Cleopatra IS brat? These 5 women in history were the OG brat girls

Brat girls play hard and write their own rules. Unbothered by convention, they embrace their authentic selves and don’t mind a little drama. Singer-songwriter Charli XCX popularized the term with her 2024 album “Brat,” and Kamala Harris has embraced the label, but the lifestyle brat girls represent is far from new.

Historically, women who embodied boldness, independence, and unapologetic self-expression faced admiration and criticism. Today, brat girls enjoy freedoms their predecessors could only dream of, yet they still navigate a landscape where their boldness can be both celebrated and weaponized. Here’s what you need to know about the evolution of brat girls and their enduring impact.

Cleopatra’s love life became political

Cleopatra VII, Egypt’s last pharaoh, is arguably one of history’s most propagandized women. As Rome warred and expanded, she sought to protect her kingdom. And so she allied herself, politically and romantically, with two influential Romans: first with Julius Caesar and then with Mark Antony.

(She ruled Egypt and seduced the Romans. But who was Cleopatra?)

During his rise to power, the future Caesar Augustus sought to defeat Cleopatra and Antony. He launched a full-throttle propaganda campaign to discredit the Egyptian queen, painting her as a debauched, corrupt, and overly sexed foreigner.

Roman writers followed suit. Second-century writer Cassius Dio derided her “insatiable passion and insatiable avarice.” To the poet Propertius, she was “lecherous” and a “harlot queen.”

Wu Zetian defied convention to rule

Wu Zetian, China’s first empress, became a concubine to Emperor Taizong of Tang when she was still a teenager. She also had an affair with her husband’s son, who ascended the Dragon Throne in 649 as Emperor Gaozong. Wu became his concubine.

Well-educated, intelligent, and ambitious, Wu became an influential advisor to Gaozong. She claimed power when he died in 683 and became the dowager empress.

Later, critics focused on one aspect of her life: the question of her lovers, including Zhang Yizhi and Zhang Changzong, a pair of brothers. As a result, embellished, salacious accounts of her romantic escapades emerged after her death.

(This controversial concubine became one of China’s greatest rulers.)

As Keith McMahon wrote in Women Shall Not Rule: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Han to Liao, these fictionalized accounts “exaggerated Wu’s attraction to young men and portrayed her as an insatiable woman. Her accomplishments as a ruler became secondary.”

Lucrezia Borgia could do more than party

Born in 1480, Italian noblewoman Lucrezia Borgia was the illegitimate daughter of future Pope Alexander VI. Their family has been mythologized as debaucherous hedonists.

Indeed, Borgia frequented parties, some of which may have been rowdy. According to chronicler Johann Burchard, she once witnessed a party at the Vatican in October 1501 that featured an orgy.

What was she really like? One contemporary described her as “modest” and “graceful.” Crucially, she was intelligent enough to take the reins of the Vatican during her father’s absence.

She also bore the burden of familial duty by being forced to marry. Her marriage to her first husband, Giovanni Sforza, ended in annulment on her family’s orders.

Mortified that impotence had been cited as a reason for the annulment, Sforza spread rumors of incest between his ex-wife and her father. The myth clung to Borgia in life and death.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, gambled in life and politics

In 1774, Georgiana Spencer celebrated her 17th birthday by marrying William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire.

Their domestic life was anything but conventional. Beginning in 1782, her husband’s mistress openly lived with them.

But Georgiana didn’t have the same freedoms as her husband. Sometime around 1789, she began an affair with future Prime Minister Charles Grey and, in 1791, became pregnant with his child. She was forced to part with the infant.

The duke let his wife come home and reunite with their children––but only if she ended things with Grey. She reluctantly agreed. “I have in leaving him for ever [sic], left my heart and soul,” she wrote to a friend.

Despite her private anguish, Georgiana lived an active social life by frequenting the city’s ballrooms––and gambling tables. At the time of her death in 1806, Georgiana’s debts had swelled to the modern-day equivalent of over $5 million.

She enthusiastically supported the Whig party and publicly canvassed on its behalf, even though women did not yet have the right to vote. This opened her up to attacks.

One print satire from 1784 depicts Georgiana relieving herself on a rival candidate. As art historian Cindy McCreery argued in The Satirical Gaze: Prints of Women in Late Eighteenth-Century England, the image “demonstrates that the Duchess’s involvement in politics has compromised her feminine modesty as well as her sexual propriety.”

George Sand authored her own life

In 1832, 27-year-old Aurore Dupin adopted the pseudonym George Sand. She would become one of the most unconventional writers in French literature.

Though Sand initially followed society’s rules by marrying and having children, she also bucked convention. She separated from her husband, moved in with her lover, Jules Sandeau, and opted to live life by her own rules.

Other lovers, including Frédéric Chopin, Alfred de Musset, and Charles Didier, followed.

If there’s one thing Sand loved more than her string of lovers, it was living life by her own rules. Sand smoked cigars, burned the midnight oil, and wore men’s clothes.

Critics and admirers alike fixated on both her gender and sexuality. Alexandre Dumas called her “that hermaphrodite genius,” while Gustave Flaubert believed she was a member of a “third sex.”

These criticisms were the same as they had been for centuries––attacks on women who didn’t always behave as they were supposed to. Like modern-day brat girls, they dared to live how they wanted.