Women Who Dared: To Break All the Rules

by Jeremy Scott

Overview

Victoria Woodhull, Mary Wollstonecraft, Aimee Semple McPherson, Edwina Mountbatten, Margaret Argyll and Chanel were all women who dared. They had no time for what society said they could and couldn’t do and would see the world bend before they did.

In 1872 a mesmerising psychic named Victoria Woodhull shattered tradition by running for the White House. Had she won the ensuing spectacle would surely have rivalled that of our own era. Abhorring such flamboyance, Mary Wollstonecraft inspired a revolution of thought with her pen as she issued women’s first manifesto – still to be fulfilled.

From Aimee Semple McPherson, the first female preacher in America, to Coco Chanel, designer of an empire, these women became the change they wanted to see in society.

In Women Who Dared, Jeremy Scott pays tribute to them all with wit, verve and reverence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786071941
Publisher:	Oneworld Publications
Publication date:	02/07/2019
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jeremy Scott became a full-time writer following a colourful career in advertising, as described in his acclaimed memoir Fast and Louche. He is the author of Dancing on Ice, Show Me a Hero, The Irresistible Mr Wrong and Coke: The Biography. He lives in Chelsea, London.

Read an Excerpt

Coco Chanel was born in the poorhouse. The unmarried mother, nineteen and already with a year-old daughter, gave birth to the baby girl in a charity hospital run by nuns in Saumur, a small town in rural France. When the baby was baptised soon after, her mother was absent, sick at home. The father, an itinerant pedlar who spawned six children, was on the road with his horse and cart. By mistake the baby’s surname was misspelt as Chasnel in the church register. The error was unimportant, both parents were illiterate and of no significance. It went uncorrected until altered to Chanel five years later. By that time the slight dark-haired girl was known to everyone as Coco.


The date of her birth was August 1883 – or was it 1893 as she maintained later? She was a ready fabulist, ‘My life didn’t please me, so I invented my life.’ Coco was a mystery long before she became a myth.


When she was either twelve or two years old her mother died of tuberculosis and malnutrition. She and her two sisters were unloaded at the door of the convent at Aubazine, deep in France profonde, before her father disappeared with his cart. The convent was located in the twelfth-century abbey of Saint Etienne, within whose walls was an orphanage run by sisters of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Existence for the abandoned siblings in the convent’s stone-flagged rooms was basic and austere. The dormitories were unheated, the food poor. There were two sorts of orphans: those with relatives who paid the fees and came to visit, and the charity wards who did not – whose clothes were patched and shoes down at heel. Very early Coco learned of the divide separating the haves from the have-nots and the indignities which diminish the nots.


All the girls had to attend Matins at 6 A.M. After making their beds and housework, breakfast was bread and a glass of milk. The morning consisted of schoolwork, interrupted by a short service at eight and Mass at twelve. After a frugal meal they were taken for a strenuous walk in the wooded hills surrounding the monastery, when conversation was permitted. Coco was fit and energetic, and would remain so all her life (despite sixty cigarettes per day and a morphine habit for thirty years). Vespers was at 4.15. More lessons, then Compline at 6.15. Afterwards, supper, reading or talk until lights-out. Discipline was harsh, ‘I remember that they used to take my knickers down to spank me. First there was the humiliation. Then it was very unpleasant, your bottom was red as blood.’


Coco, who stayed at Aubazine until she was sixteen, says she was so miserable she thought often of killing herself, ‘Every child has a special place, where he or she likes to hide, play and dream. Mine was an Auvergne cemetery. I knew no one there, not even the dead.’


Many girls in the orphanage would remain to become nuns, but not Coco, who lost her faith soon after her First Communion, ‘The Catholic religion crumbled for me’. She left to board with an aunt, of which there were many for her father had nineteen siblings. She shared an attic bedroom with another aunt, Adrienne, only a year older than herself. The two attended the same Catholic school in Moulins, where they learned the practical skills of sewing, embroidery and needlework, together with coursework.


Moulins was a garrison town, populated by soldiers. The place had a number of bars, and a small leafy park contained a pavilion with dance floor and band. It also provided entertainment: magicians, jugglers, stand-up comedians and singers. Many of the acts were amateur, but prices were cheap. It was a popular spot for troops to spend their pay.


Coco and Adrienne auditioned as a singing duo and were engaged as a side act – not for pay, but reliant upon tips and coins tossed onto the stage. Their performance was clumsy, but they were teenage girls in a town where men outnumbered young women 20:1. Of course they were popular. After a number of appearances the two agreed that Coco should go on stage alone. She had a nothing voice, she couldn’t carry a tune, but what she did have was brio – a vivacity and spirit that was infectious. She was not beautiful but cute, a tomboy with thick black eyebrows and wide mouth. She was petite, scrawny, animated, with a gift for expression ranging from comic to pathos. The soldiery loved her.

