Unusual women of the past

You may think that no women went to sea or joined the army until the twentieth century, but this is not true. Although they usually had to pretend to be men, there are a few true stories of women who fought for both good reasons and bad ones.

One English woman soldier in the seventeenth century was Christian Walsh, the wife of a man who was made to join the army, although he did not want to be a soldier. Christian refused to accept the situation, unlike most women in those days. She cut off her hair, dressed as a man and joined the army, calling herself Kit Cavanagh, in order to look for her husband. It was thirteen years before she found him and during that time she fought in several different countries. She was only discovered to be a woman when doctors were operating on her for an injury she had received while fighting.

A rather different example, from around the same time, is Anne Bonney. It is not certain why she left Ireland, where she was born, and went to the islands which are now called the Bahamas. However, we know that when she got there, she fell in love with a sailor called John Rackham. She worked with John to steal a ship from the local port. They obviously chose the ship carefully, because it was the fastest one in the port at the time. For the next ten years they sailed round the Caribbean, attacking other ships and stealing everything valuable from them, as well as taking sailors to help on their own ship.

One day, Anne was surprised to discover that a boy they had taken off another ship in this way was really a young woman. She told Anne her name was Mary Read. She said she had dressed like a man to increase her opportunities, because in those days of course most women were expected to stay at home. Earlier, Mary had fought in the army, but had stopped pretending to be a man for a short time when she married a soldier who had realized that she was a woman. Unfortunately her husband died, and so Mary started to dress as a man once again and became a sailor.

Anne and Mary continued their criminal career with John Rackham, but in the end their ship was caught by the navy. The two women went on fighting even after all the men were taken prisoner, but they avoided punishment and disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to them after that. Perhaps they pretended to be men and joined another ship, or maybe they got married.

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