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Before we start, this episode discusses murder, bestiality, executions, slavery, suicide, and torture.
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Please take care of yourself while you listen.
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If you are struggling, you can call or text 988.
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We should be considerate to the living.
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To the dead, we owe only the truth.
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That's the French writer Voltaire in a letter published in 1719, meaning that we shouldn't be so harsh on the living because they can still suffer.
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But for the dead, we can just tell the plain truth without worrying about their feelings.
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Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with him.
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This week we're investigating who gets to tell a woman's story after she dies, why the stories outlive the truth, and why those stories so often turn her into a witch or a slut.
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This is Witches, Bitches, and Sluts.
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I'm your host, Xtina Rose.
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Before we get started, I want to remind you that this is a system episode, and it's the starting point for our next three episodes on Catherine the Great, Marie Antoinette, and Dorothy Bradford.
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In a small ceme tery in Burrville, Rhode Island, strangers come looking for a grave.
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They've been coming for years because they've heard the woman buried there was a witch who killed a baby for the devil.
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Some of them damaged her headstone so badly that it had to be replaced.
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Her name was Bathsheba Sherman, and we covered her in our Halloween special.
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She was a farm wife who buried three of her four children before any of them turned four.
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She died in 1885, most likely of a stroke, and left her property to pay for her grandson's education.
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The witch story didn't appear until 1973, 88 years after her funeral.
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Forty years after that, a Hollywood movie called it a true story.
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A question I didn't get to in that episode is, is this legal?
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If someone published a book today saying your neighbor murdered a baby and it wasn't true, your neighbor could sue.
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That's defamation, a false statement of fact that damages someone's reputation.
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When it's written, it's libel.
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When it's spoken, it's slander.
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But in the United States, you can't defame the dead.
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Once a person dies, the law says their reputation died with them, and their family can't sue on their behalf.
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That rule holds even for the most famous lawyer in the country.
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In 2005, Johnny Cochran, the defense attorney from the O.J.
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Simpson trial, had a case before the U.S.
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Supreme Court against a man who'd been picketing his office with false and insulting signs.
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Cochrane died while the case was still waiting for a decision.
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His own lawyers then told the court that California doesn't recognize any claim for harm to a dead person's reputation.
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The man who won some of the biggest cases of his era couldn't protect his own name once he was gone.
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There is exactly one exception in the entire country, and it's in Rhode Island, Bathsheba's state.
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In 1974, Rhode Island passed a law that lets a dead person's estate sue for libel.
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When I found it, I thought Bathsheba might have a case after all.
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Then I read what it actually covers.
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It applies only to a false obituary or similar report in a newspaper, on the radio, or on TV published within three months of the death.
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Bathsheba's three months ran out in the summer of 1885, and the obituary she actually got was respectful.
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So 88 years later, her reputation was apparently fair game.
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Even in America, the law does protect one thing about a dead woman.
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In California, a famous person's estate controls her name, her face, and her voice on products and in ads for 70 years after she dies.
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Nobody can sell a t-shirt with her face on it without paying, but they can say almost anything they want about her.
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The law will guard a dead woman's face when there's money in it and do nothing for her name.
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But not every country made the same choice.
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In Germany, disparaging the memory of a dead person is a crime, and it can carry up to two years in prison.
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But America's rule does make some sense.
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If the dead could sue, a dictator's grandchildren could sue every historian who documented his massacres, and a dead businessman's estate could sue the reporter who exposed what he'd done.
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The same rule that lets someone lie about Bathsheba lets someone tell the truth about a monster.
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So it's not going away.
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But it means that once a woman dies, the only fact checker she has left is whoever's listening.
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And whoever outlives her owns the story.
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Sometimes that's a family
Load full transcript
with a ghost story, and sometimes it's a king with a chisel.
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In 1927, a team from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art dug near a great temple in southern Egypt and found a pit full of broken statues.
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There were stone faces, arms, hands, and bodies smashed and thrown away more than 3,000 years earlier.
