plaything's pen

The Vampire Woman

Miriam Kate Williams alias Vulcana in 1900

"Even within the unconventional world of the circus, Sandwina was not your typical circus performer. For one thing, she was well paid, up to $1,500 a week. Careers for other female performers might not be as lucrative, but there were other women who made a name for themselves—and often a fierce name, at that. There was Athleta, who could waltz with three men on her shoulders. One of her signature tricks was getting in a crab position with a seesaw on her abs of steel, a horse balanced on each end. 

Then there was Vulcana, the beautiful daughter of an Irish minister, who as a teenager once stopped a runaway horse in the middle of a street in England and freed a wagon whose wheels had locked up. Articles about her accomplishments illustrate how she, too, defied gender norms while simultaneously reinforcing them. “When you hear or read of a woman of this description, you naturally conjure up visions of a large, heavy, mannish-looking person, devoid of the soft feminine graces which must ever enfold the type of true womanhood,” an article in Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture said. “But you have only to see Vulcana to realise that there is nothing masculine about her, in spite of her strength.”

There was also Minerva, who could lift 700 pounds from the floor, one-hand press 100 pounds overhead, and, standing in a ten-quart bucket, hoist a 300-pound barrel of lime to her shoulders without disturbing the bucket at all, demonstrating tremendous balance to accompany the strength. She once lifted eighteen men at a resort near Washington, D.C., and she had a surefire system for fueling herself for that kind of stunt. 

"Eating is about the principal part of my existence, and I always have the best I can possibly procure,” she told a reporter. “For breakfast I generally have beef, cooked rare; oatmeal, French-fry potatoes, sliced tomatoes with onions and two cups of coffee. At dinner I have French soup, plenty of vegetables, squabs and game. When supper comes, I am always ready for it, and I then have soup, porterhouse steak, three fried eggs, two different kinds of salads and tea. For every meal I have a bottle of the best wine I can procure."

"In cuneiform, the word ‘midwife’ is written with three logographic signs – or signs that stand for whole words – meaning ‘woman’, ‘inside’ or ‘womb’, and ‘to know’. Midwives, in other words, were women who knew the inside. Their role had both medical and mythological import. Clay tablets that record medical instructions often feature midwives, like one reddish tablet unearthed from an ancient library in Assur written down in the early first millennium BCE. A lengthy collection of prescriptions for a challenging birth combines spells and medicine. It reads like an instruction manual, explaining how to mix and apply salves and oils, and how to massage the pregnant woman’s abdomen to help move labour along. (...)

Women didn’t just treat illnesses and processes specific to other women; they also served as ancient GPs. Some of the earliest records of female physicians appear in clay tablets from the third millennium BCE, including even their names. Dubildamu may not have used a stethoscope 4,500 years ago, but she is listed in an accounting tablet as an azu munus, which in Sumerian means ‘female physician’. A few centuries later, a woman called Ubartum also carried her proverbial medical bag to visit so many patients that her name appears in no fewer than fifty documents. (Incidentally, Ubartum’s brother was also a physician who was married to a princess, the daughter of King Shulgi.) Women continued to work as physicians throughout the region’s long history, and they may have even composed and used medical texts, including one clay tablet written in the early second millennium BCE to assist with childbirth."

The simple yet useful Arabic numeral: