A full yet readable historical survey of women at war that
convincingly shows females have long been soldiers and military
leaders. To counter the male conditioning that has led women to
believe that "the warrior's power historically and biologically
belongs only to men," Jones, a scholar of military societies
(Cultural Anthropology/Univ. of Central Florida), spans past and
present to gather a variety of true-life examples of women warriors
from Arabia, India, the Middle East, and Western societies.
Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and Molly Pitcher are presented in detail;
so are less well known women, including the Teutonic warrior
Thusnelda, the ancient Ethiopian warrior queens called kentakes,
and the 20th-century Vietnamese warrior Ming Khai, whose prison
cell wall bore a poem written in blood that ended, "The sword is my
child, the gun is my husband." The practices of women warriors are
no less harsh - murder, scalping, removing a tongue to prohibit
dissemination of secrets - and the will to conquer and subdue
opponents, male and female, no less fierce than in male warriors.
The numbers of women warriors, Jones demonstrates, sometimes ran
high, comprising, for example, nearly half of "some European tribal
armies" and 30 percent of the Sandinista forces in the 1970s. Some
may feel empowered by these impressive accounts; others may find
them repetitive in their narration of military action. (On a
lighter note, this may be a useful sourcebook for actresses
searching for good female roles: Before Braveheart, there was Queen
Penthesilea.) By sheer accumulation of examples, and by careful
adherence to its cultural and historical perspectives, this book
succeeds in its goal - to position women as accomplished, worthy
soldiers, and to "reveal a particular truth of female historical
experience." (Kirkus Reviews)
Women Warriors takes the reader back through history and around the
world to uncover a clear pattern of women as warriors. It is a
fascinating comment on the nature of gender, on the power of the
warrior image, and on the image's source in history.
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