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Every piece showed the same ruler.
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That ruler was Hatshepsut, and she was a king of Egypt.
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She'd been married to a pharaoh who died young and left the throne to a little boy, his son by another wife.
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The boy was Thutmosa III, and Hatshepsut ruled for him as regent.
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A few years in, she took the title of pharaoh for herself and ruled for about 20 years with the boy king as her junior partner.
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She restored temples that had fallen apart, reopened trade with distant lands, and built the temple those excavators were digging beside.
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And after she died, Thutmosa finally ruled alone.
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And at some point, someone set out to remove her.
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They cut her name out of temple walls and replaced it with the names of male kings, and they smashed and dumped her statues.
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The evidence suggests it happened late in Thutmosu's long reign, not right after her death.
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Why it happened is still a mystery.
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It may have been about succession, making the royal line look like an unbroken chain of men, so nobody could question Thutmosa's son's right to the throne.
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Some think it was Thumotsa's son who ordered it, but unfortunately nobody knows.
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The curators who dug up her temple in the 1920s had no doubts though.
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To them, the broken statues proved she'd stolen the throne and that the king was simply setting the record straight.
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In 1953, one of them described her as a quote, vain, ambitious, and unscrupulous woman.
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The damage done to her memory became the evidence against her.
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More than 3,000 years after her death, scholars reading the broken pieces of her statues gave Hatshepsut a brand new label, usurper.
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The wicked stepmother who stole a little boy's throne and deserved to be wiped off the walls for it.
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And while in Egypt the erasure happened in stone, in Rome it happened by order of the Senate.
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In the year 48, while the Roman Emperor Claudius was away at the port of Ostia, his wife held a wedding in Rome.
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The groom was a senator named Gaius Cilius, who'd already been chosen as one of the next year's consuls, the highest elective officials in the city.
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The bride was the empress herself, Valeria Messalina, who was still married to the emperor.
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Scandalous! Welcome to an episode of The Real Housewives of Ancient Rome.
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The Emperor's advisors convinced him it was a plot to overthrow him.
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Cilius was executed, and Messalina was killed.
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Afterward, the Senate ordered her name and her statues removed from every public and private place.
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And I am so glad we live in a time where we just have to delete photos on our social media and our phones instead of having to send people out to find all the statues and smash them.
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But here's the mystery.
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Why did she even go through with that wedding?
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Especially since her husband was alive and just a day's trip away.
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One ancient account says Cilius offered to adopt her young son Britannicus, the emperor's heir, with Messalina betting on a new husband to protect her son's future.
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Some historians think Cilius convinced her that the emperor was going down anyway, and that this was her only way to survive.
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And one modern theory says it was never a real wedding at all.
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Just a staged mock marriage at a harvest festival that got out of hand.
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Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing what she was thinking.
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What we do know is that once they erased her name, anyone could fill in the rest.
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About 30 years after her death, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder told a story about her.
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He claimed she challenged one of the most famous prostitutes in Rome to a contest over who could sleep with more men in a single day and night, and that she won.
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He put the story in a section of his encyclopedia about the mating habits of animals.
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Later, the poet Juvenal wrote that she slipped out of the palace at night in a blonde wig to work in a brothel under the name She-Wolf.
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The historians who wrote most about her did so generations later, under a new imperial family with every reason to make her look bad.
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So Messalina almost certainly had affairs, as many powerful Romans did.
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Have you seen Spartacus?
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And some ancient writers say she had rivals killed, which may also be true.
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But the contest and the brothel come from men who weren't there, writing decades later about a woman whose name had been officially wiped away.
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In Rome, accusing a political woman of sexual misconduct was one of the easiest ways to destroy her, whether it was true or not.
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So basically, things haven't changed much since ancient Rome.
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Five hundred years later, it happened to another empress, and this time the smear stayed hidden for a thousand years.
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Theodora ruled the Byzantine Empire alongside her husband, Emperor Justinian, in the 500s.
