The Women Who Built Christmas (Whether You Know Them or Not)
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This week's podcast is about the women who built the Christmas we know and love.
Every December, the world slows down and tells the same story.
Lights twinkle. Choirs swell. A bearded man in a red suit becomes the unquestioned CEO of joy. And we’re meant to believe Christmas has always looked like this — cozy, sentimental, male-led, and powered by “tradition.”
It hasn’t.
Behind the tinsel and nostalgia are women — real women — whose courage, labor, creativity, and quiet rebellion shaped Christmas as we know it. Women whose names were erased, softened, or replaced by men with better PR.
This week on Bitchstory, we’re reclaiming Christmas for the girls, by telling the stories of four women who built the holiday — whether history bothered to credit them or not.
Harriet Martineau: The Woman Who Invented Christmas Vibes
Before the 19th century, Christmas in England was… bleak. Church. Survival. Possibly a boiled vegetable. No trees. No cozy domestic glow. No “holiday spirit.”
In the 1830s, Martineau began writing wildly popular stories that folded Christmas into the fabric of family life. Her work emphasized warmth, generosity, moral reflection, and community — the very elements we now think of as “timeless tradition.”
Here’s the part they don’t teach you: she did this before Charles Dickens.
Martineau was already shaping Christmas as a sentimental, family-centered holiday when Dickens later published A Christmas Carol. But because she was a woman — and a disabled one — her influence faded while his became legendary.
Martineau didn’t just write stories. She invented the Christmas aesthetic — without electricity, Pinterest, or a single ring light. She did a whole bunch of other badass stuff too, and you should give this wiki article a glance!
Marie Noël: Hope as Resistance
Fast-forward to Nazi-occupied France.
Books were censored. Art was controlled. Joy itself became suspicious. And Christmas — a holiday centered on light — felt almost dangerous.
That’s when Marie Noël, a poet whose very name means “Christmas,” began writing poems that refused to surrender hope.
Her verses were quiet, luminous, deeply human. They spoke of compassion, resilience, and the stubborn endurance of the soul. They weren’t overtly political — which made them radical.
Her poems were banned. So women copied them by hand. Passed them through churches. Slipped them into pockets. Whispered them in kitchens.
In a time of occupation, Marie Noël showed that hope is an act of defiance — and that women have always known how to keep the light alive when the world goes dark.
Jo Ann Robinson: The Christmas That Fueled a Revolution
Most people learn Rosa Parks’ name. Far fewer learn Jo Ann Robinson’s.
Robinson was a professor and the president of the Women’s Political Council in Montgomery, Alabama. She had been organizing, planning, and warning city officials about bus abuse for years — and being ignored.
When Rosa Parks was arrested in December 1955, Robinson didn’t wait for permission. She mobilized.
Overnight, she and two colleagues printed 50,000 flyers calling for a bus boycott. With 1950s technology. (If you’ve ever fought a printer over one boarding pass, you understand how heroic this was.)
The boycott stretched into Christmas shopping season — the most profitable time of the year.
The economic pressure worked.
Women organized carpools, dispatch systems, and community support networks that kept the boycott going for over a year. The result? A Supreme Court ruling desegregating Montgomery’s buses.
Christmas didn’t just bring gifts that year.
It helped dismantle segregation. Jo Ann is one of hundreds of black women who fought for equal rights in the 50's and 60's and we only know a handful of their names. We need to change that. We at Bitchstory are trying...
Mrs. Claus: The Woman Christmas Erased
And then there’s Mrs. Claus — the fictional woman whose labor Christmas pretends not to see.
Early versions of Mrs. Claus weren’t passive. She was Santa’s partner. A co-manager. The logistical brain behind the entire North Pole operation.
But as advertising culture and post-war domestic ideals took hold, she was rewritten into the ultimate “trad wife” — sweet, supportive, and deliberately unimportant.
Which is nonsense.
Mrs. Claus isn’t a side character. She’s the operations manager. The HR department. The supply-chain supervisor. The woman keeping a global operation running while a mascot gets the credit.
Sound familiar? (hint: M-O-M!)
The Truth About Christmas
Harriet Martineau.
Marie Noël.
Jo Ann Robinson.
Mrs. Claus.
Four women. Four very different stories. One shared truth:
Christmas has always run on women’s work. (basically the whole world does, but the world also isn't quite ready to process that fact)
Women create the meaning.
Women carry the labor.
Women preserve the light.
So this year, as the ornaments shine and the carols play, remember the women who built Christmas — especially the ones history tried to forget.
And if anyone calls that “untraditional”?
Good.
Tradition has always needed an update.
Listen to the full episode of Bitchstory: The Women Who Built Christmas (Whether You Know Them or Not) wherever you get your podcasts.
Follow us on Instagram @bitchstory.pod and join us every week as we reclaim history — loudly.