Int'l Women's Day: Seven Infamous Missouri Women

March 8 is International Women's Day, a day to celebrate the women's rights movement and women's place in the history of our country and the world. While most women's history focus on the better-known — and better-behaved — figures, here are a few of the more infamous ones — the troublemakers, rabble-rousers, killers and spies who you may not have seen in your Missouri history textbooks.

Calamity Jane

Martha Canary, who would later be known as Calamity Jane, was born in Princeton, Mo., around 1856. When she was just 8, her family struck out west, headed for the Montana gold fields and eventually Utah. When her parents died within a year of each other, eleven-year old Canary was orphaned and alone.

But, she soon learned to ride a horse, shoot a gun, and hold her own as a woman in the Wild West. She often disguised herself as a man and rode with cavalry soldiers and railroad workers as they ranged across Wyoming and other states, cooking, cleaning, and possibly engaging in prostitution to make ends meet.

After meeting Wild Bill Hickock in her travels, and earning a new nickname for her fiery temper, Canary began selling her story to journalists, pulp magazines and dime novelists, cementing her place in the popular history of the American West.

Carrie Nation

In June 1900, Carrie Nation picked up a hatchet and went down the the local saloon, following guidance she believed God had given her. One of the most ardent proponents of the temperance movement, Nation busted up saloons all over the Midwest and was arrested more than 30 times in the process.

As a single mother, Nation moved to Holden, Mo., in the 1870s and taught school there for several years before remarrying and bouncing around between Missouri, Kansas and Texas. In 1881, she founded the Women's Christian Temperance Union and began protesting outside bars and saloons, singing hymns, praying, and haranguing bar owners. When that didn't work, she turned to the more drastic tactics she would later be famous for.

Later in life — her mission accomplished — Nation opened a home for young women in need of financial assistance and began selling souvenirs to support herself and her family. She is buried in Belton Cemetery, not too far from her hometown of Peculiar, Mo.

Celia

Celia was only 14 years old when a white man bought her at a slave auction in Audrain County, Mo. Historians believe Robert Newsom, her legal owner, probably raped her for the first time on the journey to his home in the next county over. She was 14 years old, and he would rape her repeatedly for the next five years. Celia would go on to bare two of Newsom's children.

Then something changed. When Newsom came one day to rape now 19-year-old Celia, she fought him off with a stick, killing him in the process. Celia burned her former owners bones in a fireplace, crushing what was left into smaller pieces and burying the remains nearby.

She was arrested and charged with murder, but took her case all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court, arguing that she had killed Newsom in self defense. The court ruled that slaves could not use self-defense as a justification for killing a white man, and Celia was hanged in December 1855.

Josephine Baker

Born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis in 1906, Baker, who was black, would go on to be an jazz dancer, activist, and French resistance agent during World War II. Writer Ernest Hemmingway called her "the most sensational woman anyone ever saw."

Baker moved to New York City when she was 15 and became a Broadway performer, but refused to perform for segregated audiences, making her an important early voice in the civil rights movement. In the 1930s, she moved to Paris, renouncing her U.S. citizenship to marry a wealthy French industrialist. Baker had initially preformed in the country in the late 1920s, causing a sensation when she danced clothed only in bananas.

When France was invaded by the Nazis in 1939, Baker continued to perform, attending high-society parties and relaying what she learned from German officers to the allies, often using invisible ink to make secret notes on her sheet music. After the war, she received the French Cross of War and Resistance medals and was made a knight of the Legion of Honor by French president Charles de Gaulle.

Ma Barker

Killed in a shootout with the FBI in 1935, Ma Barker's sons all grew up to be criminals, and Barker herself soon gained a reputation as the family matriarch and ringleader behind her sons' crimes. J. Edgar Hoover called her "the most viscous, dangerous and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade." And that was a decade that saw Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, "Pretty Boy" Floyd and scores of other notorious depression-era criminals.

Barker was born in Ash Grove, Mo., and her childhood farm is now part of Stanton Dairy Farms.

Historians now say Hoover likely concocted the chargers against Barker as an excuse for killing her, and whether she actually participated in the shootout is a matter of debate. But that hasn't stopped films and television shows from depicting her with Tommy gun in one hand and a cigar in the other, plotting bank robbery after bank robbery across the Midwest.

To learn about other Missouri women, visit missouriwomen.org.