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The court historian Procopius recorded her bravest moment in his official history.
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A riot nearly toppled the throne, and her speech talked her husband out of running.
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In private, the same man was writing a very different book.
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It described Theodora as a woman with an endless filthy sexual appetite, and he never published it.
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But that sounds like fanfiction to me.
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For centuries, almost nobody read it.
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Then a copy turned up in the Vatican Library, and in 1623, more than a thousand years after it was written, it was actually printed.
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And it caused a sensation across Europe.
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And for many readers ever since, that secret book has been the only Theodora they know.
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Can you imagine if a man wrote down some sexual fantasy about like the late Queen Elizabeth, and then a thousand years later, someone finds it and publishes it as nonfiction?
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But sometimes the person holding the pen is someone who is just trying to honor her.
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In September of 1797, a woman lay dying in London 11 days after giving birth to her daughter.
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Her husband stayed by her side.
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The story goes that her last words about him were that he was the kindest, best man in the world.
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She was Mary Wollstonecraft.
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Five years earlier, she'd written A Vindication of the Rights of Women, one of the founding books of feminism, arguing that women weren't born with weaker minds.
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They were just denied an education.
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The baby girl she left behind grew up to write Frankenstein.
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Her husband, the philosopher William Godwin, was devastated.
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And within a few months, he published a memoir of her life.
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He decided to tell the whole truth.
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He wrote about her love affairs, about the daughter she'd had before they married, and about her two suicide attempts after that daughter's father left her.
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Godwin believed that honesty would honor her.
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Instead, it ruined her.
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Readers were scandalized, and her critics went back to the book looking for proof that a woman like that couldn't be trusted.
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Even the poet Robert Southey, who'd been a friend, accused Godwin of, quote, stripping his dead wife naked, end quote.
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And he meant figuratively, not literally.
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In Britain, for most of the next century, people remembered Wollstonecraft less as a thinker than as a fallen woman.
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And sometimes the motive is money.
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On a January morning in 1947, the body of a young woman was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles.
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Her name was Elizabeth Short.
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She was 22 and her murder has never been solved.
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Within days, the papers had a name for her, The Black Dahlia, a play on a hit movie that year called The Blue Dahlia.
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And then they started filling in the rest of her.
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First, she was a war widow.
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She wasn't.
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She never married the pilot she was engaged to.
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Then she was an aspiring actress, a beautiful girl who'd come to Hollywood to be a star.
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That's the version I heard.
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Then she was a party girl.
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And finally, in a best-selling crime novel in the late 1970s, A Prostitute.
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But in reality, she'd come to Southern California chasing a man and the romance fizzled.
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She told people she wanted to act, but there's no sign she ever took an acting class or even tried for a single role.
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She never even held a steady job in Los Angeles.
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By the end, she was moving from couch to couch and sometimes telling men sad stories to get money for rent.
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The grand jury that investigated her case said plainly that she was not a prostitute.
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But look at how the labels traveled.
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A broke young woman with nowhere to live became a starlet, because that's a better story.
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And a starlet who ends up dead in Hollywood became a woman who must have been asking for it.
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Sometimes the story is about the death itself.
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Catherine II, also known as Catherine the Great, ruled the Russian Empire for more than 30 years.
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Almost everyone has heard how she supposedly died with a horse, a harness, and a rope that broke.
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I will let your imagination fill in the rest of that story.
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But in reality, she died of a stroke in 1796.
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The horse story takes the most powerful woman in Europe and turns her death into a dirty joke.
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And we'll explore where it all came from and the rest of her story in next week's biography episode.
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At Shepsuit, Messalina, Theodora, Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Short, and Catherine were erased by a successor, slandered by enemies, exposed by a grieving husband, sold by storytellers, and mocked by strangers.
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And in every one of their cases, the truth was still out there.
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Hatshepsit's temple is still standing.
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Catherine's death was documented by the people in the room.
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So why doesn't the truth win?
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And we'll get to that after this break.
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Let them eat cake.
