Review: Women & Warfare In The Ancient World by Karlene Jones-Bley

Synopsis: Explores mythological, legendary, archaeological, and historical evidence of women in a military setting.

Women and Warfare in the Ancient World presents a broad view of women and female figures involved in war in the ancient world, incorporating mythological, legendary, archaeological, and historical evidence for women in a military setting. Within this context are found not only fighters but also strategists, trainers, and leaders who may not have been on the actual battlefield. Exploring women and war within the Indo-European and Near Eastern worlds, this title seeks to challenge the view that women do not fight and that war is completely a male occupation – a view expressed as early as Xenophon and as late as the end of the 20th century.

Karlene Jones-Bley begins her study by defining Virgins, Viragos, and Amazons, going on to explore war goddesses, legendary, and historical women giving insights into different cultures, their attitudes towards women and how these have developed over time. Recent archaeological evidence supports her conclusions that women have always been a part of warfare.

~ ~ ~

Whilst extensively researched, the first part of the book is mainly on the earliest aspects of women and war which tend to be more mythological and refer to goddesses or legendary women. Having said that, the use of mythological references sets the cultural stage for an acceptance of the role of women in warfare, showing that ancient cultures were "... quite adept at envisioning women as warriors ..." - I would hesitate to say,even more so than in our own modern times.

Jones-Bley then discusses archaeological evidence and a more modern re-assessment of both ancient graves and grave goods, before launching into the historical sphere from the classical ancient world to the late 15th century. Jones-Bley concludes that whilst "... power was a factor in women's fighting, women, in general, have more often fought in defence ..." - usually of their own rights or those of their families and children - or husbands!

Points off for repeating a very basic research errors, especially those dealing with Eleanor of Aquitaine on Crusade (unfortunately, this author is not alone in this as I have found this same error repeated in other tomes - a little due diligence next time rather than repeating the same old tropes).

Review: Sisters In Arms by Julie Wheelwright

Synopsis: A history of female combatants, from those who joined the military disguised as men to the current role of women in the armed forces. The book follows the evolution of women in combat, from the Scythian women who begat the Amazonian myth, to the passing women in the eighteenth century, and on to the re-emergence of women as proud members of the armed forces in various countries in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book also explores the formalization of women’s military roles and questions the contemporary relationship between masculinity and combat.

I'll begin with a quote: "Beginning with the founding myth of the Amazons--in reality female warriors of a nomadic tribe to whom the Greeks attributed super-heroic powers--Julie Wheelwright explores the history of women in arms. " Not my advanced copy.

Whilst ever so briefly mentioning the Amazons, this lengthy tome focuses heavily on the period from the 18th Century onwards and predominantly on the UK, USA and USSR (for want of a better collective term). It covers quite succinctly the areas of gender disguise and open enlistment, the maintenance of the fiction (ie: women disguised as men), the fear of discovery and punishment, and the experiences of these women upon their return from active duty and their new-found celebrity. I, however, was looking for more of the historical aspect rather than the more "recent" history.

It is the final chapters that looks at the continuity between historical and contemporary female warriors, but again within the parameters as set out above. There is a good section on sources, notes and extensive bibliography for those wishing to explore this topic further.

This will still make for a good sourcebook for those wishing to explore more - again, within the actual parameters.

Review: The War Queens by Jonathan & Emily Anne Jordan

Synopsis: The ingenious wartime tactics of some of history’s most powerful female leaders, from the stifling battlefields of ancient Egypt to the frigid waters off the Falkland Islands.

History’s killer queens come in all colors, ages, and leadership styles. Elizabeth Tudor and Golda Meir played the roles of high-stakes gamblers who studied maps with an unblinking, calculating eye. Angola’s Queen Njinga was willing to shed (and occasionally drink) blood to establish a stable kingdom in an Africa ravaged by the slave trade. Caterina Sforza defended her Italian holdings with cannon and scimitar, and Indira Gandhi launched a war to solve a refugee crisis.

From ancient Persia to modern-day Britain, the daunting thresholds these exceptional women had to cross―and the clever, sometimes violent ways in which they smashed obstacles in their paths―are evoked in vivid detail. The narrative sidles up to these war queens in the most dire, tumultuous moments of their reigns and examines the brilliant methods and maneuvers they each used to defend themselves and their people from enemy forces.

I will preface this by saying that I read this around the same time as "Sisters In Arms" by Julie Wheelwright; and as with that tome, I - personally - was left wanting a little more. Mayhap because I was already familiar with the women featured (Tomyris, Artmeisia, Boudicca, Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, Caterina Sforza, Tamar of Georgie, Catherine the Great - to name but a few) that I was looking for a bit more variety - maybe, someone not on anyone's top ten list.

