You'll encounter Kit Cavanagh, the swaggering Irish dragoon who was the first woman to be buried in London with full military honours; marauding eighteenth-century pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny, who collided on the high seas after swapping their petticoats for pantaloons; Ellen Craft, an escaped slave who masqueraded as a white master to spirit her husband-to-be to freedom; and Billy Tipton, the swinging jazz musician, who led a double life as an adult, taking five wives along the way. Then there are the women who still have to dress like men to live their best lives, like the inspirational football-lovers in Iran, who risk everything to take their place in the stands.
A call to action for the modern world, this book celebrates the #GenderRebels who paved the way for women everywhere to be soldiers and spies; kings and queens; fire-fighters, doctors, pilots; and a Swiss Army knife's-worth more. These superbly spirited (wo)men all had one thing in common: they defied the rules to progress in a man's world.
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[Hatshepsut, meaning 'Foremost of Noble Women' (how's about THAT for an opener to a book about powerful wimmin!), was the fifth pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty in Ancient Egypt, only the second woman to reign and the first female to do so as a male]***
(Little A, 1 June 2020, 277 pages, ebook, bought from @AmazonKindle #AmazonFirstReads)
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This book started off to well but ultimately disappointed me. I was really looking forward to reading it. I love the cover and I love the premise. I settled in for what I'd hoped would be a fun though educational ride. I learned Mulan was a real person. I'd only heard of a handful of these women before so the book was an eye-opener. Consider me better informed. The first couple of chapters are pretty funny. However, the writing style starts to grate. It came across as the format of a blog for tweens with someone a lot older using silly language to make them look cool to a young audience using such words as besticles, totally adulating, face glitch and strop-o-saurus! This book made me cringe for the author a lot as it came across as someone desperate to be approved. For a book about powerful women and calling out misogyny men are often referred to as ball bag (idiot), a dicktatorship and dangle fest (a group of men). This didn't impress me. The later entries discussing women still alive were a lot better written (fear of being sued?). Also, the reference section consisted of blogs and YouTube channels so the sources for the book weren't all that great either.
