5 Warrior Women From History Who Deserve Their Own Movies
Hear my truth: I’m a sucker for any blockbuster biopic about a woman who looks at the world and says, “Screw these rules!” and then proceeds to screw those rules like nobody’s business. Give me Frida on toast, and shoot Erin Brokovich directly into my veins.
But when you look at female biopics from the last 30 years or so, you’ll notice that most of them are about singers, artists, royalty, and politicians. Which are all good and well – those stories should be told. But where are my Nazi-fighting sisters at? Where are my pirate queens, plundering across the ocean and putting the fear of Cthulhu in men? Because those women existed, too, and they have the kinds of stories that would make for great cinema, and even greater spread on toast.
So here are my five movie ideas for which we are long overdue. Get cracking, Hollywood.
The Honeytrap Sisters, or Killing Nazis on Bicycles
The Plot: During WWII in the Netherlands, two teenage sisters from the Dutch resistance ride around on their bicycles, luring Nazis into the woods and to their deaths.
The story of the Oversteegen sisters reads like a Tarantino film. Sisters Freddie and Truus Oversteegen joined the Dutch resistance when they were 14 and 16 years old. They had already been helping their mother shelter Jewish refugees since the start of the war, but when the Nazis actually came to the Netherlands they began resisting more directly. At first this involved going around on their bicycles and distributing anti-Nazi literature, which went largely unnoticed, because who's going to suspect young, pigtailed girls on bikes?
Pixabay
So cute and harmless.
To be fair, they did get some attention – from Nazi perverts who liked to prey on young girls. But the sisters quickly realized they could use that very predatory behavior to their advantage. Specifically, the youngest sister, Freddie, would seduce SS officers by luring the unsuspecting perverts into the woods where someone was waiting to shoot them. The girls then moved on to perform the assassinations themselves, following soldiers home on their bicycles, guns neatly hidden in their baskets. Oh, and as part of their eight-person resistance cell, they also sabotaged bridges and blew up railway lines, because when you’re fighting Nazis, you don’t half-ass anything.
They also helped move Jewish refugees around, sometimes smuggling them out of concentration camps, and also volunteered at emergency hospitals, because these girls weren’t a pair of cold-blooded assassins – they were just trying to help. In fact, when the war ended, they had to deal with a lot of trauma, with Freddie even reliving the feeling she’d had all those years ago; a strong, natural urge to go back and help the men she herself had left for dead. Because unlike video games, real war still sucks even if you get to kill Nazis while doing it.
Buffalo Calf Road Woman
The Plot: The 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn is known for two things: The first is as “Custer's Last Stand,” and the second (and more accurate) is as an awesome victory for Native Americans over US government forces trying to take their land. But this movie is about the woman who knocked Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer off his goddamn horse.
For more than a century, few people have heard about Buffalo Calf Road Woman, the Northern Cheyenne Native who rode into battle with men, something that did not happen back then. Part of the reason is that her story was intertwined with the official Cheyenne record of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, something they were keeping secret from the US government for fear of retribution.
Pixabay
You’ll understand if they’ve had difficulties trusting the people tied to the slaughter of theirs.
It begins in the Great Plains during the Sioux Wars, when the Sioux tribes had joined forces under chief Sitting Bull and war leader Crazy Horse, and thousands of Native Americans had settled on the banks of the Little Bighorn river. Among them was one Buffalo Calf Road Woman who stood out among her female counterparts – instead of avoiding the dangers of battle, she charged into the middle of them, once reportedly with a baby strapped to her back.
A week before Little Bighorn, the fearless warrior saved her brother during the Battle of the Rosebud after he fell off his horse and she had to go back and drag his ass out of there. The Cheyenne started referring to that battle as the “Battle Where The Girl Saved Her Brother,” because it’s definitely the coolest thing that happened in it, and because Native Americans name stories better than editors do comedy articles.
Then came the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where the Natives of the Northern Plains killed around 260 US soldiers, including Custer, in under an hour. And it was Buffalo Calf Road Woman herself who shot Custer off his horse and ... just kidding. She clubbed him off. Then when the battle was over, she and some other Native women went around and finished job on anyone left breathing, Custer included.
The Petticoat Rebel
The Plot: After being abandoned on her ranch during the Mexican Revolution, one woman not only stood fierce to fight the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz Morti, but also commanded an army 1,000 strong and terrorized a governor into fleeing.
Margarita Neri, also known as La Neri or Pepita, also also known as The Rebel Queen of Morales, was as badass as you would imagine someone with so many names. She was a landowner when revolution broke out in 1910, and when the men left to either go fight somewhere else or to escape into obscurity, La Neri one hundred percent did not.
Unfortunately her history is messy, but the information we do have about La Neri kind of makes her sound like if Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones had actually owned her ruthlessness and wasn’t simply an obsessive heiress to some lizard throne or whatever. For example, when most of the men bailed on her, she rallied the 200 remaining workers and within two months grew that number to 1,000. Accounts of her army sweeping through the states of Chiapas and Tabasco need no dragons — they burned and destroyed everything in the name of emancipation. La Neri led her guerilla war troops, machete in hand, and slaughtered anyone who sided with the dictator’s elites.
