The Pig-Faced Women of Europe. People believed they were a real thing
By: Gregg Newby
Tags: Womens History, History, Culture, Britain, Urban Legends

The Pig-Faced Women of Europe

The weird urban legend that endured nearly three centuries

The Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square | Public Domain

In our day and age, Miss Piggy is an acknowledged cultural icon. Yet, her creators probably didn’t realize that women have long been equated with the porcine species, and in a manner not always so comedic. It was an especially cruel association too, given the attributes of filth and stubbornness long associated with swine.

The weird urban legend of the pig-faced lady emerged in Northern Europe near the end of the Renaissance, enduring well into the 19th Century. It told of various women with actual pig faces, whose existence was usually taken as fact. It was also a given that they had come by their features as a punishment for some moral deficiency, but not their own. Usually, it was their mothers who were to blame.

Jacamijntjen Jacobs

Britain was ground zero for these boarish fabrications, though France and Holland trafficked in them too. The earliest dates back to 1621 and involves a Dutch heiress who gives birth to a pig-faced daughter after scolding a beggar woman.

“Take away your filthy pigs,” she says, pointing to the woman’s children. “I will not give you anything!”

“Are these my children pigs?” the woman asks. “May God then give you such pigs as I have here!”

Apparently, God hears her. For not long after, she delivers a squealing snout-faced baby girl who is kept locked away from human eyes.

To the average person on the street, this was a true story. The cursed woman even had a name — Jacamijntjen Jacobs. And when the tale circulated the streets of Amsterdam in the 1630s, her daughter was believed to speak in grunts and eat from a trough.

Tannakin Skinker | Public Domain

Tannakin Skinker

While the Dutch were occupied with the Jacobs story, the English were busy printing off broadsheets about Tannakin Skinker, also said to be from Holland. Tannakin Skinker was in the exact same predicament, and for precisely the same reason. Her mother had also been cruel to a beggar woman, this one elderly and without children.

A chapbook published in 1640 tells of onlookers overhearing the ancient woman’s curse. ‘As the Mother is Hoggish, so Swinish shall be the Child,’ she is heard to say. The midwife in the tale is sworn to secrecy, and poor Tannakin lives in solitary confinement, eating out of a silver trough, just as “a Swine doth in his swilling tub.”

As Tannakin matures, her parents begin to despair, and so her father, at last, consults a necromancer. This would have been an act of true desperation, given that anyone who dabbled in the dark art of necromancy could be condemned as a heretic. In any event, he is told that Tannakin’s problem can only be solved through the loss of her virginity.

But who wants sex with a pig-face? Desperate, the Skinkers announce the unheard-of dowry of £40,000 for marriage to Tannakin. But still, no takers appear. The girl is just that hideous. Even a pig farmer turns her down, saying, “I never saw such a Hogsnout”.

Finally a prominent Londoner volunteers. Here the tale suddenly changes course. On their wedding night, Tannakin takes her husband by the arm and promises to release him from his vows if only he will look at her but once. Raising his eyes, he suddenly beholds the loveliest countenance he’s ever seen.

Tannakin Skinker and suitor | Public Domain

Stories of pig-faced women circulated in the 18th and 19th centuries as well, still accepted as fact. A variety of sources published in the 1730s told of a sow-headed woman living in London’s Holborn district. She was said to be “very tall and well-proportioned,” but with a face “perfectly shaped like that of a hog or sow.” This unfortunate soul concealed herself “with a large black velvet mask” every time she left her residence. She was also known to have “a grunting voice like that of a hog,” depriving her of the facility for conversation.

Griselda Steevens

There was also the tragic tale of Griselda Steevens, a real-life figure widely believed to have a hoggish countenance. Inheriting a stately sum from her physician brother, Miss Steevens used most of it to build a charitable hospital in Dublin.

