With Women Warriors, Pamela Toler (The Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real Nurses of the Civil War) reveals a history many readers will meet with surprise as well as fascination. It is a broad examination that spans from the second millennium BCE through the present, and across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Toler details dozens of examples, from the better-known (Matilda of Tuscany, Njinga, Begum Sahib and, of course, Joan of Arc) to the obscure (Ani Pachen, Mawiyya, Bouboulina), in two- or three-page summaries. Plentiful footnotes serve an important role, too, and have a certain wry humor. For instance, Toler repeatedly and impatiently points out the tendency to compliment women as behaving like men and to denigrate men as behaving like women (a habit consistent throughout history and common to women as well as men).
Double standards are likewise emphasized, as in the way historians and archeologists have examined evidence. For example, the grave known as the "Birka man," from 834 CE, had long been considered that of a male because of the martial burial items found with him. In 2014, a bioarcheologist determined that the bones were actually that of a female. Despite follow-up DNA testing, scholars, archeologists and historians continue to argue about the identification of the Birka woman. As Toler points out, the scholarly contortions now employed to deny her status as a warrior were never mentioned while her skeleton was assumed to be that of a male.
With such copious content, Toler has been careful to keep her book a manageable length. At just over 200 pages, Women Warriors is an easy entry into an expansive topic. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia