"When I'm Good, I'm Very Good. But When I'm Bad I'm Better."

 Mae West spoke those provocative lines in the movie I'm No Angel, and women have been identifying with it ever since. But women were bad a lot further back than that 1933 movie. Find twenty-six of the world's most notorious females in Bad Girls: Sirens, Jezebels, Murderesses, Thieves, & Other Female Villains by Jane Yolen and Heidi E. Y. Stemple, with illustrations by Rebecca Guay.

Modern Times and Changing Gender Roles

If Salome dropped her veils today, would we call her bad? Or would we arrest her parents for a variety of crimes against a child? If Mata Hari made up a whole new self tomorrow and danced her way into a criminal lifestyle, would we execute her or send her to counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder? Would we encourage Lizzie Borden to move into her own apartment, Bloody Mary to establish an ecumenical council, and Typhoid Mary to take some nursing courses at a community college? Would we still consider these women bad? Or would we consider them victims of bad circumstances? As our world changes, so does our definition of bad. Especially when it comes to half the world's population--the half that happens to be female.

With women's relatively new rights--to speak out, to vote, to have power over their own bodies--comes a new set of responsibilities. Women are no longer required to do a man's bidding--no matter whether that bidding is legal or not. But no longer can a woman say that she was just followign a man and count that as justification for bad acts.

We measure guilt and innocence today on a sliding scale. And never has it been easier for the general public to "weigh" the misdeeds of its favorite modern-day bad girls. The nightly news, tabloids, blogs, and the fast pace of the Internet all make sure of this. Today, as throughout history, the court of public opinion is capable of swaying or tempering the criminal courts.

Now that you have been introduced to some of history's bad girls, you will have to decide for yourself if they were really bad, not so bad, or somewhere in the middle. And perhaps you will see that even the baddest of bad girls may have had a good reason for what she did.

from the Conclusion of Bad Girls

March is Women's History Month!

Rhyme Time with Jane Yolen and J. Patrick Lewis

April is Poetry Month! Two renowned authors, Jane Yolen and J. Patrick Lewis (current Children's Poet Laureate), teamed up to celebrate poetry by interviewing each other about their experiences as poets. Even better, they've done it in rhyme...

Jane Yolen:
So you say you're a poet,
So how do we know it?
Do you wear special clothes when you rhyme?
So, like how do you show it?
Do you go with the flow? It
can't mean that you rhyme all the time.

J. Patrick Lewis:
I rhyme for a nickle, I rhyme for a dime,
A penny, a quarter--it's strange.
I rhyme when I go to the grocery store.
I rhyme when I'm looking for change.

But I won't if I don't really feel like rhyming.
Sometimes words like playing around
On the horn in my mind or the drum on the page.
I sit back enjoying the . . . noise.

Jane:
As for me, I've been rhyming before I could talk,
with a goo . . . and a gaa . . . and a waa.
I rhymed for my daddy, my uncles and aunts,
and especially rhymed for my Ma.

I began with real verse in rhymed couplets for school
when I was in first grade, I'm told.
(Though I must admit that I'm growing a bit,
Getting better as I have grown old.)

I did a long poem, all in rhyme, at thirteen,
an assignment about New York State.
A great rhyme for Otis, who made elevators,
and I did not turn it in late.

I won a Scholastic award for my verse
and the poetry prizes in college.
I sold my first poem to a real publication
before I'd amassed enough knowledge.

So--over to Pat, catch us up with your verse.
Do you think you're now better or now getting worse?
(To keep rhyming this way can be seen as a curse
Or a-musing.)

Pat:
How can you write sonnets or epics if, Lordie,
You don't meet Ms. Prosody till you turn forty?!
Where was she hiding? My Pied Piper teacher
In third grade? In eighth grade? Dark mystical creature
To juggle me the noun and swivel me the verb,
To give me a special hat, Do Not Disturb:
The Boy in the Corner May Turn Out To Be
A Man of Outlandish Whimsicality.

Nowhere, I tell you, my wee muse had flown,
So I had to stumble ahead on my own.
My ear is improving, I'm glad to report.
I'm learning by doing this indoor sport.
Who knows? If I practice both day and night,
By flashlight and candle, I may get it right.

Both:
So the word from the experts, is just keep on moving.
The more that you do it, the more you're improving.
And whether you've rhymed from your childhood or dotage,
If you work at your poems, then you're sure to get quot-age.







Stay tuned for the upcoming release of Jane and Pat's next poetry collaboration, Last Laughs: Animal Epitaphs, due out July 2012.

Pirates are good, okay?

The very first book I can remember loving was called The Pleasant Pirate. I got it--alongside my other favorite book The Story of Ferdinand (an antiwar picture book, so you can see how conflicted I was even then)--from the Newport News Public Library. My mother, baby brother, and I were living down in Virginia with our grandparents Dan and Fanny Berlin while Daddy (Will Yolen) was away in the War. Actually he was a second lieutenant and head of the Secret Radio ABSIE, stationed in London.

The very first book I ever made was in 7th grade. It was a school project for one of my classes at Hunter Junior High in New York City. It was about pirates and I leaned rather heavily on my sources, made illustrations, cardboard-covered-with-blue-cloth jackets, and sewed it together. I think it was simply called Pirates.

The very first actual book I sold to a publisher was called Pirates in Petticoats, about women pirates. I was living in New York at the time, and had a bunch of badly written picture books making the rounds plus one interesting nonfiction proposal. I never actually sold any of those picture books but Rose Dobbs, an editor at David McKay, made an offer for Pirates in Petticoats on my 22nd birthday and so my book writing career was launched. It took a year for the research (in the NY Public Library's rare book room, and at Foul Anchor Archives in Rye, New York, this being long before the Internet) and writing. The book got some nice reviews and went out of print just as the woman's movement was really getting going. Bad timing.

Years later, I took two of those women pirates--Ann Bonney and Mary Reade--and wrote a ballad about them called The Ballad of the Pirate Queens which David Shannon illustrated and it is still in print.

Which brings me to now and to Charlesbridge.

I had often bemoaned the fact that Pirates in Petticoats went OP. But I knew it had been written by a 22 year old, one still learning how to write. I wanted to redo it. Once I thought of writing it for adults and calling it Buccaneer Broads. After all, most of the pirates didn't actually wear petticoats And I'd made up conversations between the pirates and their friends and enemies with abandon. (One did that back in the 60s in children's nonfiction.) I discussed this with the irrepressible Judy O'Malley, editor extraordinare who was--at that time--newly come to Charlesbridge. Among other things, I'd discovered Grania (Grace) O'Malley whom I hadn't put in the earlier book. I'd discovered that several of the pirates in my first book were probably simply storybook lasses, not real at all. In the ensuing years (Pirates in Petticoats had come out in 1963) much more had been written about women pirates.

Judy and Charlesbridge were intrigued. My granddaughter and her best friend went trick-or-treating as Anne Bonney and Mary Read the year Charlesbridge gave me a contract for the book (the next year they were "Thelma and Louise.") And I began to work hard on the research and writing.

Sea Queens will be out this year, in time for September 19, "Talk Like A Pirate Day." I plan to take to the airwaves, saying things like "Get off the poop deck!" and "Arrrrrrr" to anyone who will listen. I may even buy myself a parrot. Or learn to sail.



Posted by author Jane Yolen.