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You know exactly who said it.
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The French queen with the towering hair right before the revolution cut off her head.
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But Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said it.
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The line was written about someone else while she was still a little girl.
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And it wasn't pinned on her in print until half a century after she was executed.
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And we'll dig into her whole story in two weeks.
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But for today, here's the question: How does a line about somebody else end up stuck to one particular woman so firmly that 200 years later, it's the first thing most people know about her?
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Two Harvard psychologists spent the 1940s trying to figure out exactly that.
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How a story changes as it gets passed from person to person.
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So they turned the childhood game of telephone into an experiment.
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One person looked at a detailed picture and described it from memory to someone who hadn't seen it.
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That person described it to the next, and so on down the line, while the researchers recorded every version.
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They expected the details to fade, and they did.
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Most of them were gone within the first handful of retellings, but the bigger finding was the way the story bent toward what people already expected to see.
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For example, in one picture, an ambulance was carrying boxes marked as explosives, and people kept retelling it as carrying medical supplies, because that's what ambulances usually carry.
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In another, set on a subway, a white man was holding a razor during an argument with a black man.
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A few people down the line, the black man was the one holding the razor.
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Nobody in that line was lying.
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Each person passed along the version that made sense to them.
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And what made sense was whatever matched what they already believed.
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That's how a line written about someone else ended up on the queen who fit everyone's picture of a spoiled foreigner who didn't care about the poor.
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And it happens every time a story gets passed along without its source.
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It loses the detail that would let someone check it, and it bends toward whatever the people repeating it already think.
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And the same thing happened to a woman you met in our Salem series.
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In the court papers of 1692, Tichubba is described as an Indian woman.
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The only magic anyone documented in that household was an English folk remedy, a witch cake, made of rye meal, mixed with the afflicted girl's urine and fed to a dog.
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And it was a neighbor's idea.
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But Tichubba later said her master beat her until she confessed.
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Then, over the next two and a half centuries, writer after writer retold her story without going back to the court papers.
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Each one copied the one before and then added something of their own.
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A historian gave her fortune-telling lessons that she was teaching the girls.
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A poet gave her an African father who practiced magic.
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By the time Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in the 1950s, she was an enslaved black woman conjuring spirits with the girls in the woods.
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And psychologists have known since the 1970s that hearing a statement again makes it feel more true, whether it is or not.
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For a long time they assumed that it only worked on people who didn't know the facts.
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And in 2015, a team at Vanderbilt University decided to test that.
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First, people read a long list of statements, some true and some false, and rated each one for how interesting it was.
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And that was the whole task.
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Nobody was asked whether anything was true.
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Some of the statements were about things almost everyone knows, like which ocean is the biggest, and others were about things almost nobody knows.
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So in that first round, all they did was pick what was interesting.
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They didn't have to rate it, they didn't have to say whether it's true or false, just whether it was interesting.
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Then in the second round, people got a new list.
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And this time they were asked to rate each statement on how true it seemed, like on a scale from definitely false to definitely true.
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Half the statements were ones they'd read in the first step.
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The other half were new to them.
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And then finally, in the last step, they were given a multiple choice quiz on the same facts, with questions like What's the largest ocean?
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And that's how the researchers found out what each person actually knew.
00:21:59.279 --> 00:22:03.759
So, if knowing a fact protects you, the results should be simple.
00:22:03.759 --> 00:22:11.039
For any fact a person got right on the final quiz, it shouldn't matter if they saw the false version earlier.
00:22:11.039 --> 00:22:12.960
But that's not what happened.
00:22:12.960 --> 00:22:16.720
Even with the facts, people answered correctly on the quiz.
00:22:16.720 --> 00:22:27.759
The false statements about those facts still got higher truth ratings in the second round when the people had already read those false statements in the first round.
00:22:27.759 --> 00:22:38.000
People didn't suddenly believe the Atlantic was the biggest ocean, but that sentence seemed a little less false just because they'd seen it before.
