Crazy. Feisty. Bolshy. Bossy. Hysterical. Sassy. Shrill. Spinster. Cat woman. Hag. Cougar. Frigid. Slut. Bitch. The English language has no end of words to describe women who don’t behave the way they are supposed to. They are all derogatory and almost none of them have a male equivalent. The most complimentary thing you can hope to be called if you are a woman who doesn’t conform to societal expectations is the E-word: eccentric.
While the idea of eccentricity is nebulous, it is an important barometer of society and women’s place within it. “The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour and moral courage it contained,” wrote John Stuart Mill in 1859. If that is the case, then I think we should be incredibly excited by the loud and proud display of feminist vigour running through popular culture. From Janelle Monáe rocking very unsubtle vagina trousers in the music video for her song Pynk to Marina Abramović’s provocative performance art, and TV shows such as Killing Eve and Sally4Ever that revel in weird women, female eccentricity is having a moment.
Dr David Weeks, a neuropsychologist at the Royal Edinburgh hospital and the author of Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness, agrees. “We are seeing more female nonconformists, and most eccentric women come from that group. There are more eccentric women nowadays, although they were not as well documented over the period from about 1580 to 1800 in the UK.”
The emergence of more female eccentrics is a sign of how much feminists have achieved. Women, Weeks says, now have more opportunities to “exercise their creativity, independent-mindedness and their feminist, anti-sexist rights.”
To be labelled as eccentric rather than crazy used to be a privilege only a great deal of money could buy. In the past, eccentric women tended to be aristocrats. Being upper class gave one more licence to stray from social norms. As Edith Sitwell, one of history’s most famous female eccentrics, noted: “The genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.” If you were posh enough, you could get away with anything.
Sitwell came from an incredibly wealthy and famously odd family. Her father, Sir George Sitwell, invented a tiny pistol for shooting wasps and a musical toothbrush. When not shooting wasps, he wrote a number of unusual – and unpublished – books, including A Short History of the Fork and Acorns as an Article of Medieval Diet. Then there was her maternal grandfather, the Earl of Londesborough, who died after contracting a disease from a parrot. Some of her relations were reportedly fond of hiding live lobsters between the sheets as a prank. Her mother, Ida Sitwell, was an alcoholic who spent a few months in Holloway prison for fraud. It would have been remarkable, with all that going on, if Sitwell had ended up in any way conventional.
This is particularly true considering her appearance, which was striking. She was 6ft tall with a magnificently beak-like nose and dressed in unusual clothes. The author Elizabeth Bowen described her as looking like a “high altar on the move”. Her poetry was similarly idiosyncratic, as was her manner of performing it: she has been described as the world’s first white rapper and performed the poems of her series Façade through a large megaphone behind a curtain.
There is more than an echo of Sitwell’s defiance of gender and genre norms in many of today’s eccentric women – particularly when it comes to Tilda Swinton, who happens to be Sitwell’s cousin. (Swinton paid her respects to her forebear in a photoshoot for W magazine this month when she dressed up as Sitwell.)
But Sitwell is not the most eccentric female aristocrat to have graced history. In fact, in many ways, she led a conservative life compared with the extraordinary Hester Stanhope. Born in 1776, Lady Stanhope spent her early adulthood managing the household of her uncle, William Pitt the Younger, who was then serving as prime minister. In her early 30s, after her uncle’s death and a love affair gone wrong, she reinvented herself as an archaeologist and explorer and headed off in pursuit of adventure in the Middle East.
Like Sitwell, Stanhope was known for her unusual fashion; she was shipwrecked during her travels and lost her English wardrobe, so she started dressing like a Turkish man. She even shaved her hair and wore a cashmere turban. Her clothing, along with her confidence, meant that no one knew what to make of her. “She was neither a man nor woman, but a being apart,” said her biographer, Joan Haslip. She was treated as a being apart, too, getting unique privileges and access. She became the first European woman to enter Palmyra in Syria and earned the nickname the Queen of the Desert.
While, historically speaking, being an English aristocrat helped ensure you were put in the eccentric box rather than a mental asylum, it has never been a mandatory requirement for attaining eccentric status. What is most important is defying categorisation; being impossible to pin down. That has traditionally been much harder for women than for men, with society having invented so many labels for women; so many convenient ways to reduce them to types rather than appreciate them as individuals; so many ways to cast off female nonconformity as mad or bad rather than interesting.
One woman who defied categorisation without the help of any blue blood was Vivian Maier, a US nanny and street photographer who died in 2009. Maier took more than 100,000 photographs during her lifetime but her work was largely a secret. Her prodigious output came to light by chance in 2007, when a young estate agent called John Maloof bought a box of negatives at auction, hoping it would contain pictures of his Chicago neighbourhood. In fact, it contained work that is now considered to be among the finest street photography of the 20th century. Maloof became obsessed with finding out more about their unlikely creator.
What makes Maier so intriguing is the contradictions she embodies: career nanny; street photographer; proudly independent; mysteriously private. She resists any easy attempt at categorisation. There is no easy way to bundle up and explain her; you must approach her as an individual.
This insistence on unapologetic individuality is what makes modern eccentrics such a powerful force for social change, particularly at a time when authoritarianism and groupthink threatens to take over the world. The likes of the Icelandic musician Björk, Swinton, Abramović and Monáe do not fit comfortably into a particular era or genre, nor within the conventional confines of gender. They are purely themselves and they are unapologetic about it. And that is the most revolutionary thing a woman can ever be.
“I’m always left of centre and that’s right where I belong,” Monáe sings on I Like That, a single on her latest album, Dirty Computer. “Told the whole world / I’m the venom and the antidote / Take a different type of girl to keep the whole world afloat.”
It certainly does.
