I’m a sweary mom – as if you couldn’t guess from the name Mommy Cusses.
I swear like a sailor because my dad was a sailor, and let’s just say I took to the song of his people. I delight in my extensive swearcabulary and discovering new, uncommon curse words I can apply to motherhood. But recently, I got to thinking – who were the original sweary moms?
I decided to look into the history of my foul-mouthed predecessors and was not disappointed. If you love history and a good “fuck” (the word, I mean – but if you love the verb, too, hey new bestie!).
Some of these sweary moms didn’t have specific examples of cussing that I could find – only that they were described as having “foul mouths,” but I think are still worth mentioning.
Let’s raise our middle fingers in homage to these 10 original sweary moms throughout history.
1886-1969
Also known as Helen Joslin and Helen Cromwell, Dirty Helen was a prominent prostitute in the 1920s (though she hated that title and would probably cuss me out for calling her that if she were alive. She wished the term “call girl” were available in her day), owner of a speakeasy called the Sunflower Inn, and the madam of a brothel in Milwaukee. She also had one of the filthiest mouths. Helen worked at various restaurants, taverns, and brothels and turned them into Dicks Last Resort before Dicks was cool. Customers remember Helen throwing things at them and calling them “cheap fuckers” if they didn’t order enough but she’d turn around and tell you she was just teasing and was said to be a sweet woman. http://www.mkelgbthist.org/people/peo-j/joslin_helen.htm
Known for being promiscuous at an early age, Helen writes in her memoir Good Time Party Girl: The Notorious Life of Dirty Helen Cromwell that “there were no flies on her fast ass.” She married and got pregnant but found out her husband was cheating on her so she paid the woman a visit and clawed her face. It’s said that she had more children but purposely estranged herself from them. Helen died in 1969 (a fitting date) and the Sunflower Inn is now a parking lot.
1901-1971
Pancho Barnes was a famous pilot, believed madam at a brothel of sorts made as a club for fellow pilots and socialites, sweary mom (who didn’t take to being a mother), and thrill-seeker. Like many others you’ll read about in this post, Pancho dressed and acted more like a man, though she was known for having several husbands and lovers. After having a son in an arranged marriage to a pastor, Pancho, who came from a wealthy family, realized she wasn’t about that life so she hired help and a nanny and basically ran away to go adventuring and standing in as a stunt double in movies. Thrill-seeking brought her into the world of being a stunt pilot and she found herself buying a piece of land that she built a landing strip, pool, bar, guest rooms, flying school, and more on and began the Happy Bottom Riding Club just outside an Air Force base. The club was basically a place to drink, swear, tell jokes, and schmooze with her friends, celebs and movie industry people she’d met during her career, and local fly boys. Pancho would hire girls to serve and entertain her patrons by dancing with and for them.
“I got along with Pancho because when she’d cuss me out, I’d just cuss her right back and she’d laugh. But she had most of the girls scared to death.”
Pancho’s house was burned in an inexplicable fire after losing her property in a heated lawsuit with the Air Force who wanted to use her land.
When the fishermen are away, the fishwives will hold it down at home by selling fish at the market, gossiping, drinking, pipe smoking, shouting, and swearing so much they had a phrase coined after them: “swear like a fish wife.” Known to be rude and vulgar, the term fishwife became a slur to describe a mouthy broad. In the 1300s a fishwife meant “a bold, impudent, or wicked woman” and that definition carried on long after.
Fishwives in the town of Billingsley were said to be the worst, and in the 1874 “Slang Dictionary” (sounds like an olden Urban Dictionary, no?) a definition that was once only dedicated to a Billingsgate fish wife, calling anyone a fishwife or “fishfag” meant “Any scolding, vixenish, foul-mouthed woman.”
Take a gander at this mother-oyster-shucker, 1845 Mrs. Flucker. Now that’s a fun tongue-twister or kid’s nursery rhyme.
