Re-Feminist History (aka Bitchstory)

After covering Marie Antoinette in our last episode of "Bitchstory", I became intrigued (read: obsessed)with the idea of how many (probably countless) women in history have been wrongly villainized.  We once covered Margaret Beaufort , the mother of Henry VII, and you can listen to that here . She was hell bent on making sure her son was able to claim the throne, and there have been other "Queen Regent" mothers who have done much the same. Beaufort's father died when she was only 1. She was married to Edmund Tudor, pregnant at age 12, and then lost her husband to the plague before the baby was born. She was only 13 when Henry VII was born, and she never bore another child. I'm sure pregnancy and birth at age 12 damaged her ability to conceive again, but there is no history of that that I am aware of. Why would there be? So Henry became her singular focus. And she was not well liked for her ambition. What's new? Ambitious women are almost always hated. A...

Our latest episode of BitchStory is about a woman you've definitely heard of, but she is one of those historical figures that has been villainized to a wild degree - a woman villainized? No way...Do tell! History has had zero sympathy for the Austrian Arch Duchess...which is our first fact... #1 She was NOT French.   She was, as I just mentioned, Austrian. This didn't help her when she was just 14 when it was arranged for her to marry King Louis XVI. She was out of her depth in French Court at Versailles, where they did things in a way that was totally unfamiliar to her - especially the makeup and fashion (which ironically, she would leave an indelible mark on!). She was judged as a foreigner from the get-go and struggled to fit in. I imagine that the women of the French Court might also have been young, some of them, since girls were always married off young when possible. French Court sounds to me like Jr. High with really, really fancy clothes and tiny sandwiches and pas...

 Last week I talked about the astrology birth chart for Mary Shelley.  It started me thinking about the other female authors we talked about in our most recent podcast episode, so I looked up their charts too (most of them) to see if there was some things in common.   I'll tell you, I expected to see Gemini, the sign of communication. But the rest of what I saw surprised me a fair bit.  It makes sense now that I think about it, but it wasn't what I expected.   So I looked at the Sun sign and its house placement, the Moon sign, the Ascendant, the Mercury placement, the ruler of the 3rd house, the North Node placement, and the Midheaven. And you know I love a spreadsheet (Mercury in Cap!) so here we go... SUN/HOUSE MOON/H ASC MERC H3 N NODE MC LOUISA MAY ALCOTT SAG 3 AQ 5 VIRGO SAG 4 SCORP CANCER 11 GEM JANE AUSTEN SAG 4 LIB 1 VIRGO SAG 3 SCORP LEO 11 GEM HARPER LEE TAUR 7 SCORP 1 SCORP ARIES 6 SAG CANCER 9 CANCER AGATHA CHRISTIE VIRGO 8 LIB 9 SAG LIB 9 ...

August 9th was National Book Lovers Day, so for our latest episode of Bitchstory (Re-feminist History…whatever you want to call it), we talked about female authors that really blazed trails. Lisa’s first idea was Mary Shelley, and it doesn’t get much cooler than her. She was only 18 when she wrote Frakenstein, which would become one of the most iconic novels in literary history. The book was published when she was the ripe ol’ age of 20. (When I was 20, I couldn’t even articulate some of the themes she writes about.) Frankenstein tackles some huge themes wrapped in a truly horrifying story - life, death, man vs. nature, man vs. God, social isolation, empathy, revenge, romanticism, connection with nature, ambition, fate and free will, science, family, and others. It is an absolute work of literary genius. Here’s some other facts about Mary Shelley Mary was the daughter of two influential thinkers: her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneering feminist and author of A Vindication o...