Women in History
By C.P Sutterman
September 25, 1999
It's easy to overlook the many valuable contributions women have made to American history, for there have been so few. It's easy to skip over that chapter on Women in History in your 8th grade text book; it's very short and the pages are always stuck together. And yes, it's easy to tune out women's ill-informed ramblings altogether, because they don't have the proper urinary tract to make any sort of meaningful contribution to the conversation.
Or so you thought.
I have been comissioned by divisiontwo to change these and other negative perceptions/outmoded stereotypes regarding women that are routinely propagated in sexist magazines such as divisiontwo. Every month, I will highlight the historic contribution of one woman whose name you may have never heard, whose deeds you may have never known, and whose ass you may not be able to find on the Internet, no matter how many searches you do. It is with this mission statement in mind that I present to you the subject of my first column: Prudence Homegood.
What I'm about to tell you about Prudence Homegood you won't find in the sticky pages of any textbook, and you won't hear it from any crusty librarian who talks in his sleep. The story of Prudence Homegood is a fascinating one, but one which has been buried under years of dust and natural sediment. Today, purely for your education, I will painfully excavate Prudence's story, resuscitate it, give it a bath, and let it stay in my guestroom if it promises not to make any rude noises.
Prudence Homegood was Abraham Lincoln's live-in nanny/whore the during his entire term in the White House. Lincoln hired the poor-but-humble Prudence Homegood at the age of 13, right out of her seventh grade classroom and brought her to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a white stretch limousine. At first, it was the classic rags-to-riches story for Prudence, who enjoyed taking care of President Lincoln's kids, his dishes, and his relatively benign sexual needs. But after that magical first year, both the President and his wife Martha Washington began to notice subtle changes in Miss Homegood's behavior and dress. She began claiming to see trolls, trolls which told her dirty jokes about dead people and showed her pictures of Hell. She also began wearing canvas knapsacks with nipple cut-outs around the house, and she insisted on keeping Lincoln's dutiful manservant Nigel on a metal choke chain at all times. During the night, she would often crawl into bed with Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln and sing religious hymns while they copulated. On more than one occasion, she was accused of offering the sexual services of Lincoln's children to local merchants in exchange for mystical trinkets.
None of this behavior seemed extreme enough to the then-alive President Lincoln to cast her out of his home. Being the kind, compassionate soul he was, he continued to feed and house her in exchange for sexual favors and nightly foot-rubs.
During the Civil War (which you may or may not have heard of), Prudence was given a spot on Lincoln's Advisory Cabinet, which she viewed as a means of carrying out her own selfish agenda. It wasn't long before Prudence, being the deep-seated racist she was, began plotting against President Lincoln in the hopes of bringing slavery to the Northern states and possibly leasing some extra slaves to Canadian businesses. She attempted to poison President Lincoln on three occasions, but through a series of mishaps and blunders, she only managed to kill Lincoln's purebred horse, his prized fern, and his daughter Emma. None of these deaths were ever pinned directly on Prudence during her lifetime, however. It wasn't until the discovery of her secret diaries and sextapes in 1974 that the truth finally came to light.
As the Civil War drew to a close and Prudence saw her dreams of a slavery-blanketed North America setting beyond the horizon, her visions of trolls re-emerged. Only this time, the trolls told her to cut X-shaped incisions into her body and rub herself on the white bedding in the Lincoln bedroom. After dozens of such incidents, Martha Washington had finally had enough. She gave her husband's dick an ultimatum; either Prudence would go, or she herself would leave. In response, the President tucked his tail between his proverbial legs, sulked for a few days, and eventually gave into his wife's demands. He ordered Miss Prudence Homegood publicly hanged outside the Jefferson Memorial on February 2nd, 1865.
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I hope you had as much fun learning about Miss Homegood's heroic contributions to American History as I had researching them. Miss Homegood's story may be a tragic one, but it is one that should forever be remembered as a cautionary example of what can result when a woman is granted a little bit of power.
C.P. Sutterman