What I will say is that each woman featured has her own story to tell and it is told well, with some background information and a focus on the well known battles in which their are noted for (these are are explained quite well for the lay-reader). One reviewer commented that Maggie Thatcher should not have been included as she wasn't a "queen" per se - well neither was Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir or Caterina Sforza for that matter.

There are many more examples of women who could have been included (Empress Matilda and her rival Matilda of Boulogne, Zenobia, Isabella of Castile, Rani of Jhansi, Amanitore of Nubia, even Katherine of Aragon) for whilst many did take to the battlefield, they were also strongly supported by seasoned military commanders - and I was particularly struck by the quote from Gen. George Patton: "... tactics .. belong at battalion level, not in the supreme commander's palace ..." - a sly reference to the fact that a good leader need not always be required to know everything military-wise.

The extensive bibliography, secondary sources, and notes will provide those with an interest the stepping stones for explore and research at their leisure.

Invisible Agents by Nadine Akkerman

It would be easy for the modern reader to conclude that women had no place in the world of early modern espionage, with a few seventeenth-century women spies identified and then relegated to the footnotes of history. If even the espionage carried out by Susan Hyde, sister of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, during the turbulent decades of civil strife in Britain can escape the historiographer's gaze, then how many more like her lurk in the archives?

Nadine Akkerman's search for an answer to this question has led to the writing of Invisible Agents, the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies, demonstrating that the allegedly-male world of the spy was more than merely infiltrated by women. This compelling and ground-breaking contribution to the history of espionage details a series of case studies in which women - from playwright to postmistress, from lady-in-waiting to laundry woman - acted as spies, sourcing and passing on confidential information on account of political and religious convictions or to obtain money or power.

The struggle of these women to construct credibility in their own time is mirrored in their invisibility in modern historiography. Akkerman has immersed herself in archives, libraries, and private collections, transcribing hundreds of letters, breaking cipher codes and their keys, studying invisible inks, and interpreting riddles, acting as a modern-day spymistress to unearth plots and conspiracies that have long remained hidden by history.

Remembering a Woman Who Was a Leader of the French Resistance

From The New York Times: 

Lynne Olson’s “Madame Fourcade’s Secret War” tells of a woman who led the fight against the Nazis while combating sexism among her colleagues.

Why have most of us never heard of Marie–Madeleine Fourcade? Why is her name missing from the honor roll of war heroes carved into thousands of monuments in hundreds of French village squares? Might the fact that this hero — the leader of one of France’s most successful anti-Nazi resistance organizations — was not a hero, but a heroine, have something to do with her absence from history? There is reason to believe so. At the end of World War II, the triumphant Gen. Charles de Gaulle designated 1,038 people as resistance heroes. Only six of those heroes were women, and Fourcade, who ran the longest-running spy network, was not among them. In “Madame Fourcade’s Secret War,” her fast-paced and impressively researched account, Lynne Olson corrects that historical injustice. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade emerges as a vivid and pivotal player in the French Resistance.

Olson writes with verve and a historian’s authority. Fourcade, she tells us, was beautiful and liked men, but she was obsessed with defeating the despised Boches. A master of disguises, she frequently changed her hair color, and sometimes used distorting dentures and other theatrical tricks.

read more here @ The New York Times

Marie Colvin: an Amazing Woman Whose Life Was Cut Short Trying to Present Us with the Truth

From History News Network:

2018 was an annus horribilis for freedom of the press. Reporters Without Borders announced that 63 professional journalists were killed, of whom 49 were specifically targeted for death by an army or rebel group. 

The most famous journalistic killing came on October 2, when agents of the Saudi government murdered and dismembered Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and columnist for The Washington Post. 

The conditions endured by journalists in war zones are portrayed in chilling detail in Lindsey Hilsum’s new book on war correspondent Marie Colvin (In Extremis). A staff reporter for The Sunday Times of London, Colvin died on February 22, 2012, aged 56, in Homs, Syria. The Syrian army, honing in on her satellite phone, targeted an artillery strike on the building where she was reporting from. 

At the time, Colvin was arguably one of the best-known war correspondents at work. With her distinctive black eyepatch, flak jacket and wavy hair tied in a bun, she was familiar to many Americans through her frequent appearances on CNN and other news outlets. 

read more here 

@ History News Network

@ Vanity Fair

@ The New Yorker

read also:

On The Frontline by Marie Colvin

A Private War by Marie Brenner

In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin by Lindsay Hilsum

Under the Wire by Paul Conroy

Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs: 100 years of the best Journalism by Women by Eleanor Mills

Bearing Witness: The Lives of War Correspondents and Photojournalists by Denise Leith

Review: Women Warriors by Pamela D Toler

The author states her intent is to bring women warriors out of the historical shadows; to consider the reasons that they have taken up arms and how those reasons related to their roles; and the consequences of their actions.