Alas, where you find sweary moms, you also find sanctimommies. And, in the case of fishwives just tryna do fishwife shit with their fishwife friends, that sanctimommy was Fannie Feinburg, a snooty fish wife from New York who said, “It’s no way to sell fish, shouting abuse at the customer’s. Better not to sound like a fishwife if you want to be a success.” Kinda ironic that fanny is a British swear word, and this Fannie sounds like a proper sweary synonym for fanny *coughTWATcough*.
1862-1931
Though I couldn’t find any examples, Ida B. Wells was an educator, civil rights activist, wife, mother of four, and investigative reporter whose reporting techniques pioneered and remain to be the way journalists write today. Dubbed as the “Foul-Mouthed Princess of the Press,” Ida co-owned and wrote for her the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper only to be driven away by a white mob that destroyed her office for covering stories about lynchings and racial segregation.
Ida “Rosa Parked” 71 years before Rosa. When told by a train conductor to move from her seat because he claimed she was in the wrong car, Ida refused by wrapped her feet around the chair and biting the conductor when he grabbed her. Ida co-founded the NAACP but found others distancing themselves from her because of her frank and “unladylike” speech.
1908-1998
Martha Gellhorn was a novelist, travel writer, journalist, and mother of two sons – one she gave birth to, and one she adopted. She was known for covering wars and major world conflicts, and was Ernest Hemingway’s third wife. She smoke, drank, wore haute couture, and liked flirting and swearing. Martha seemed to swear because she liked how it shook people, expressed things that felt raw and inexpressible, and the grit it gave her writing – a girl after my own heart and, as a writer, the sweary mom I learned about that I relate to the most.
Here are some sweary gems from personal letters she wrote:
“But goddam it, I want to write great heavy swooping things, to throw terror and glory into the mind” to Hortense Flexner in 1935.
“Please be a conqueror for a bit; forget me. I’m a shit face; and make yourself realise what you knew before I came” to Bertrand de Jouvenel in 1932.
“We will skip in bitter silence the fact that all doctors are evidently incompetent sons of bitches and that you could have been gamboling like a ewe lamb some time ago” to Flexner in 1937.
Martha referred to people who desecrated Paris in 1940 as “Goddam maniac bastards.”
“It’s exhilarating to shit but one doesn’t wave the shit in the air for everyone to admire” she wrote in 1934.
On journalism, she wrote, “There is so much shit written in our business that finally you feel very ashamed: you cannot write the straight truth because people resent it, and are conditioned (by the shit) not to believe it. So, finally, you write a certain amount of evasion yourself, carefully shirking the definitely dung features of journalism. … You have to be very young, very cynical and very ignorant to enjoy writing journalism these days.”
1884-1980
Alice Roosevelt was President Theodore Roosevelt’s eldest daughter. She was a writer, socialite, and rule-breaking badass. Alice had a pet snake named Emily Spinach that she kept in the White House and wore as an accessory, wore a dagger, smoked (often on the roof of the White House), gambled, wore pants, and enjoyed staying out late at parties and dancing on rooftops and then sleeping until noon. She was also kinda bitchy, but in the best ways as evidenced by a pillow in her home she needle-pointed with, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anyone, come and sit here by me.”
“I’m a hedonist,” Alice once said in an interview, “I have an appetite for being entertained.”
After Alice’s father left office, she was banned from the White House not once, but twice. For burying a voodoo doll of Secretary of War William Howard Taft’s wife in the yard, and then for badmouthing Woodrow Wilson.
She was a mother to one daughter, whom she conceived during an affair from her husband, a Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives with a Senator. When speaking on the sexual revolution, Alice said she lived by the adage, “Fill what’s empty, empty what’s full, and scratch where it itches.”
As her father famously said, “I can be president of the United States — or — I can attend to Alice. I cannot possibly do both!”
1848-1908
Calamity Jane was a well-known frontierswoman. Left to fend for herself at the age of 12, Jane took on a lot of work meant for men because it paid and she had a strong build. She dressed masculine, chewed tobacco, drank, swore, was rumored to have been a prostitute from time to time as a teenager as a way to earn money which is supposedly how the word “Calamity” was added to her name. She hung out with some of the most famous gun stingers, and performed as one herself in the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Calamity Jane was also known for her kindness and charity.
