Women Warriors by Pamela Toler

Women Warriors by Pamela Toler ISBN-13: 9780807064320 Hardcover: 240 pages Publisher: Beacon Press Released: Feb. 26, 2019

Source: ARC review copy from the publisher through Amazon Vine.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
The woman warrior is always cast as an anomaly--Joan of Arc, not G.I. Jane. But women, it turns out, have always gone to war. Historian Pamela Toler draws from a lifetime of scouring books for mentions of women warriors to tell their stories and to consider why women go to war.

Tomyris, ruler of the hard-riding Massagetae, and her warriors killed Cyrus the Great of Persia when he sought to invade her lands. She herself hacked off his head in revenge for the death of her son. The West African ruler Amina of Hausa, a contemporary of Elizabeth I, led her fierce warriors in a campaign of territorial expansion for more than thirty years. Like Elizabeth, she refused to marry; unlike Elizabeth, she never claimed to be a Virgin Queen. Contemporary accounts of medieval sieges in Europe describe women using firearms, participating in night raids, joining in the defense of breaches in the walls, and fighting hand-to-hand at the improvised barricades that often provided a last line of defense. Among the examples of female samurai in Japan are the Joshigun, a group of thirty seriously combat-trained women who fought against the forces of the Meiji emperor in the late 19th century.

These are the stories of those who commanded from the rear and those who fought in the front lines, those who fought because they wanted to, because they had to, or because they could. Considering the ways in which their presence has been erased from history, Toler concludes that women have always fought: not in spite of being women but because they are women.


My Review:
Women Warriors is as much about how various cultures (including modern America) have viewed women warriors as it is about the warrior women themselves. Each chapter had several examples of that theme (Queens who led troops, etc.) and each biography was about 3 pages long. The bios covered why the woman went to war, what she did during the war, and how her contemporaries viewed her. Between each bio (and even within it), the author commented on people's attitudes about the female warriors. It was an interesting, brief overview of the fact that women have been going to war from ancient to modern times and in cultures all over the world.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.