Customer Reviews

Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger

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The title of this book excites me so much. Such a book needs to be written. My own 'Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates across the ages' didn't really tackle the politics enough, I now feel. What it did do was give women histories a context, calmly.
Unfortunately Klansman's book comes across as heated. It needed to be coherent and focused. And it is, in a way, a product of 1970s feminism. But there are some great ideas in there struggling to come out. I'd like to see a rewrite.

This book is by far not the best book that I have read on pirates. It is written more for a woman who is feeling bad about her sexuality. The book is an effort to list every woman, fictional and otherwise, that has ever had a role in maritime history. The book starts out by talking about ancient gods (yes, female gods) that related to the sea. This discussion is better saved for a book on mythology because it was a good summary of female gods but it did not pertain to pirates. The book moves on and talks about female pirates through the ages all over the world. While this is somewhat informative I believe that the significance of these woman pirates in history is way overstated. Female pirates were very few and far between, and many really shouldn't be considered pirates. The best part of the book was the discussion of the most netorious women pirates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. These two chapters were interesting and informative but they were also burried in the book. I would suggest a book that includes but is not limited to woman pirates because the fact is that there were very few woman pirates in history. The last quarter of the book focused on the politics of the Jolly Roger. This section helped to save the book but it often repeated and contradicted the first part of the book. I noticed a few inaccurate statements in this section, but on the whole this section was well done. This book is not a total waste of time, but it gets off topic and overstates things in my opinion. Women have played a huge part in world history, just not as pirates.