Rumors of Griselda’s appearance were rooted in an actual physical ailment. Suffering a severe light sensitivity, she had worn a veil outdoors since girlhood. Later, she moved into an apartment on the hospital grounds, causing the locals to mumble that she too was a pig woman.

There was nothing Griselda could do to stem the belief. Sitting out on an open balcony didn’t work, and neither did commissioning a portrait of herself to hang in the main ward. The public stubbornly clung to its misperception of her. She finally withdrew from society altogether, dying a recluse in 1746.

Yet that didn’t kill the legend either. Even into the 1860s, people believed her to have been boar-headed. It didn’t help that a local pub kept a painting of her on the wall showing giant triangular ears and a prominent snout.

Suitors to the Pig Faced Lady | Public Domain

The noble pig woman of Manchester Square

Griselda may have been the inspiration for the stories of another such woman, this one sweeping London in 1814 and 1815. She was also said to be an heiress from Ireland now living in fashionable Manchester Square. Like those who came before her, she spoke in grunts and took her meals from a silver trough. The substantial salary she paid her attendant was not enough, according to legend, and the attendant finally fled the house in fear, selling her story to the press instead.

No reason was given for this woman’s appearance, just as none had been given for the woman of Holborn. What was different, though, was that the London newspapers became fascinated with her began reporting her existence as fact. Letters to the editor told of passersby glimpsing a snout or piggish profile from the window of a passing coach. Others spoke of a stylish hoof dangling a dainty handkerchief.

But then, in February 1815, an advertisement appeared in the Times purporting to be from a young man offering her his hand in marriage. The proposal prompted the paper’s editors to finally put the rumors to rest. Describing the story as “folly,” the Times went on to joke that any “Swinish Lothario” who would wed the Lady of Manchester Square must first “woo her in grunts.”

Of course, the editorial couldn’t completely kill the story, but it did rob of its cultural cachet. No self-respecting member of polite society would now treat it seriously.

The legend still lived on, though, but with a more low brow tint to it. It found new life in circulars and broadsheets, formats favored by the poor, and snubbed by the gentry. In one story, for instance, she made an appearance at Piccadilly Circus to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat but had to flee the curious crowds in her carriage.

The Pig-Faced Lady of Manchester Square | Public Domain

The legend’s decline

The lady of Manchester Square was nearly the last of her kind. Gradually, the belief in pig-faced women vanished, but not altogether. Moving out of newspapers and tabloids, they became a sideshow at local carnivals and fairs. Usually, the ‘woman’ was a shaved bear in dress and bonnet, prodded from behind to produce angry grunts and squeals.

Furthermore, if the repetition of these legends tapered off, knowledge of them didn’t. In 1861, for instance, none other than Charles Dickens wrote in his All the Year Round, “In every age, I suppose, there has been a pig-faced lady”.

The final treatment of the legend appeared in 1924, when a professional ghost hunter published a volume of supernatural research. In his Ghosts, Helpful and Harmful, Elliot O’Donnell retold the story of a ghostly woman who kept herself concealed beneath a veil. O’Donnell claimed that this ‘vice elemental’ had convinced the children in the house to torture small animals. When their father confronted her, the ghost removed her silky covering and revealed to him a pig’s face. The family then fled their London dwelling, never to return.

O’Donnell’s vignette appears to be the last time the idea of a pig woman was taken seriously. Yet, by then, these stories had left their scars on the collective unconscious. One subtext they conveyed was that only the acceptance of a man could make a woman whole. A pig woman was either saved by marriage or lived in despondency alone. Those were the only two possible endings.

Obviously, these legends weren’t the only ones contributing to the fallacy that women always need a man, but they certainly reinforced it. Essentially, they provided one kind of myth in service to another. And though they were largely forgotten in the 20th Century, the themes they promoted lived on in films and novels.

Many of the concepts informing these legends of swinish women still haunt us to this day. However, happily, there has been at least some progress. After all, what do we call a man who’s dismissive of women’s talents and abilities? We call him a sexist pig.