Adrienne, the better-looking of the pair, was not jealous of her success. The two were close. In the evening they worked in their attic, altering clothes for clients or embellishing hats with ribbon and artificial flowers. Adrienne shared with Coco the second-hand books (romantic fiction, melodrama and the macabre) she had accumulated during adolescence, and also magazines she’d saved and sewed together into volumes of illustrated pages, revealing to Coco a wider, more glamorous world.


Her aunt and landlady Louise had succeeded in rising from her lowly childhood among a score of ragged siblings. She’d improved her position in life by marrying a station-master on the Moulins–Paris line. In a field on the outskirts of town, she managed a stable where she raised horses to sell to the army. Coco helped to look after and exercise them in the wooded country surrounding Moulins. ‘I mounted our horses bareback [at sixteen, I’d never seen a saddle]. I caught hold of our best animals…by their manes or tails.’


Aunt Louise’s business brought cavalry officers to the stables, who came to choose a mount themselves. These were young, well-dressed and well-heeled, for most had a family income to supplement their pay. Among them was Etienne Balsan. He was no longer a serving officer in a smart regiment, but independently wealthy. Still in his twenties, he had resigned his commission to devote himself to a bachelor’s pleasures: racing, polo, hunting, food, drink and the company of women. Willingly, Coco was seduced.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 Mrs Satan: Presidential Candidate 1

2 Monogamy is Unacceptable Behaviour 21

3 Liberty, Equality, and…What? 52

4 Holy-Rolling in Carmel Love Nest 84

5 'Society Shaken By Terrible Scandal' 132

6 The Messalina Complex 183

7 'I Am News Just Because It's Me' 188

8 The Brand Becomes Her 225

9 The Scent of a Woman 258

Notes on Sources 261

Acknowledgements 267

Index 269

What People are Saying About This

author of Daughters of Britannia and Courtesans Katie Hickman

‘Hugely enjoyable and a sparkling addition to the genre.’

Marcelle d’Argy Smith

‘Jeremy Scott, a man who clearly loves women, is awed by the exploits of these outrageous rule breakers. Me too. It’s a great read.’

author of Queen Bees Siân Evans

‘Simultaneously an exuberant celebration of lives lived at full throttle, and a collection of cautionary tales… an engaging and often witty celebration of rugged individualism and outright eccentricity.’

Editorial Reviews

05/13/2019

Scott (Fast and Louche) serves up six tasty biographies of bold British, French, and American women united by rebelliousness. There’s no introduction or conclusion, and no statement on how he chose these subjects; Scott just dives right into the first bio—that of the mesmerizing American Victoria Woodhull, who ran for president in 1870. British writer Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman took unpopular stances in favor of women’s rights; Scott’s biography of her ends abruptly, because Wollstonecraft’s life ended the same way, after giving birth to the author of Frankenstein. American Aimee Semple McPherson, a millionaire evangelist in the 1920s and ’30s, was a “spiller of bunk and baiter of boobery,” according to one journalist. Though Englishwoman Edwina Mountbatten repeatedly cuckolded her husband, Dickie, including with Indian political leader Jawaharlal Nehru when her husband was viceroy of India in the 1940s, she also did much for India’s poor. Wealthy American socialite Margaret Whigham Argyll was divorced by her British duke husband in 1963 after naughty Polaroids of her extramarital activities (one labeled “Oh!”) came to light. Coco Chanel designed clothes 20th-century women could actually wear and created “the scent of a woman” with her signature No. 5 fragrance. Scott presents each woman’s tale in humorous, gossipy style. Each subject possessed “a priceless gift—personal charisma,” he writes, but also, some of them were probably “insufferable prigs.” This fun, often scandalous romp is women’s history with a very light touch. Agent: Julian Friedman, Blake Friedmann Literary Agency. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

‘Simultaneously an exuberant celebration of lives lived at full throttle, and a collection of cautionary tales... an engaging and often witty celebration of rugged individualism and outright eccentricity.’

Siân Evans

‘Bold, raunchy, and colorful, Scott’s book reveals what the history books leave out, including intimate details of the hidden and public scandals that marked the lives of these outspoken women, and honors them for their courage, determination, and commitment to change.’

Foreword Reviews

‘There are some great stories along the way, and Scott tells them with verve.’

New York Times

‘With an adman’s flair for what’s bold and flashy [Scott] speeds the reader through the lives of his extraordinary subjects.’

Sunday Times

‘Hugely enjoyable and a sparkling addition to the genre.’

Katie Hickman

‘Jeremy Scott, a man who clearly loves women, is awed by the exploits of these outrageous rule breakers. Me too. It’s a great read.’

Marcelle d’Argy Smith

‘Simultaneously an exuberant celebration of lives lived at full throttle, and a collection of cautionary tales... an engaging and often witty celebration of rugged individualism and outright eccentricity.’

Siân Evans

‘Jeremy Scott, a man who clearly loves women, is awed by the exploits of these outrageous rule breakers. Me too. It’s a great read.’

Marcelle d’Argy Smith