Violent Femme
Violent Femme is a narrative podcast about women in history who were brave, bold, and ingenious, yet are mostly remembered for their brutality or villainy, if at all. Each episode will resurrect one of history’s brutally brave women whose image has been tarnished or even erased by men who fear such women but have long been entrusted with our history. Violent Femme will retell and sometimes reimagine history from the heroine’s perspective. This is herstory.
Comandanta Ramona became the nom de guerre for the Mayan woman who saw injustice all around when she looked at the way women were treated in her community and the way the Mexican government treated her people, an indigenous population in southern Mexico. ...
Boudicca (also known as Boadicea and Boudica) was Queen of the Iceni people on the island of Britannia. The Romans had conquered and occupied much of the island and around 60-61 AD, after her husband’s death, the occupying forces redoubled their savager...
Always outspoken against the patriarchy, in 1974 at age 11 Phoolan Devi is considered a trouble-maker. She is married off and sent several hundred miles away from her home in Ghura Ka Purwa, India. By age 17 she escapes her abusive husband and joins a gan...
Some call it the numbers racket but true believers call it policy banking because the numbers games provide much needed cash flow for economic life in 1920s Harlem. Numbers kings abound, but there is only one Queen, Madame Stephanie St. Clair, a French Ca...
In the early 1800s Ching Shih goes from being a poor girl in the Guangdong province of China, to becoming a high class prostitute to the region’s elite She then marries an already successful pirate and grows his business three-fold in three years. Whe...
In the 6th century BC, Tomyris rises to become Queen of the Massagatae, a confederation of nomads who roam the Eurasian steppe just east of the Caspian Sea. The culture of these fierce Scythians insists that women fight alongside men in battle.When her hu...