To read the poem "Dulle Griet Stages a New Assault," click here.

I owe thanks to Kate Heartfield’s novel The Chatelaine (originally published as Armed in Her Fashion) for introducing me to Dulle Griet. An army of women raiding Hell: it sounded amazing! Imagine my disappointment when I discovered the painting is widely assumed to be a condemnation of women, mocking them for being noisy, aggressive, and greedy. Dulle Griet going after more valuables when her hands are already full might be a bit much, but the rest struck me as a sixteenth-century iteration of the gendered, dichotomous interpretation of behavior. Men raid Hell? They are strong and brave. Women raid Hell? How foolish of them.

As I kept reading that Wikipedia page, though, I arrived at the Flemish proverb that supplies the italicized lines in my poem, and I was struck by how—for a modern reader, at least—it moves from misogyny to something that sounds pretty bad-ass. There’s a long folkloric tradition of tales and songs about women so contrary or shrewish even the Devil washes his hands of them, but it takes only a tiny tilt of perspective to see that in a different light—to turn lamentable fractiousness into admirable ferociousness. Pair that with the upward counting of the proverb, and it starts to look like misogyny wins when women are isolated or few in number, but mass solidarity can carry the day.

I titled and subtitled this poem to point toward Bruegel’s painting, because that’s not an image so well known I can assume the average reader will be familiar with it. It’s not just a response to that one source, though; the proverb gave me my structuring principle, and of course individual lines allude to specific incidents or patterns of sexism in the modern world. Sadly, even if the reader doesn’t pick up on a single one of the references, I suspect the general thrust of the poem will be all too comprehensible. We are far from the point at which misogyny itself is a historical curiosity that requires explanation.