Who do you think was the most evil woman in history and what gave her that reputation?

Answer 1

There are so many flavours of evil, it is difficult to say who is the greatest of the different kinds - it's a little like comparing apples and oranges.

If you are talking about personally committing monstrous deeds, then the winner is probably Elizabeth Bathory (see link 1). Though many of the things said about her are almost certainly not true (try bathing in blood some time - it doesn't work... the stuff coagulates), there are enough reliable accounts of horrific deeds to give her the title. We're not talking about just beating servants to the point of death (many early accounts), but pouring water over people in winter until they froze into columns of ice (found during her arrest) and tying down people and rending their flesh with her teeth. It is easy to see why some vampire enthusiasts credit her with being one of their own, on par Vlad Tepes. Unlike Vlad, who often did his notorious deeds to make a political point or to scare enemies, Elizabeth did so just for fun. (A more modern parallel might be Ilse Koch. Link 4)

But there are other kinds of evil out there...

Some would cite Elena Ceausescu, for example (link 2). She was the wife of Romania's communist leader and ran many functions of the country for 25 years. Her brand of evil lies closer to incompetence and self-absorption than maliciousness. She helped ban contraception and insist that all 'good' women have five children apiece, filling state orphaniages. She had numerous scientific awards bestowed on her despite her dubious scientific ability. She even introduced forgeries into her own birth certificate. It has been said that during her husband's reign she was the most hated person in Romania.

Jezebel is considered to be one of the most evil people in the Bible (link 3), and there is SOME archeological evidence to support her existance. Some might argue that her brand of evil is being a zealot - if her acts in the Bible are taken as fact, most of them involve converting people to her faith and persecuting and killing those of other faiths. But, as I mention, evidence is weak on this one, though there are other sources. We might as well include Shammuramat (also known as Semiramis) in on the same basis (link 5).

Personally, I think the greatest evil is not only to commit atrocious acts, but to get away with them and be hailed as a saint at the same time. Nor am I alone in this regard - this is essentially how the Antichrist is sometimes desribed. In this wise, I do not believe that anyone is likely to know who REALLY was the most evil woman in history, simply because the MOST evil one would not seem evil at all. This making her all the more horrible.

Answer 2

no person is rather stable, or completely undesirable. in spite of if the allegations approximately JFK have been actual, his legacy as President got here all the way down to 2 issues - area, and the Bay of Pigs. Oh, yeah. The e book Repository. Why everyone would - with a at cutting-edge face - declare that he became "immoral and evil" is previous me. He became only a guy.

Answer 3

Typhoid Mary was her nickname....her real name was Mary Mallon

"Mary Mallon seemed a healthy woman when a health inspector knocked on her door in 1907, yet she was the cause of several typhoid outbreaks. Since Mary was the first "healthy carrier" of typhoid fever in the United States, she did not understand how someone not sick could spread disease -- so she tried to fight back.

After a trial and then a short run from health officials, Mary was recaptured and forced to live in relative seclusion upon North Brother Island off New York. Who was Mary Mallon and how did she spread typhoid fever? "

It's a very interesting read...link to the story below

Answer 4

Elizabeth Bathory.

She was alive during the 16th century [I am pretty sure] lived in Hungary. She tortured women, very sadistically for many years and killed several hundred young women for their blood, believing it attributed to youth. What she did was exceptionally gory and horrific! Look up her history if you have a strong stomach!

Answer 5

The first woman to declare someone a witch on the planet. It started a massacre that spanned the planet, and killed innocent women and girls. Ignorance breeding hatred....now that is evil.

Answer 6

Women have been typed as evil in Greek and Judeao-Christian mythology - think of Eve in Genesis and the Whore of Babylon in Revelations - and this mythological cast of thought tends to frame or rub off on real women, who are often referred to as "Medeas" (women who murder their children, after the Greek heroine) or "Eves" or "Liliths" or "Medusas," and so on. It's hard to extricate real histories of women's wrongdoing because they are a) so bound up in patriarchal notions of women as bearers of original sin and b) women were rarely allowed to tell their side of the story -- there are far fewer autobiographies, or even recorded confesssions, by women than men.

Women who are cited as evil, within historical times, include: Lucrezia Borgia, charged with poisoning (a familiar charge in Renaissance Europe, and linked to witch-hunting); Elisabeth Bathory (who reputedly drank the blood of virgins to stay young, a charge bound up with a horror of women's financial independence, and prejudice against women who enjoyed the company of women); Joan of Arc (burnt as a witch, and certainly considered evil by the English); the Chinese Emperor Wu (the only ever woman emperor), fictionalised as Nu Huang in Lydia Kwa's The Walking Boy, and believed to have murdered - variously - her husband's first wife, her husband, her mother-in-law, members of her court.

La Malinche, also known as Malintzin, was widely regarded as evil in Latin American historiography, cast as the woman who betrayed her land to Cortes, working as his interpreter and possibly his lover. For centuries, her image - combined with the Spanish mythological La Llorona, a mother who weeps for the children she abandoned - was used to punish Latin American women. Cherrie Moraga, Isabel Allenda and others have shown how this narrative was conceived, (ab)used and can now be rewritten.

Myra Hindley and Karla Homolka, who were accomplices in the abduction, rape and murder of young women in the UK and Canada, have both been vilified in similar ways, both for being victims of their powerful male partners and simultaneously for being willing participants. This shows the double bind in which women are trapped: if they are 'good', they are victims; if they are equal to men, they are evil.

I am not condoning the actions of any of these women, but trying to illustrate that women's actions are apprehended as being exemplary of their gender's capacity for evil, and not considered as the actions of individuals but as tokens, while men's actions are comprehended as products of individual psychology and symptomatic of the larger category of "humanity."

So consider where your question comes from, and what you really want to learn by asking it.

Answer 7

Try a countess who killed young girls and bathed in their blood.

http://www.darkest-destruction.com/Bathory.html

Answer 8

Bloody Mary - England's Queen who had her sister beheaded.

Or, Hillary Clinton :-)