00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:43.759
So, in other words, they didn't rank that Atlantic was the biggest ocean as completely true.
00:22:43.759 --> 00:22:50.480
They just didn't rank it as false, even though they knew that that was not the right answer.
00:22:50.480 --> 00:22:55.359
So, how can someone know the right answer and still be nudged by the wrong one?
00:22:55.359 --> 00:22:58.079
It comes down to the question being asked.
00:22:58.079 --> 00:23:03.200
Makes you look up the answer in your memory.
00:23:03.200 --> 00:23:06.240
How true does this sentence seem?
00:23:06.240 --> 00:23:07.440
Doesn't always.
00:23:07.440 --> 00:23:14.079
Sometimes your mind just notices that the sentence sounds familiar and familiar seems true.
00:23:14.079 --> 00:23:17.519
The researchers called this knowledge neglect.
00:23:17.519 --> 00:23:25.200
The right answer was in a person's memory, but they didn't use it when they judged the statement they had already heard.
00:23:25.200 --> 00:23:34.160
So the right answer could be in someone's memory, but they don't necessarily look for it when they're judging a false statement that they already heard before.
00:23:34.160 --> 00:23:35.839
But it wasn't all bad news.
00:23:35.839 --> 00:23:41.440
The strongest factor in what people believed was still whether the statement was actually true.
00:23:41.440 --> 00:23:47.759
Repetition made lies more believable, but it didn't make people believe everything.
00:23:47.759 --> 00:23:52.640
And every writer who retold Tichiba's story repeated the one before.
00:23:52.640 --> 00:23:57.519
And each repetition made the invented version feel a little more like history.
00:23:57.519 --> 00:24:03.599
And that's very similar to what happened to Tichiba, because most people don't know anything about Tichiba.
00:24:03.599 --> 00:24:13.359
So every writer who retold Tichiba's story repeated the one from before, and each repetition made the invented version feel more like historic fact.
00:24:13.359 --> 00:24:18.720
Nobody went back to the court papers because the story already felt known.
00:24:18.720 --> 00:24:24.640
But sometimes somebody does go back to the records and makes a correction, but it's still not enough.
00:24:24.640 --> 00:24:33.759
In 1994, two psychologists at the University of Michigan had people read a series of news updates about a warehouse fire.
00:24:33.759 --> 00:24:42.240
An early update said the fire probably started in a closet where someone had stored paint cans and gas cylinders.
00:24:42.240 --> 00:24:47.440
A later update corrected that because the closet had actually been empty.
00:24:47.440 --> 00:24:54.799
Then everyone answered questions about the fire, like why the smoke was so thick and why it spread so fast.
00:24:54.799 --> 00:25:05.680
If corrections worked the way we'd like them to, the people who got the correction should have reasoned just like people who never heard about the paint cans.
00:25:05.680 --> 00:25:06.640
They didn't.
00:25:06.640 --> 00:25:11.359
They kept blaming the paint cans for the thick smoke and the fast spread.
00:25:11.359 --> 00:25:17.039
Only when they were asked directly did many of them remember the correction.
00:25:17.039 --> 00:25:22.559
They knew the closet was empty, but they used the paint cans anyway.
00:25:22.559 --> 00:25:29.680
A correction leaves a gap, and people would rather keep a wrong explanation than have nothing at all.
00:25:29.680 --> 00:25:32.640
But the same research found something that works.
00:25:32.640 --> 00:25:44.160
When people were told the closet was empty and were also given a different cause, like signs of arson somewhere else in the building, they let go of the paint cans much more easily.
00:25:44.160 --> 00:25:46.960
So a correction on its own leaves a hole.
00:25:46.960 --> 00:25:50.720
A correction with a better explanation fills it.
00:25:50.720 --> 00:25:54.160
And that's what eventually happened for Hatshepsut.
00:25:54.160 --> 00:26:12.240
After those curators branded her vain and grasping, later scholars went back to her temples and records and told the fuller story, a reign of stability and prosperity, with restored monuments, reopened trade, and one of the most ambitious temples in Egypt.
