Was there ever a time when female pirates were “accepted”?
There were some very powerful female pirates. One of the most powerful was Cheng I Sao (known as ‘Madame Ching’) who controlled a flett of two thousand junks and had more than eighty thousand pirates – men, women and children, at her command in the early 1800s. Another powerful woman pirate was Lai Choi San, who as recently as the 1930s commanded twelve fully armored oceangoing junks – seven she had inherited from her father and five she’d picked up herself. She led her crew on brutal raids and amassed a fortune so enormous that she was known by some as “mountain of wealth” and also as “Queen of the Macao Pirates.” In the 16th century, an Irishwoman, Grace O’Malley, purused a successful career in piracy for many years. She and her men lay in wait for merchant ships in the waters around Bunowne, in western Ireland. After taking what they wanted from the cargo, she would generally let the ships proceed to Galway. In the 1720s two Englishwomen, Anne Bonney and Mary Read, apparently carved