Much of Calamity Jane’s life is rooted in rumor and one such rumor was that she married in 1885 and had a daughter in 1887 though no marriage or birth certificates were ever found.
Anne Bonny and Mary Read the Pirate Queens
1697-1782 | 1685-1721
Anne Bonny and Mary Read were two of the most famous sweary, violent, plunder-happy, drink swilling Pirate Queens.
Both Anne and Mary had salty upbringings. Anne was born of an affair her father had with the family’s maid – who died while Anne was still young, Anne was rumored to have killed a servant girl at a young age, and her tendency to hang out at taverns and sleep with fishermen and drunks caused her father to disown her.
Anne married a sailor named James Bonny and they sailed to the Bahamas. Anne started fuckin’ around with pirates. Literally. And ended up leaving James for, and joining the crew of a pirate named “Calico Jack Rackam.” Though it was frowned upon – and could even get you killed – Anne didn’t hide the fact that she was a woman but would dress as a man while fighting and pillaging. She was said to be as or more violent and foul-mouthed as the men in her crew.
Calico Jack attacked a ship that Mary Read was on and he decided to keep her instead of making her walk the plank. Anne actually followed Mary into a cabin and tried to seduce her, thinking her a he, to which Mary exposed her breasts. Anne swore to keep her secret and the two became best friends. Ol’ Jack was put off by his wifey’s fondness of “Mark” (Mary’s alias) and went to slit “his” throat until Mary showed him her breasts and Jack also promised to keep her secret.
Mary was also a “bastard.” Her mother dressed her as her dead brother so she could keep receiving money from her mother-in-law (who offered to support her and her grandson after her son died). But Granny eventually found out she was being bamboozled. Mary was hoed out by her mom as a male servant, joined the army, quit the army, married a soldier…who died (lots of death, I tell ya), so Mary boarded a ship (that would be conquered by Calico Jack) and shipped the fuck outta there.
The trio and the crew pirated hard until they were finally overpowered in 1720. Mary, Anne, and Captain Jack were the only three willing to fight and it’s rumored that Mary said, “If there’s a man among ye, ye’ll come up and fight like the man ye are to be!” to which no one obliged. They were defeated.
Calico Jack Rackam, Anne, and Mary were all set to hang, and Jack was but Anne and Mary were spared after it was discovered that they were pregnant.
I didn’t turn up any actual swear-filled quotes from Anne or Mary, but taking into consideration what the life of a pirate entailed and that they were surrounded by men, I’m gonna go ahead and take an educated guess and say that these swashbucklers participated in some RRRRRRRR- rated language. Ahahaha, I’ll see myself out. There’s also a victim account of Mary’s where she was described as being “very profligate. Cursing and swearing much.”
Sweary moms have come a long way. Something that could once get you arrested (for being a “common scold”) is now a fun sentence enhancer. Not ladylike? My sir, do I not tell you to fuck off with my dainty little pinky up?
So, if you feel like you start the day off like Mary Poppins just to end it like Mommy Dearest, you’ll be relieved to know that Julie Andrews, the actress who plays her, is also a sweary mom.
“I do swear a lot. Mr Disney found out that quickly,” Andrews joked about a time a flywire she was being held up by on the set of “Mary Poppins” broke. “I have to admit, I let fly a stream of colorful expletives. I think I said a few words he (Walt Disney) had not heard very often.”
A common theme I’ve learned from these OG unicorn mamas is that they liked to drink, swear, bone, and weren’t afraid to admit that motherhood sucks sometimes. They were also some of the fiercest and sweetest moms around.
Horror of horrors, a foul mouth’d woman, / Shows the depth of degradation; / She should be struck from the race call’d human / And rank’d with the brute creation.
To all my fellow foul mouth’d mamas and swear enthusiasts, I hope you found this a…Bonny Read. Ahahahaha!…I’ll see myself out…
If you liked this, I’d love it if you shared this shit and/or commented below. Happy swearing!