Pixabay
The version in my head always includes an eye patch and a badass pose, too.
Accounts of her exploits vary wildly. Some believed that the Rebel Queen was merely an officer under Zapata, the official leader of the Mexican Rebellion. Others say Zapata sent men to try and recruit La Neri, but she was so offended that she cut off their ears. The legend also goes that, as her fierce army approached Guerrero, the governor hid in a crate and had himself shipped away. We'll probably never know the true extent of her ass-kickery, or which details were all the way true, but the Washington Herald called her the “Mexican Joan of Arc,” so that's pretty rad.
The White Mouse
The Plot: Based on the book by the woman herself, The White Mouse is the story of the spy who became the Gestapo’s most wanted person.
Nancy Wake was a New Zealander who moved to Europe to become a journalist before her career turned to espionage. You see, she had seen enough Nazis beating up Jewish people in Vienna in the mid-1930s to get really pissed, so she joined the French Resistance as a courier. In fact, Wake was so good at moving information around that the Gestapo gave her the nickname “White Mouse,” made her their most wanted person, and put a bounty of five million francs on her head.
Wikipedia
I don’t know if she did, but I’d totally brag about that.
Being on any “most wanted” list is bad, as it was for Wake, so she escaped to London where she ... asked if she could join the Special Operations Executive for the British, which she then did. Six months later she was parachuting back into France where she joined French Resistance fighters against German forces. Oh, and this was all behind enemy lines, because at this point Wake was just toying with the Nazis like she was the Jerry to their Tom.
Wake ended up becoming the most decorated woman of WWII, and she’s credited with saving hundreds of Allied soldiers’ lives. She was crucial in creating communication lines between the French fighters and the British military, actively sought out and exposed German spies, and was even a weapons and explosives expert. She also pulled off incredible feats like riding a bicycle 800 kilometers to deliver important codes and stealth-killing someone via throat slitting before they could sound an alarm.
Damn. It's no wonder she received medals from five different countries for her efforts during the war.
Bonny and Read
The Plot: Back when women didn’t sail oceans or fight wars, Anne Bonny and Mary Read did both of those things by deceiving men and becoming ruthless pirates, hitting the seas together like some sort of Thelma & Louise of the Big Blue. You might recognize the characters of Bonny and Read from the Black Sails TV series, but that’s not good enough. I want a full-scale, blockbuster epic film saga about these pirate queens of yore.
Unsurprisingly, Anne Bonny didn't have an ideal childhood. Born in Ireland as Anne Cormac, she was the result of an extramarital affair her father, William Cormac, had with Mary Brennan, the family maid. And after his wife left him, Cormac dressed her up like a boy and told everyone she was someone else's kid to hide the whole thing in some ridiculous lie. A lie which fell apart when “Andy” began getting older and people noticed “he” was not, in fact, a boy, so they fled to the South Carolina area.
Pixabay
Take a guess on whether or not you think things got better.
But a few years after moving there, Brennan died and the now teenaged girl discovered her inner rage. For example, she was said to have once stabbed a servant to death, and on another occasion beat a man into a puddle for trying to rape her. Cormac discovered life at sea when she married a sailor named James Bonny and took his name; her husband ended up becoming a pirate bounty hunter, and it all became a bit much for the elder Cormac, who ended up disowning her.
Anne Bonny herself preferred the company of pirates, and she soon started gallivanting around with pirate John “Calico Jack” Rackham and his crew. It's true that many men frowned at the sight of a woman on a pirate ship, but Bonny most likely just murdered anyone who mentioned it. She did, however, dress up like a man when they took on crews from other ships, because all that time spent killing dudes who didn't think she should be a pirate probably took away from valuable pirating time.
Enter Mary Read, who just like Bonny had to hide her female status to be accepted in certain parts of life. Her parents had also presented her as a boy to the public, and eventually she’d actually been accepted into the British army as a man. While on a Dutch ship in the West Indies, Read was taken captive by Bonny and Rackham’s men and, thinking she was a man, convinced her to join their piratin' crew. The story (or one of them) goes that Bonny only learned the truth about Read when Bonny tried to seduce her, which propelled them into a solid friendship, which also caused Rackham to almost kill Read in a jealous rage before finding out she was a woman — a secret he agreed to keep because Read was just a damn good pirate.
When Rackham’s ship was overtaken by a governor’s vessel, Rackham and his crew surrendered, but Bonny and Read refused, and they took on the governor’s men alone. It is told that at one point during the gun blasts and pistol-whips, Mary yelled into the hold, “If there’s a man among ye, ye’ll come up and fight like the man ye are to be!” No one came up, so she shot first, killing one of the men.
But as fierce as they were, they were also still very much outmatched, and they along with the rest of the crew were taken prisoners. Both were sentenced to be executed, which was a pretty big deal actually, for women to be convicted of being pirates. I know that's maybe not the best way to celebrate how these women destroyed gender stereotypes, but it ... no, that's still all the way badass.