I am actually going to be very blunt here - this is very basic stuff that a good google search can produce. I myself have written about over half the women mentioned; have read the same books; have read the same internet articles. And if this is your area of interest, then you also have already - so nothing new, no "unexpected history". I could literally just publish my own blog - Women of History - as a book (which is what this looks like to me - at times I felt as if I was reading my own works).

There are lots of snappy titles - "father's daughter", "widows", queen" - you get the gist - but I felt it could have been better organised. Yes, there is a great spread of warrior women across time, but it is presented in a hodge-podge sort of way (under the snappy titles) rather than in chronological order. Had the author (editor, publisher) maybe presented the work in this way, we the reader may have been able to see more of a development in the ways women took to the battlefield. You don't unfortunately get this - just some randomly arranged biographies interspersed with some commentary and biographies that don't really seem to fit under any the chapter. We finish with a dozen or so references - six biographies - though the notes are a little more extensive.

No star rating from me - I surprised myself by even finishing it to be perfectly honest.

Please bear in mind that this is my review of the book and its presentation, not the author; I know how huffy people can get in defending their favourite authors.

I would be very interested in the thoughts of those for whom this area is something completely new.

Women in the Military Orders of the Crusades by Myra Miranda Bom

This study of the female members of the Order or Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem in the High Middle Ages analyses their presence in the context of female monasticism and compares their position to the position of women in other religious military orders. Introducing questions of gender into the history of the military orders.

read also 

@ Medieval Women & Warfare (pub: 2010 @ Pages From History)

@ Women Knights In The Middle Ages (Heraldica)

The Women Who Flew for Hitler by Clare Mulley

From Historia Magazine:

Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were talented, courageous and strikingly attractive women who fought convention to make their names in the male-dominated field of flight in 1930s Germany. With the war, both became pioneering test pilots and both were awarded the Iron Cross for service to the Third Reich. But they could not have been more different and neither woman had a good word to say for the other.

Acclaimed biographer Clare Mulley gets under the skin of these two distinctive and unconventional women, giving a full – and as yet largely unknown – account of their contrasting yet strangely parallel lives, against a changing backdrop of the 1936 Olympics, the Eastern Front, the Berlin Air Club, and Hitler’s bunker.

India's Rani Of Jhansi Regiment

This is a riveting and meticulously researched account of the Indian National Army’s Rani of Jhansi regiment, the first in recorded military history that comprised only women.

It is not often that a forgotten and glorious chapter of a country’s history is resurrected and presented to its people and the rest of the world, and that too by a foreigner. This is what India now sees with the publication of a riveting and meticulously researched account of the INA’s Rani Jhansi Regiment (RJR) authored by Danish historian Vera Hildebrand.

As the author says, this unit was the first in recorded military history that comprised only women. Admittedly, the Soviet Union’s Red Air Force in World War II had a few squadrons of women pilots, but the support staff included men. In any case, these squadrons were not formally designated as “women’s regiments”. The RJR’s status as the world’s only all-women ground forces fighting contingent remains uncontested.

Read more here at Swarajya Magazine Online and at the Hindustan Times
Read an excerpt here at Kitaab

 

Les Parisiennes: The Women in WWII Paris

The women in WWII Paris who 'did what they had to' for survival | The Times of Israel

The testimony of Arlette Reiman, now Arlette Testyler, is just one of scores of agonizing stories, many of them Jewish, in a remarkable new book, “Les Parisiennes,” by the journalist and historian Anne Sebba. It seeks to recast wartime France — and, specifically, Paris — as a time when women were in the ascendant as never before.

“Paris was a feminine city,” says Sebba. Its men had either been called up and imprisoned or killed as France fell in 1940, or — if they were Jews — they had been deported to camps from which few returned. The only men in Paris were those too young or too old to serve, or they were the German occupiers.

So the women, as Sebba shows in a meticulously researched series of sweeping vignettes, were faced with the most difficult of choices.

The choices ranged from full-on collaboration — resulting, said Sebba, in the birth of between 100,000 and 200,000 Franco-German babies from illicit love affairs — to tiny compromises, such as buying black market food for children. And there was also out-and-out heroism, displayed by the women of Paris and the women of the SOE, or Special Operations Executive, parachuted into France from Britain, for extraordinarily dangerous missions that nearly always ended in capture, torture and death.

