Five Poems and Introductory Notes about Five Famous Nasty Women by Peggy Landsman

In honor of April, National Poetry Month, here are five poems with introductory notes about five women writers, political activists, and poets, each nasty in her own distinctive and liberating way.

Susan B. Anthony (2/15/1820 – 3/13/1906), whose name is synonymous with American women’s right to vote—and the long, hard struggle for that right—wrote the Woman Suffrage Amendment, which finally, in 1920, became the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Although initially reviled as a threat to society, marriage, and family, by the time she turned 80, Anthony was invited by then-President William McKinley to a birthday celebration in her honor at the White House. And the honors, dubious as they may sometimes seem, never stopped. In 1979, she was the first female to appear on an American coin, the Susan B. Anthony dollar.

 

Alice Paul (1/11/1885 – 7/9/1977), 65 years Anthony’s junior, carried on and intensified the struggle for suffrage. She suffered numerous arrests and abusive imprisonments before women finally won their right to vote. For Paul, though, the right to vote was just the beginning. She was not going to be satisfied with anything less for women than full legal equality, so in 1921, she and Crystal Eastman co-wrote the original Equal Rights Amendment. Paul then founded the National Woman’s Party to campaign for its passage and dedicated the rest of her life to achieving that goal. If today’s 24-word ERA, the one Paul rewrote in 1943 to better align with the times, ever passes, it will become a poem that does make something happen. In 1995, the US Postal Service issued the 78-cent Alice Paul stamp.

GOOD GIRLS GO TO HEAVEN; BAD GIRLS GO EVERYWHERE

(a new dollar, 1979; a new stamp, 1995)

Susan B. Anthony’s on a dollar,
Susan B. Anthony’s on a buck.
Silver Susan’s the size of a quarter,
but her shape is strangely nipped and tucked.

You can’t use Suze in the washing machine
at your coin-op laundromat.
You can’t use Suze in a public telephone…
Stick her under your pillow and don’t leave home!

Susan B. Anthony’s on a dollar,
but Silver Susan is hardly ever seen.
If you’re afraid you’ll come unglued if you can’t find her,
try your post office self-service stamp machine.

Alice Paul is on a seventy-eight-cent stamp.
Alice Paul is hardly ever seen
except by that Susan B. Anthony dollar
making change in your post office self-service stamp machine.

Gertrude Stein (2/3/1874 – 7/27/1946) is famous as a writer of mostly experimental literature that few people read today, but during her lifetime, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was a bestseller. A brilliant, unique individual, Stein influenced many of the most avant-garde artists and writers of her time. Pablo Picasso, Cecil Beaton, and others immortalized her in their paintings, sculptures, and photographs. She mentored the young Ernest Hemingway and, to this day, no one is sure which of them came up with the label, “The Lost Generation.” Something else no one knows for sure is who it was who described the young woman Radcliffe-student Stein as “big and floppy and sandaled and not caring a damn.” And who cares who described her that way? What matters is that she was who she was, the way she was and that she was…a nasty woman after our own rebel hearts.

 

GERTRUDE

What did they say about Gertrude Stein?
If she were skinny, she’d be fine.

What did they say about Gerty’s hair?
If she had more of it, she’d be fair.

Everyone sighed at the size of her thighs;
In philosophy she took first prize.

Gerty Gerty Stein Stein Stein
Never toed that fine fine line.

Gertrude the short-haired, Gertrude the fat,
Thank you for writing. Thank you for thriving.

Thank you
for seeing and being and being for being and seeing like that

Like That!

 

Alice B. Toklas (4/30/1877 – 3/7/1967) was Gertrude Stein’s life partner, amanuensis, and, in short, her everything. In her own right, she’s famous for The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook which contains her recipe for marijuana brownies.

GERTRUDE, ALICE, AND ERNEST: THE BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Gertrude Stein
took a shine
to the lovely Alice B.,
her lifelong love, her dear wifey.

Gertrude Stein
took a shine
to earnest Ernest Hemingway.
Toklas took a dimmer view, wanted Hem away.

Ernest Miller Hemingway
praised each word that Gert would say.
But did he have the hots for Stein?
Erase that image from your mind.

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (3/6/1806 – 6/29/1861) is well-known today for her poem, “How Do I Love Thee?” and her book of love sonnets, Sonnets from the Portuguese, but during her lifetime she was much more than her father’s disinherited daughter and poet Robert Browning’s wife. She was an influential abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and progressive social reformer. One of her poems was credited with spurring the reform of child-labor laws. Aurora Leigh, her blank-verse novel, influenced Susan B. Anthony’s thinking about how a woman should be able to live her life. Nasty women stick together; there are always fewer than six degrees of separation.

TO ELIZABETH

Rereading Sonnets from the Portuguese,
I sense that something profound has transpired.
I feel deeply moved, engaged, inspired.
Although you didn’t live in times like these,
your life and times induced that strange disease.
Your time was time enough to make you tired.
And you couldn’t stand that man who’d sired
you and forced you to mind his stern decrees.
Fathers, despotic; daughters rebelling,
desperate for strength to draw our own free breath,
we do grow stronger with each retelling,
fueling ourselves for love and life, not death.
I finish the book, my tears are welling
for your passion and your pain, Elizabeth.

ROUGH DRAFTS

Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
knitting her brows and frowning,
kept losing count of the ways….
She’d be counting and counting for days!

Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are Nasty Women Writers, Activists, Poets and more!

© Peggy Landsman 2026

Works Cited

Landsman, Peggy. “Gertrude.” To-wit To-woo, Foothills Publishing, 2008.

— “Gertrude, Alice, and Ernest: The Biographical Sketch.” Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, 2025.

— “Good Girls Go to Heaven; Bad Girls Go Everywhere.” The Museum of Americana, 2021.

— “To Elizabeth”: To-wit To-woo, Foothills Publishing, 2008.

— “Rough Drafts.” New Verse Review, 2026.