MFM Minisode 480

In this Women's History Month minisode, hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark read listener emails sharing stories of "badass" female relatives—grandmothers, great-aunts, and sisters—who demonstrated remarkable grit, defiance, and resourcefulness amid hardship, from wartime chaos to criminal encounters and cultural breakthroughs.

Defiant Dancers and Nazi Escape

Vanessa from the UK recounts her great-grandmother Lisolette "Lottie" Hamondson Burke, born in 1913 to a wealthy Jewish family in Cologne, Germany. A classical pianist turned modernist ballet dancer, Lottie gained fame with her husband Ernest Burke. As Nazis rose, her Jewish heritage banned her from performing, but she defiantly joined him onstage at a Cologne venue surrounded by SS officers, thanking the cheering crowd with "Thank you for not being Nazis." The family fled the next week on fake British passports with their young daughter (Vanessa's grandmother), arriving penniless in the UK. Lottie smuggled jewelry from Germany during the war to survive, later inventing the Barre exercise method at age 40. She has a Wikipedia page and a biography by her daughter titled My Improper Mother and Me. Hosts note her fur coats and enduring Chanel No. 5 scent as symbols of her unyielding style.