Read rest of article here at The Times of Israel

Review: Jane Whorwood - The King's Smuggler

From the Press Release:

THE KING'S SMUGGLER: JANE WHORWOOD, SECRET AGENT OF CHARLES I by author John Fox (Pub: The History Press 8th February 2010).

It is the first biography of Jane Whorwood. She spied for the King and smuggled a huge amount of gold in order to raise funds for the army and the royalist cause in England's Civil War.

Most biographies about the Civil War relate to the men's stories and the women's escapades tend to get missed out!

Jane Whorwood was one of King Charles' closest confidantes - when he was imprisoned she set up correspondence networks, consulted the national astrologer, raised and moved money, and organised escape attempts, ending up in the hub of a naval mutiny.

So, who is this woman you are asking. I did too when first asked to review a copy of John's biography. Not only did I know nothing of her role in the English Civil War of the 1640s but I had not heard of her either. Upon a visit to my local library, I checked out various books on the English Civil War - and there was no mention of Jane at all.

John's book was an eye-opener on a woman who contributed much, lost it all, and was never recognised at all for her role. Flora MacDonald achieved world-wide fame for her support of Bonnie Prince Charles - but Jane was a "non-entity" or rather "non entry" on the pages of history.

Jane (or Joan, Jeanne, or Jean as she was variously known), was a member of a prominent Scottish family at the Courts of Kings James I & VI and Charles I of England. Her family (of which the branches of her family tree were numerous and fruitful) attained positions at both courts, and in particular that of Charles I.

And so the first third of the book deals with background information - vital to the story. It covers Jane's early years and her family rise through the ranks of the nobility culminating in the her step-father's appointment as "Black Rod". Next we deal with Jane's marriage and that of her sisters. We find Jane settling into the socially expected domesticity of her status.

The disputes between Charles I and his Parliament become the focus of the daily lives of the English peoples, especially the nobility. We find, like the American Civil War, families on opposing sides - in this instance - having "crossed the bridge".

The Parliament - which did not have the powers of Parliament as we know it today - were fearful of Charles' view of an "absolute monarchy" and in the "Divine Rights of Kings" - that is, the King is subject to God alone. The Courts of Kings James I and Charles I saw the introduction of Scottish magnates into the English dominated court. Conflict was inevitable of courtiers jostled for position and favouritism. With financial and religious difficulties, Parliament attempted to force the King to acceed to their demands. War was effectively declared.

One Mistress Whorwood in Oxfordshire, was wont to bring in intelligence to the late king, as well as to Oxford as to the Isle of Wight. She was sent several times of messages. Thomas Coke, interrogated in the Tower, May 1651

It was not only intelligence that Jane sent to the King, but money with which to sustain his army. Her activities were barely known - even after the event - as she used a system of codes to disguise both herself and the King. Her position and that of her family, gave her ready access to information - it was not as if she had to don a disguise to infiltrate royal circles. She was already there - on the spot.

Jane's service in the King's name ended with his execution and the abolition of the monarchy in England (30 January 1649). Jane herself was imprisoned for her loyalty to the late Charles I; her family lire crumbled around her with the return of her abusive husband; and she was in fact disinherited. Divorce and scandal ensued - and her family (more importantly her sisters) deserted her in her time of need.

But Jane survived - the monarchy was restored under King Charles II.

Consistent with the previous thirty years, Jane never cited her service to the Crown, as if governed by an unspoken etiquette.

She spent her final years petitioning for that which was due to her - fighting till the very end.

Few co-conspirators from Wartime were alive to notice Jane’s death. Poverty and isolation reduced her to childlike pleading with a king who either did not know, or preferred to forget that his father had once importuned her in a similar isolation. In the summer of her death the great and the good – the second Earl of Clarendon and Archbishop Sancroft – began to enquire about Jane’s and others’ role in Charles I’s final years. By then, Dugdale’s sources and memory were suspect or failing, most witnesses were dead, Jane was stilled and no one asked again for many years.

Jane was a woman of extraordinary courage and conviction - she stood by her monarch when others fell away - and she paid the price. I cannot but commend this book on a most remarkable woman. Hopefully one who will no longer be a footnote on the pages of history.

About the Author - John Fox:
John is an Oxford university trained historian and has spent 6 years working on the project. of Jane Whorwood John has also written "Forgotten Divisions" (1994) on WWI in Bonn and Manchester, (‘a publishing rarity’, Geoffrey Moorhouse), and "Macnamara’s Irish Colony" (USA, 2000) on British designs to annexe California in 1846 (‘fascinating evidence, superb cast’, Prof. Roy Foster). Besides the new "Jane Whorwood" entry in ODNB, he has written several local histories for his home community near Oxford.