Customer Reviews

Women Rulers throughout the Ages: An Illustrated Guide

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Women Rulers Throughout the Ages is based on Jackson's Women Who Ruled and presents revised, expanded, updated entries from the prior book plus over 200 new entries bringing history up to date for female rulers of the past decade. The result: an illustrated reference covering not the rulers' lives and achievements, plus the era and nations which they governed.

This is a sort of alphabetical encyclopedia of women rulers in history. Included are many different people like: Hoho, a 18th century Hottentot ruler, Drahomira, mother of the "Good King Wenceslas" of Bohemia, Betty Mae Jumper, chief of the Seminole Nation in the 1960s, Tansu Ciller, Prime Minister of Turkey in the 1990s, and Diane of Poitiers, mistress of the French King around 1550.

Some entries contain only a few lines, while other entries fill 3 pages, including a black-and-white picture. The number of references also differs for each entry with sometimes only one reference. Despite the difference in quality of the entries, the book is very thorough and contains many little known Queens.

Caterina Sforza, as a widow in the 15th century, refused to yield her castle, when her children were held hostage, explaining that she could always make more babies. Cleopatra Thea of Egypt married successive Seleucid Kings and had her own son put to death. Kaahumanu, co-ruler of Hawaii in the 19th century, tried to raise the sexual moral standards of her subjects to the annoyance of foreign sailors.

Women Rulers is a valiant attempt to provide an encyclopedic entry for "all" known women rulers. And I love that it tries and that it exists. I do have a few issues with the book which keep me from wholeheartedly recommending it. The first is that the majority of the entries are very short and the writing is on the dry side; and I understand, when writing up entries for that many subjects, you've got to keep it short, but most of the rulers get just a few sentences. For the more recent or well-known rulers, they might get half a page or a little more, but for instance with Theophano (984-991), it states that many historians consider her one of the greatest women in world history....she gets one long paragraph, but it doesn't really convey why exactly she's considered so important by historians.
The second issue is that there are two very glaring typos that I noticed: for Jeanne Mathilde Sauve, it states that she was born in 1992, but was Governor-General of Canada from 1984-1990; for Tz'u-an, it states she was regent for her son until 1873, but that her son reached his majority in 1973...yet her son died in 1875. In both cases a simple mistype but pretty obvious errors, so I do have to wonder if the editors and author missed these two, what other errors might there be?