Women at War: Female Soldiers, Pirates, and Warriors History Forgot to Fear

History decided, long before the first shot was fired, that war belonged to men. The record disagrees. Boudicca of the Iceni raised an army of tens of thousands and burned three Roman cities to the ground, coming within a single battle of ending Roman rule in Britain entirely. Ching Shih commanded 1,800 vessels and 80,000 sailors - the largest pirate fleet in the history of the world - and negotiated her retirement on her own terms with the Qing dynasty, Portugal, and Britain simultaneously. The Dahomey Agojie were the most feared fighting force in West Africa for more than a century: an all-female warrior regiment, professional soldiers recruited, trained, and deployed by a state that knew exactly what it had. Women at War tells the stories of twelve female soldiers, pirates, warriors, and commanders across three thousand years of human conflict. From the ancient Iceni queen who nearly drove Rome from Britain, to the medieval Japanese samurai Tomoe Gozen, to the Irish pirate queen Grace O'Malley, to Joan of Arc leading France's army at seventeen, to Rani Lakshmibai dying in battle against British colonial forces, to the Soviet Night Witches flying 30,000 combat missions in plywood biplanes - these women fought, commanded, and changed the outcome of wars. They are not presented here as romantic heroines or inspiring symbols. They are presented as military professionals, assessed by the same standards military history applies to male commanders: the quality of their tactical decisions, the scale of their achievements, the specific consequences of their campaigns. The standard military historical narrative has called them exceptions. This book calls them evidence. Written in the tradition of Mary Beard and Bettany Hughes, Women at War is a work of rigorous popular history that restores twelve of the most consequential female military figures in history to their proper place in the record - and makes the case that the record has always been richer, stranger, and more accurate than the version most people have been given.