Women Warriors and National Heroes: Global Histories

This open access volume presents women warriors and hero cults from a number of cultures since the early modern period. The first truly global study of women warriors, individual chapters examine figures such as Joan of Arc in Cairo, revenging daughters in Samurai Japan, a transgender Mexican revolutionary and WWII Chinese spies. Exploring issues of violence, gender fluidity, memory and nation-building, the authors discuss how these real or imagined female figures were constructed and deployed in different national and transnational contexts. Divided into four parts, they explore how women warriors and their stories were created, consider the issue of the violent woman, discuss how these female figures were gendered, and highlight the fate of women warriors who live on. The chapters illustrate the ways in which female fighters have figured in nation-building stories and in the ordering or re-ordering of gender politics, and give the history of women fighters a critical edge. Exploring women as military actors, women after war, and the strategic use of women's stories in national narratives, this intellectually innovative volume provides the first global treatment of women warriors and their histories. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction, Boyd Cothran, Joan Judge and Adrian Shubert (All of York University, Canada) Part 1. Process 2. India's Greatest Heroine: The Many Lives of Rani Lakshmi Bai, Queen of Jhansi, Harleen Singh (Brandeis University, USA) 3. Forgetting Lives, Remembering a Symbol: Nehanda of Zimbabwe in History and Memory, Ruramisai Charumbira (University of Bern, Switzerland) 4. Women Warriors or Mothers of the Nation: Hero Cults and Gender in Basque Nationalism, (1893-1937), Nerea Aresti (University of the Basque Country, Spain) Part 2. Violence 5. Filial Daughters and Female Heroism from Tokugawa to Meiji, Marcia Yonemoto (University of Colorado Boulder, USA) 6. Women Warriors and the Mobilization of Colonial Memory in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Gina M. Martino (University of Akron, USA) 7. From the Nation to Emancipation: Women Warriors and National Heroes in Modern Greece, Sakis Gekas (York University, Canada) Part 3. Gender Fluidity 8. Madeleine de Verchères (1678-1747): Woman Warrior of French Canada, Colin M. Coates (York University, Canada) 9. Jeanne d'Arc, Arab Hero: History's Legendary Figures and Vernacular Debates on Political Rights in the Age of High Colonialism, Marilyn Booth (University of Oxford, UK) 10. The Feminization of Amelio/a Robles in the Hero and Heroine Cults of the Mexican Revolution, Gabriela Cano (Colegio de México, Mexico) Part 4. Survivors 11. The “Amazons” to Pantheon? Women Warriors, Nationalism and Hero Cult in Chile and Peru (1836-1929), Gabriel Cid (Diego Portales University, Chile) 12. Problems for Commemorating Women Wartime Spies: Case Studies from China, Louise Edwards (University of New South Wales, Australia) 13. Vietnam's Militarized Women: The Costs of Transgressing Boundaries, Karen Turner (College of the Holy Cross, USA)

About the Author :
Boyd Cothran is Associate Professor of History at York University, Canada. The co-editor-in-chief of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era he has written extensively on Indigenous peoples and the construction of national identity in the US. Joan Judge is Professor of History at York University, Canada. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has authored three books in the field of modern Chinese cultural history, with particular emphases on print culture, gender history and knowledge culture. Adrian Shubert is University Professor of History at York University, Canada. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Killam Research fellowship, and is a recipient of Spain's Order of Civil Merit.

Review :
A unique understanding of the lives, practices of commemoration and the representation across time of women who participated in wartime activities. It offers excellent, selective coverage of women warriors over centuries and across the globe... Each chapter is a little jewel, clearly written, full of insight and vivid in its presentation of each protagonist's life and military deeds.