00:26:12.240 --> 00:26:19.599
In 2005, the Met itself helped put together a major exhibition built around that version of her.
00:26:19.599 --> 00:26:23.599
The myth didn't just get corrected, it got replaced.
00:26:23.599 --> 00:26:30.480
And that worked because when I heard about Het Shepsu, I heard of her as one of the best rulers of Egypt.
00:26:30.480 --> 00:26:33.440
Bathsheba hasn't been so lucky.
00:26:33.440 --> 00:26:43.519
In 2014, the author whose family had lived in that farmhouse admitted in her third book that no records supported the rumors about Bathsheba.
00:26:43.519 --> 00:26:45.519
That was an actual correction.
00:26:45.519 --> 00:26:54.000
But it came out a year after a Hollywood movie told millions the opposite, and it didn't give them anything to replace the witch with.
00:26:54.000 --> 00:26:57.359
The author just moved on to blaming a different spirit.
00:26:57.359 --> 00:27:01.359
For almost everyone else, Bathsheba stayed the witch.
00:27:01.359 --> 00:27:06.640
People kept coming to her grave and kept damaging it until her headstone had to be replaced.
00:27:06.640 --> 00:27:15.119
The better explanation was there all along: the three small graves and the will that paid for her grandson's education.
00:27:15.119 --> 00:27:24.000
A drowned pilgrim wife got her own version of this, a suicide story that kept getting repeated even after it was debunked.
00:27:24.000 --> 00:27:30.160
Her name was Dorothy Bradford, and she's getting her own episode on our Thanksgiving special.
00:27:30.160 --> 00:27:37.359
So the lesson here is that when someone tells you a myth about a woman, saying, that's not true is not enough.
00:27:37.359 --> 00:27:42.880
You have to tell them what actually happened so they have something to replace the myth.
00:27:42.880 --> 00:27:46.400
And that's why a myth about anyone can stick.
00:27:46.400 --> 00:27:53.519
But it doesn't explain why the myths about dead women keep coming back in the same few shapes.
00:27:53.519 --> 00:27:56.400
And we'll get to that after this break.
00:27:56.400 --> 00:28:07.119
In 2010, two researchers at Yale wanted to see whether ambition gets punished differently for women and men.
00:28:07.119 --> 00:28:14.960
People read short biographies of fictional state senators, a man and a woman with basically the same background.
00:28:14.960 --> 00:28:20.079
In some versions, the senator came across as especially hungry for power.
00:28:20.079 --> 00:28:26.240
And then people were asked who'd they'd vote for and how they felt about each one.
00:28:26.240 --> 00:28:33.680
If voters simply dislike power-hungry politicians, ambition should have hurt the man and the woman equally.
00:28:33.680 --> 00:28:34.559
It didn't.
00:28:34.559 --> 00:28:39.359
When the woman seemed power seeking, people were less likely to vote for her.
00:28:39.359 --> 00:28:43.599
When the man seemed power seeking, it made no difference.
00:28:43.599 --> 00:28:45.599
And it didn't stop there.
00:28:45.599 --> 00:28:56.240
People reported moral outrage toward the ambitious woman, meaning contempt, anger, and disgust, and they saw her as less caring.
00:28:56.240 --> 00:28:59.839
Women judged her just as harshly as men did.
00:28:59.839 --> 00:29:03.759
She wasn't being punished for breaking a rule about politicians.
00:29:03.759 --> 00:29:08.000
She was being punished for breaking a rule about women.
00:29:08.000 --> 00:29:13.680
That disgust is what turns a political woman into a sexual monster.
00:29:13.680 --> 00:29:18.799
When a woman reaches for power, the reaction isn't, I disagree with her.
00:29:18.799 --> 00:29:21.200
It's something is wrong with her.
00:29:21.200 --> 00:29:23.839
Something unnatural and dirty.
