I’m an academic, writer, and broadcaster, and I’ve always been fascinated by the big questions of who fights wars and why. A puzzle caught my eye: the only profession (short of maybe priest) where women were actively banned in the 1980s and as late as the 2010s, was combat. How could Western democracies ban women from an entire profession? This was especially odd, given that the plentiful historical evidence that women were perfectly capable of combat. So I wrote a book explaining how women in combat fit into the broader sweep of military history, and how the suppression and dismissal of their stories has had a profound social and cultural impact.
I wrote...
Forgotten Warriors: The Long History of Women in Combat
From Boudicca’s rebellion to the war in Ukraine, battlefields have always contained a surprising number of women. Some formed all-female armies, like the Dahomey Mino of West Africa; some fought disguised as men; some mobilized in times of national survival, like the Soviet flying aces known as the Night Witches. International relations expert Sarah Percy unearths the stories of these forgotten warriors. She sets the historical record straight, revealing that women’s exclusion from active combat in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a blip in a much longer narrative of female inclusion. Deeply researched and brilliantly told, Forgotten Warriors turns the notion of war as a man’s game on its head and restores women to their rightful place on the front lines of history.
If you didn’t know that between 800,000 and a million Soviet women fought in combat during World War II, this book will blow your mind.
Even for those aware of the history of Soviet female combatants – Soviet women fought in every imaginable military role, from fighter pilots to snipers to tank units – Alexievich’s astonishing oral history brings their stories to life. It’s especially profound to hear from the women themselves because after the war was over, women were told to never speak of their military service and got very little recognition for it.
By the time Alexievich recorded their stories, these women were getting old – and without her work many of these stories would have been lost.
'It would be hard to find a book that feels more important or original' - Viv Groskop, Observer
Extraordinary stories from Soviet women who fought in the Second World War - from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
"Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown... I want to write the history of that war. A women's history."
Great historical fiction is meticulously researched, and really great historical fiction is also fun to read.
All of Kate Quinn’s books are excellent but this one is pretty close to a time machine that scoops you up and takes you to the famous Soviet all-female bomber aviation unit known as the Night Witches. Quinn brings to life a world where women were true military heroes.
And if that’s not enticing enough, the stories of the Night Witches are wrapped up in an exciting thriller that incorporates a hunt for a Nazi war criminal.
From the author of the New York Times and USA Today bestselling novel, THE ALICE NETWORK, comes another fascinating historical novel about a battle-haunted English journalist and a Russian female bomber pilot who join forces to track the Huntress, a Nazi war criminal gone to ground in America.
In the aftermath of war, the hunter becomes the hunted...
Bold and fearless, Nina Markova always dreamed of flying. When the Nazis attack the Soviet Union, she risks everything to join the legendary Night Witches, an all-female night bomber regiment wreaking havoc on the invading Germans. When she is stranded behind enemy…
The stories of women spies during World War II are not as well known as they should be – especially because these women were highly trained, incredibly brave, and trained in all kinds of combat techniques.
I find them fascinating because they demonstrate that ordinary women are capable of the greatest feats of physical bravery – these women were not recruited because they were muscle-bound or could shoot a bullseye from a great distance.
They were usually just regular women who happened to speak a European language fluently. Krystyna Skarbek, brilliantly written about in this exciting biography by Clare Mulley, was one such woman – her adventures, including crucial organization of French resistance fighters and rescuing her colleagues from the Nazis – make for irresistible reading.
In June 1952, a woman was murdered by an obsessed colleague in a hotel in South Kensington. Her name was Christine Granville. That she died young was perhaps unsurprising, but that she had survived the Second World War was remarkable. The daughter of a feckless Polish aristocrat and his wealthy Jewish wife, she would become one of Britain's most daring and highly decorated special agents. Having fled to Britain on the outbreak of war, she was recruited by the intelligence services long before the establishment of the SOE, and took on mission after mission. She skied into occupied Poland, served…
We all think we know the story of Joan of Arc – she’s possibly one of the world’s most famous women. But what Kelly Devries’ book does is to put Joan’s military accomplishments into the spotlight.
By focusing on Joan as a military leader, the book reminds us that women’s military experience was often dismissed. In Joan’s case, the only explanation people had for the military capacity of a teenage girl was magic. The British thought Joan was a witch, the French that she was divinely inspired – but no one thought that she may just have been a good fighter and a good leader.
Devries unpacks some of the more prosaic explanations behind Joan’s military success, explanations that indicate that Joan (like other women) may have had military talents rather than magical ones.
Where previous works have concentrated on the religious and feminist aspects of Joan's career, this title addresses the vital issue of what it was that made her the heroine she became. Why did the soldiers of France follow a woman into battle when no troops of the Hundred Years War had done so before, and how was she able to win? The English called her whore, and believed her to be possessed, but her own troops trusted her without any proof of her abilities. And she did have very great abilities - in particular her remarkable prowess as a military…
World War I, to many, seems like the quintessential all-male war. After all, the experiences of men fighting alongside each other in the trenches are one of the definitive cultural touchstones of the 20th century and beyond.
That’s why I find Flora Sandes’ story so intriguing. Flora was yet another ordinary woman who went on to great military exploits. A clergyman’s daughter, she was rejected for nursing service on the Western front so she ended up driving an ambulance in Serbia, and through some twists and turns ended up as a corporal in the Serbian army.
Conditions on the Eastern front were brutal, and Flora fought through them all – her memories are extraordinary, and she’s also funny and honest.
English, Pages 233. Reprinted in 2013 with the help of original edition published long back. This book is in black & white, Hardcover, sewing binding for longer life with Matt laminated multi-Colour Dust Cover, Printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents. As these are old books, there may be some pages which are blur or missing or black spots. If it is multi volume set, then it is only single volume. We expect that you will understand our compulsion in these books. We found this book important for the readers who…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
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Leaving behind ancestral Chinese homelands and their family, brothers Yang and Lee face harrowing challenges as they join countless immigrants seeking a better life in the 1860s.
This story follows their remarkable journey across the ocean to San Francisco, then into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where they'll labor to build the Transcontinental Railroad. Surrounded by California's new marvels, and carrying their cultural traditions in their hearts, Yang and Lee find themselves in precarious situations. Their passions, struggles, dreams, and…
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