Make your own choices. Live your own life. But when women see patterns through other women's lives, our eyesight becomes so much
Make your own choices. Live your own life. But when women see patterns through other women’s lives, our eyesight becomes so much clearer. THAT is why our voices, our history, our accomplishments, our leadership, and our stories are hidden, erased, and forbidden.
Josephine Baker and Megan Thee Stallion come from different centuries, different performance worlds, and different social battles. Both courageous and persevering Black American women.
One rose from St. Louis poverty to vaudeville, Broadway, Parisian stardom, wartime resistance work, and civil rights activism. The other rose through Houston rap, social media, Southern Black girl confidence, viral freestyles, and global celebrity.
Still, when you place them side by side, something powerful appears. Both women show us what happens when a Black woman becomes too visible, too talented, too sensual, too independent, and too difficult to control.
1. Both turned performance into power.
Josephine Baker was not merely dancing. She was commanding the room. She used rhythm, humor, costume, exaggeration, and elegance to make audiences watch her on her own terms. Megan Thee Stallion does something similar through rap, dance, fashion, confidence, and wordplay. Her performance style says she is not begging for permission to be seen.
Both women understood that performance is not always escape. Sometimes performance is strategy.
2. Both were criticized for owning their bodies.
The public has a long, ugly habit of wanting Black women’s bodies available for entertainment but unavailable for self-possession. Josephine Baker was adored and exoticized, especially in Europe, yet her body was often interpreted through other people’s fantasies. Megan Thee Stallion faces a modern version of that same contradiction. People consume her image, her dancing, her lyrics, and her style, then act offended when she claims authority over her own body.
That is not new. That is old control wearing fresh shoes.
3. Both became symbols larger than themselves.
Josephine Baker became more than a star. She became a symbol of glamour, escape, racial contradiction, artistic freedom, and international Black womanhood. Megan became more than a rapper. She became a symbol of body confidence, Southern Black girl pleasure, resilience, ambition, and public survival.
This is a heavy thing. When a Black woman becomes a symbol, people often stop treating her like a full person.
4. Both used beauty without surrendering intelligence.
The world loves to pretend beauty and brilliance cannot live in the same Black woman. Josephine Baker exposed that lie. Behind the costumes and stage lights was a woman who served in the French Resistance, supported civil rights, and refused segregated audiences.
Megan Thee Stallion exposes the same lie in a different key. She built a music career while also earning her college degree, building business ventures, and speaking openly about mental health and survival.
Neither woman can be reduced to pretty.
5. Both had to navigate fascination and disrespect at the same time.
Josephine Baker was desired, celebrated, caricatured, and dismissed. Megan Thee Stallion is streamed, quoted, copied, mocked, and attacked. That strange mix is familiar to Black women in public life: people want the magic, but not always the woman carrying it.
The applause does not always mean safety. Sometimes applause is just another form of appetite.
6. Both broke into spaces that were not built for them.
Josephine Baker was St. Louis-born, U.S.-tested, Harlem-seasoned, and Paris-amplified. She was born in St. Louis, sharpened in American vaudeville and Black musical theater, and already stood out in U.S. performance spaces before France made her an international phenomenon.
Megan Thee Stallion entered a male-dominated rap industry and became one of its most recognizable stars. She also became a Grammy-winning artist, including Best New Artist in 2021.
Both women walked into rooms that had rules already written, then made the room adjust.
7. Both faced public attempts to discipline their image.
Josephine Baker’s image was often controlled through exoticism and respectability politics. People wanted to decide whether she was art, scandal, fantasy, activist, mother, or threat. Megan faces similar public disciplining through social media, gossip, industry commentary, and misogynoir. After she came forward about being shot, PBS reported that she faced harassment, mockery, and death threats, and that criticism around the case reflected misogyny targeting Black women.
Different era. Same hunger to put a Black woman “back in her place.”
“You would be safe if you weren’t front-facing or truth-telling.”
Meanwhile, women and children are harmed in their homes, bedrooms, on visitations with our parents, in vacation cabins, playing in the front yard, online, on public transportation, in faith spaces, in restrooms, in gyms, at schools, on campuses, jogging, walking, reporting a crime …..BUT if we notice, speak up, or report, THEN WE are the problem. More problematic than the assault or trespass.
8. Both carried joy and pain in public.
Josephine Baker’s smile did not mean her life was easy. Her glamour did not erase racism, exile, political pressure, or personal struggle. Megan Thee Stallion’s confidence does not erase grief, violence, betrayal, or public cruelty.
This is one of the great misunderstandings about Black women performers. People see the sparkle and assume there is no wound. They hear the laugh and assume there is no cost.
9. Both challenged the idea that Black women must be small to be worthy.
Josephine Baker was theatrical, bold, funny, sensual, political, and international. Megan Thee Stallion is loud in the best sense: tall, skilled, Southern, sexual, educated, playful, strategic, and visible.
Neither woman built her public life around shrinking. That alone invites backlash, because many people are still more comfortable with Black women when we are useful, wounded, quiet, or safely inspirational.
10. Both used fame as a door to something bigger.
Josephine Baker used her celebrity in resistance work during World War II and later in civil rights activism. She refused to perform for segregated audiences and spoke at the 1963 March on Washington. Megan Thee Stallion has used her platform beyond music as well, including public conversations around mental health, education, philanthropy, and the protection of Black women.
They remind us that fame can be shallow, but it can also become a tool.
11. Both exposed society’s discomfort with free Black womanhood.
There is a particular kind of discomfort that rises when a Black woman is beautiful but not obedient, sexual but not ashamed, wounded but not defeated, successful but not submissive. Josephine Baker exposed that discomfort in the early twentieth century. Megan Thee Stallion exposes it now.
Their lives make people reveal themselves.
12. Both show how history often honors women after punishing them.
Josephine Baker was once treated as scandalous, exotic, and difficult. Later, she was honored as an artist, activist, and national hero in France. Megan Thee Stallion is still living inside the heat of her own era, where praise and punishment arrive at the same time.
That is the hard lesson. Some Black women are called “too much” while they are alive and “ahead of their time” once the culture finally catches its breath.
Josephine Baker and Megan Thee Stallion are not twins. They are echoes. One danced across empire. One raps across the digital age. Both show what happens when a Black woman refuses to be merely consumed and insists on being understood.
And history keeps proving the same thing: the women they try hardest to control are often the women who teach the future how to be free.
You don’t ever have to pretend that people are being “nice” to you when they silence, erase you, or “keep you in your place.”
Live as expansion: move through life as a growing, thinking, creating, boundary-holding person who refuses to shrink into the limits other people built for them.
Female oppressive structures are not required to be comfortable with the woman you are becoming.