00:29:23.839 --> 00:29:30.799
Messalina married a senator to protect her son, and she became a woman who sold herself in a brothel.
00:29:30.799 --> 00:29:36.480
Theodora helped run an empire, and she became a woman of endless appetite.
00:29:36.480 --> 00:29:43.119
Catherine ruled Russia for more than 30 years, and she became a joke about a horse.
00:29:43.119 --> 00:29:50.480
Even Hatchepsut's label, vain and ambitious, was a word for a woman who wanted too much.
00:29:50.480 --> 00:29:56.799
And if you've been with us since our very first episode, you know the research behind the other half of this.
00:29:56.799 --> 00:30:02.559
The ambivalent sexism theory states that sexism comes in two kinds that work together.
00:30:02.559 --> 00:30:10.079
One is hostile, resentment toward women who seem to be taking power that's supposed to belong to men.
00:30:10.079 --> 00:30:12.480
The other sounds sweet.
00:30:12.480 --> 00:30:20.640
It says women are pure and nurturing and should be cherished and protected, and it puts a woman on a pedestal.
00:30:20.640 --> 00:30:29.359
The pedestal rewards women who stay in their assigned place, and the hostility punishes women who don't.
00:30:29.359 --> 00:30:32.160
The label follows the same pattern.
00:30:32.160 --> 00:30:35.359
The saint and the good mother are the reward.
00:30:35.359 --> 00:30:38.720
The witch and the slut are the punishment.
00:30:38.720 --> 00:30:44.160
And there's a third punishment for a woman who leaves a silence behind.
00:30:44.160 --> 00:30:55.599
When a woman dies without explaining herself, the easiest story is that she must have been too fragile to cope, lovesick, unstable, or heartbroken.
00:30:55.599 --> 00:30:57.440
That's the madwoman.
00:30:57.440 --> 00:31:01.119
And it's the label that got pinned on Dorothy Bradford.
00:31:01.119 --> 00:31:04.240
Which brings us back to the Headstone in Burrowville.
00:31:04.240 --> 00:31:13.759
In part two of our Witch episode, you heard about Albert Bandura's experiment, where college students were allowed to punish another group with electric shocks.
00:31:13.759 --> 00:31:19.440
The students who overheard the group described as animals shocked them harder.
00:31:19.440 --> 00:31:25.759
They also came up with more excuses, like they deserve it, or it's their own fault.
00:31:25.759 --> 00:31:30.720
And the more excuses a student came up with, the harder they punished.
00:31:30.720 --> 00:31:39.119
And when the other group was described as perceptive and understanding, the punishment stayed low no matter what.
00:31:39.119 --> 00:31:45.440
The label didn't just make people seem less human, it gave the punishers an excuse.
00:31:45.440 --> 00:31:53.839
A farm wife who buried three babies and saved her money for her grandson's schooling is not someone anybody takes a rock to.
00:31:53.839 --> 00:31:58.720
A witch who killed a baby for the devil is a different story.
00:31:58.720 --> 00:32:01.920
For some people, that isn't just a grave anymore.
00:32:01.920 --> 00:32:06.799
The label already supplied the excuse that she was evil and deserved it.
00:32:06.799 --> 00:32:09.519
And the antidote was in the same experiment.
00:32:09.519 --> 00:32:14.480
The people who'd been described as human got the lowest punishment of all.
00:32:14.480 --> 00:32:20.799
Which brings us back to episode one again, which was titled, Are Women Human?
00:32:20.799 --> 00:32:25.039
Now let's return to the questions I posed at the beginning of this episode.
00:32:25.039 --> 00:32:28.559
So who gets to tell a woman's story after she dies?
00:32:28.559 --> 00:32:31.039
The answer is whoever outlives her.
00:32:31.039 --> 00:32:41.759
No court will hear her, so the story belongs to a successor with a chisel, enemies with pens, a husband who meant well, or a family with a ghost story.
00:32:41.759 --> 00:32:46.079
Sometimes they invent a label out of nothing, like the witch in Burleville.
