Why am I passionate about this?
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.
Sarah's book list on women in combat
Why did Sarah love this book?
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.
1 author picked Joan of Arc as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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…