34 Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries - Kate Mosse I thought this was a great book and am really glad I got it for my mum for Mother’s Day (without reading it first so I had to go on recommendations!). A definite bold.
It is in some ways just a long list of women who have achieved things throughout history, with a few lines at most about each of them (very different from Femina, which has long chapters focusing on one woman at a time), but I didn’t find that tiring or boring even though I had to pretty much read it straight through as it was a library book. It would probably be better to dip in and out (and to have time to do more reading around some of the women mentioned) but it’s definitely not just a reference book.
I also liked the sections on Mosse’s great-grandmother which were interspersed throughout the chapters on other women through history. It helped to emphasise some of the core messages of the book: namely that there will be many, many more women worthy of mention who are not in the book as this is simply a selection; and that we can only know about these women if their memory and achievements are preserved for future generations.
Overall, the best thing about the book is that it’s a celebration: it raises up all women, not just the ones mentioned, and doesn’t try to say that some women, or types of women, are better than others. It also acknowledges some of the negative things which some famous and respected women said and did, while assuming that we are mature enough to form our own opinions on these negative attributes.
This is in stark contrast to Babel: or the necessity of violence which I reviewed recently. I have only put one book in italics since I started following these threads at the beginning of 2022, on the basis that even books I don’t like generally have some literary merit. But the more I think about Babel the more I hate it despite it having some good bits - partly because of what is clearly the writer’s hatred of white people and her view that white women have no right to complain about anything because they have the privilege of being white; and also because the whole purpose of the book seems to be to set people against each other and to dictate to readers what they should think about issues of race and class. I found myself hating the message even though I agreed with the principles of it, because it was being forced on the reader. So…I’m going to put this one in italics on my list unless and until I get less angry about it.