00:32:46.079 --> 00:32:49.759
Sometimes they borrow it from another woman, like the cake line.
00:32:49.759 --> 00:32:53.119
Sometimes they rewrite her death, like the horse.
00:32:53.119 --> 00:32:56.319
Sometimes they fill her silence with a broken heart.
00:32:56.319 --> 00:33:03.440
And sometimes the label grows with each retelling, like Tichubas, until nobody remembers the original.
00:33:03.440 --> 00:33:06.480
Why do those stories outlive the truth?
00:33:06.480 --> 00:33:11.680
Because every retelling bends a story toward what people already expect.
00:33:11.680 --> 00:33:17.759
Because hearing something again makes it feel true, even to people who know better.
00:33:17.759 --> 00:33:25.519
And because a correction on its own leaves a hole, and people would rather keep the myth than have no explanation at all.
00:33:25.519 --> 00:33:32.240
And I think right there is an explanation of how Fox News got so successful.
00:33:32.240 --> 00:33:37.279
And the last question: why do they so often turn her into a witch or a slut?
00:33:37.279 --> 00:33:43.119
Because a woman who reaches for power stirs up disgust in a way a man doesn't.
00:33:43.119 --> 00:33:47.279
Because those labels punish women who leave their assigned place.
00:33:47.279 --> 00:33:55.759
And because once the label is attached, it gives people permission to do whatever they want to her, even to her gravestone.
00:33:55.759 --> 00:33:59.519
Voltaire said we owe the dead only the truth.
00:33:59.519 --> 00:34:02.480
But no one is holding us accountable.
00:34:02.480 --> 00:34:10.000
So the next time you hear a woman from history called a witch or a slut, ask who benefits from that story.
00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:12.079
Then tell her real one.
00:34:12.079 --> 00:34:17.840
If you enjoyed this episode, please follow wherever you listen and leave a rating or review.
00:34:17.840 --> 00:34:19.679
This will help me keep it going.
00:34:19.679 --> 00:34:22.880
You can also support us directly on Buy Me a Coffee.
00:34:22.880 --> 00:34:25.679
The link is in the show notes along with my sources.
00:34:25.679 --> 00:34:30.000
And you can find us on Instagram at the.wbs.pod.
00:34:30.000 --> 00:34:37.760
That's the t-e.wbs.pod pod, where I post accompanying images to each episode.
00:34:37.760 --> 00:34:40.960
Now I'm going to leave you with Hatshepsuit.
00:34:40.960 --> 00:34:51.360
She knew people would talk about her long after she was gone, so she had a message carved on one of her obelisks at Karnak for whoever came later.
00:34:51.360 --> 00:34:56.480
After she died, someone tried to make sure she'd never be part of that conversation.
00:34:56.480 --> 00:35:01.920
They cut her name out of the walls, smashed her statues, and dumped the pieces in a pit.
00:35:01.920 --> 00:35:05.599
For more than 3,000 years it mostly worked.
00:35:05.599 --> 00:35:08.000
But the obelisk survived.
00:35:08.000 --> 00:35:11.599
It's still standing with her words still on it.
00:35:11.599 --> 00:35:18.239
And when people finally went back and read what she'd left, she got the last word after all.
00:35:18.239 --> 00:35:22.159
Quote, now my heart turns this way and that.
00:35:22.159 --> 00:35:30.639
And I think what the people will say, those who see my monuments in after years and shall speak of what I have done.
00:35:30.639 --> 00:35:36.400
That's us, we're the people who saw her monument three and a half thousand years later.
00:35:36.400 --> 00:35:43.360
And we get to choose whether we repeat what someone else said about her or read what she left us.
00:35:43.360 --> 00:35:46.480
This has been Witches, Bitches, and Sluts.
00:35:46.480 --> 00:35:47.360
Thanks for listening.
00:35:47.360 --> 00:35:51.920
I'm Xtina Rose, and I'll see you next week for Catherine the Great.