Women Warriors
An Unexpected History
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Discover the incredible stories of warrior women throughout history—from Vikings and African queens to cross-dressing military doctors and WWII fighter pilots.
Who says women don’t go to war? These “exhilarating accounts . . . finally put to rest the tired old arguments that only men are fit for combat” (Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons).
The woman warrior is always cast as an anomaly—Joan of Arc, not GI Jane. But women, it turns out, have always gone to war. In this fascinating and lively world history, Pamela Toler not only introduces us to women who took up arms, she also shows why they did it and what happened when they stepped out of their traditional female roles to take on other identities.
These are the stories of women who fought because they wanted to, because they had to, or because they could. Spanning from ancient history to the 20th century, you’ll meet a cast of powerful women that includes:
• Tomyris, ruler of the Massagetae, who killed Cyrus the Great of Persia when he sought to invade her lands
• Amina of Hausa, the West African ruler who led her warriors in a campaign of territorial expansion for more than 30 years
• Boudica, who led the Celtic tribes of Britain into a massive rebellion against the Roman Empire to avenge the rapes of her daughters
• The Trung Sisters, who led an untrained army of 80,000 troops to drive the Chinese empire out of Vietnam
• The Joshigun, a group of 30 combat-trained Japanese women who fought against the forces of the Meiji emperor in the late 19th century
• Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi, who was regarded as the “bravest and best” military leader in the 1857 Indian Mutiny against British rule
• Maria Bochkareva, who commanded Russia’s first all-female battalion—the First Women’s Battalion of Death—during WWII
• Buffalo Calf Road Woman, the Cheyenne warrior who knocked General Custer off his horse at the Battle of Little Bighorn
• Juana Azurduy de Padilla, a mestiza warrior who fought in at least 16 major battles against colonizers of Latin America and who is a national hero in Bolivia and Argentina today
• And many others!
By considering the ways in which their presence has been erased from history, Toler reveals that women have always fought—not in spite of being women but because they are women.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A woman's place is on the battlefield, according to this rousing if scattershot history of female soldiers throughout history focused on lesser-known figures. Grouping tales into topic-based chapters such as "In Disguise" and "Her Father's Daughter," Toler sketches dozens of women who fought or exercised command and were slighted, she contends, by sexist historians who belittle women's military capabilities. They include Black Agnes, a 14th-century Scottish noblewoman who supposedly mocked an English army that bombarded her castle by having her maids showily dust off the battlements with handkerchiefs; Begum Samru, an Indian ex-prostitute who commanded a mercenary brigade that fought the Duke of Wellington; the 19th-century Chinese pirate admiral Cheng I Sao, who commanded hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of sailors; and Buffalo Calf Road Woman, a Cheyenne warrior who battled Custer at the Little Big Horn. There's as much folklore as history; Toler allows that her sources contain uncertainty, embellishment, and "poetic license," and she devotes a great deal of space to probably mythical figures did Tomyris, queen of the Massegatae, really behead the Persian King Cyrus in 530 BCE and use his skull as a goblet? Meanwhile, Toler keeps very brief her accounts of the well-documented exploits of Joan of Arc and more modern figures like WWII Russian sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko. The stories here, real or legendary, are sometimes shallow, since details about some of these incidents can be scarce, but they are reliably entertaining and colorful. Photos.