Published in 2003
288 pages
Jane Robinson is also the author of Hearts and Minds: The Untold Story of the Great Piligrimage and How Women Won the Vote and Bluestockings: the Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education. She was born in Edinburgh and brought up in Yorkshire before going to Oxford University to study English Language and Literature at Somerville College. She has worked in the antiquarian book trade and as an archivist and is now a full-time writer and lecturer, specialising in social history through women’s eyes. She is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, member of the Society of Authors, and founder member of Writers in Oxford. She is married with two sons and lives in Buckinghamshire.
What is this book about?
From Artemisia of Halicarnassus—a fifth century (b.c.) merchant, pirate, and naval commander—to the freelance World War I correspondent Lady Sarah Wilson, this engaging and entertaining social history chronicles the uncommon achievements of more than 100 remarkable women who over the past twenty-five centuries flouted cultural conventions. Raising the eyebrows of their ancient, medieval, seventeenth-century, Victorian, or American contemporaries, these women defied the expectations of their times and independently molded their own dynamic, often highly idiosyncratic lives. With illustrations and colorful, historically documented, and long-ignored or half-forgotten stories of women pirates, bone-setters, gold prospectors, secret agents, soldiers-in-disguise, and human cannonballs—not to mention that mistress of reinvention Lola Montez or Victoria Woodhull, the stockbroker who ran for president of the United States, or the outlaw Belle Starr, or America’s first self-made woman millionaire, Sarah Breedlove Walker—this book applauds their accomplishments, their daring, their defiance, their responses to necessity, their names.
