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.

About the Author

Adrian Shubert is University Professor of History at York University, Toronto, Canada. He is the author of A Social History of Modern Spain, 1800-1990 (1990) and Death and Money in the Afternoon: A History of the Spanish Bullfight (2001) and the co-editor, along with Jos� Alvarez Junco, of The History of Modern Spain (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). His awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Killam Research Fellowship, and being named a Commander of the Order of Civil Merit by King Juan Carlos.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.