As the book points out in the foreword, history has largely been written by men and focused on the accomplishments of men, so the book aimed at not only highlighting powerful women but also those that many have forgotten.
Awesome tales of women that the history books do not discuss or are merely blurbs in the text get full pages here.
There are a couple of Soviet women ready to take down the Nazis. Mariya Oktyabrskaya used 50,000 rubles of her own money to purchase a tank for the Soviet Union and fight the Nazis. Multiple times she came out of her tank during battle to make repairs on the machine. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a Soviet fighter during WWII who acquired the nickname “Lady Death” after killing 309 Nazis.
Other warrior women from across the globe have stories unfold in the pages. Gouyen, whose name means “the one who is wise,” was an Apache woman, who killed and scalped the Comanche chief who had killed and scalped her husband. Taytu Betul, the Empress of Ethopia in the late 1800s and early 1900s, led her people to victory against the invading Italians. One of my personal favorites is the story of Mai Bhago, a Sikh warrior, who had rounded up 40 deserters and got them to fight against the invading Mughals. Sarah Edmonds aka Franklin Thompson fought, disguised as a man, for the Union during the Civil War. Malaria caused her to leave the battlefield to seek treatment and she was branded a deserter. In her later years, it was discovered that she didn’t desert but had left so as not to be discovered and she received her pension.
Women who also impacted the world off the battlefield get their fair share as well. Kate Leigh, for example, was the mob boss of Sydney, Australia during their prohibition and much like her American counterpart, Al Capone, it wasn’t the illegal booze that did her in, but the tax man. Theodora went from a teenage prostitute to empress of the Byzantine Empire. During her reign, she “banned pimps, established execution for rapists, gave moms’ custody rights, and espoused religious tolerance” and constructed Hagia Sophia with her husband Justinian. Audrey Munson is the model whose face decorates much of New York City in its sculpture from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the New York Public Library.
If you want to find out more about these badass women, check out the bibliography at the end: “Scholary Shout-outs.”
The only bad thing I can say about this book is that it probably cannot be used in most classrooms because there are curse words. Hopefully they can make a classroom-friendly edition so that children everywhere can hear these women’s stories.
- File Size: 22475 KB
- Print Length: 173 pages
- Publication Date: October 2, 2018
- Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B07HFHJCH2
- Text-to-Speech:
Enabled
- Word Wise: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#946,247 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #1464 in History of LGBT & Gender Studies
- #6865 in World History (Kindle Store)
- #3223 in History eBooks of Women
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