Life and Loves of Lola Montez, currently being revised for a new e-edition out soon.

"Goddesses of Mercy", Women of the Other Holocaust

On 14 May, 1941, a fifty-four year old spinster turned on the kitchen gas in a house in Indianapolis and did away with herself. It wasn't the first time she had tried - a year earlier on her way home to the United States after close to thirty years missionary service in China she had attempted suicide on the ship. Considering the mental burdens she must have carried and the horrific physical abuses and tortures she had witnessed, it isn't that surprising. Her name was Wilhelmina ("Minnie") Vautrin, known to the Chinese as "Goddess of Mercy" for her actions during the infamous Rape of Nanking (Warning - link contains some graphic images) in which she saved many thousands of Chinese women from rape and murder by the Japanese army.

I am very familiar with the story of the Massacre as I grew up hearing about it from my parents who lived in China at the time and who personally knew some of the witnesses who escaped from Nanking to Shanghai to tell the tale of what they had seen. My father served in the Shanghai Defence Force during 1937 and I still have his albums that contain gruesome photographs that he took of the Japanese carnage inflicted on the civilian population of China.

What makes this event particularly distressing is that, unlike the Holocaust in Europe which is only denied by a recalcitrant few, the majority of Japanese still refuse to acknowledge it ever happened, or at least they minimise the scale of the brutality and dispute the Chinese figures of 300,000 dead.

And as if the rest of the world still doesn't want to know either, just this weekend reports of the first Chinese commemoration seem to have been relegated to the less important mid-sections of Western newspapers. BBC version - Nanjing Massacre

Minnie Vautrin knew the truth of it. And so did Tsen Shui-fang - reputedly the only Chinese woman to keep a secret diary of the events as they unfolded. Their stories are told in two books by Hua-ling Hu.

See Google Books for full biographical details of both women

The other book by Hua-ling Hu.

 Minnie Vautrin is buried in Illinois.

Find-a-Grave

Links to other sites:

Youtube re-enactment of Minnie's testimony.

Detailed history of the atrocities of the Massacre.

John Rabe - German Nazi businessman who saved an estimated 250,000 Chinese.

Several movies:

Article about Chinese film The Flowers of War.

Another Chinese film City of Life and Death

German film John Rabe (apparently Minnie was written out of the script and replaced by a French woman!)

American film Nanking (Mariel Hemingway played Minnie.)

Many books on the subject - just key "Nanking" or "Nanjing" into your search.

www.bookdepository.com
www.amazon.com
www.amazon.co.uk