Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World

Product Information

She nursed victims of cholera in Kingston and in Panama, as well as funding her own passage to Crimea to care for wounded soldiers. As Kate Mosse points out, despite her having an embarrassment of women to choose from for her book, the world hasn’t quite felt the same way.

But that this woman – a multi-million-selling author, OBE; famed for novels such as the Languedoc Trilogy – should be launching her first ever one-woman show. It’s also written with an agenda – to “prove” just cause, to “prove” superiority on the grounds of gender, age, race, ability, faith, tradition, to shore up power. You'll meet the Mothers of Invention and Pirate Queens, the unsung heroines of medicine and science, to those who reached for the stars or took up arms to fight for what they believed in. There were many women freedom-riders before Rosa Parks, in the same way that there were thousands of suffragettes.

Or that Miriam Kate Williams – known by her stage name Vulcana – was a Welsh strongwoman who toured music halls in Britain, Europe and Australia in the early part of the 20th century. One of the many legends surrounding her is that when she asked to accompany her father on a trading trip to Spain, and was refused on the grounds that her long hair would catch in the ship’s ropes, she chopped off her hair rather than accepting her father’s decision.

Since my book has been published, more letters, more photographs, more books have come to light and this will make a difference. Joyous, celebratory and engaging, this is a book for everyone who has ever wondered how history is made.

Featuring a joyous cast of characters - from the first named author in history to the 19th century woman who discovered global warming - this is an evening for everyone, friends and family, parents, and teenagers. Many names will be familiar – Aphra Behn; Eleanor of Aquitaine; Cleopatra, who was nominated by Kim Cattrall; and Ada Lovelace, nominated by both Martha Lane Fox and Konnie Huq; Julian of Norwich; the German political activist Sophie Scholl; Marie Curie; Hedy Lamarr; conservationist Rachel Carson; Jennie Lee, nominated by Ian Rankin. It was disappointing to learn that she was a supporter of the Anti-Suffrage League and, although she was a passionate advocate for girls' education, it's clear that it was within the context of producing good wives and mothers rather than to promote women's independence.

From school text books and reference books in libraries, from the documents we seek out in archives and museums, it becomes evident how easily women’s achievements and experiences can vanish from the official record. Legend has it that she said she would only marry the man who could beat her in a wrestling competition. In 1851, she led an all-female army consisting of 6,000 warriors against the Egba fortress of Abeokuta. More likely in the early 80s, when living away from home for the first time, in those heady days of “discovering” feminism, of Reclaim the Night marches, of consciousness-raising groups.You’ll meet the Mothers of Invention and Pirate Queens, the unsung heroines of medicine and science, to those who reached for the stars or took up arms to fight for what they believed in. Born in Lyme Regis in 1799, she endured her work being overlooked and misattributed to the male collectors to whom she sold. Queen of Halloween dresses up as a PEACOCK with 10-person entourage while her husband rolls up as an EGG. Yet after her death in 1881, she largely vanished from the record for almost a century and was only brought back to prominence by the tireless efforts of campaigners. About how, launching the Women’s prize back in 96, Kate – 5ft 2 – was forced to stand on a cardboard box to have any chance of visibility behind a lectern made for tall men.

When she started work in the 60s, women got two-thirds of men’s pay; yet: ‘You didn’t really feel agitated because that was how it was’. Extraordinarily, given how she lived, Gráinne survived into her early seventies, and died of natural causes in 1603. Within the first few days, we’d had thousands of nominations from all over the world and from every period in history.With toe-tapping music, video, and a few mystery objects - from a 1920s football to a 19th-century sheep - Kate will share, both the story of how she tracked down her long-forgotten relative, novelist Lily Watson (in whose literary footsteps she's walking) and, at the same time, ask how history is made and who gets to make it.