Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built The World by Kate Mosse

Published by Macmillan UK, this book was read and reviewed by one of our book club members, Charmain Lines, for Book Chats with Salomé.

“The first named writer in world history is a woman.” If that sentence doesn’t turn your understanding of the world on its head, few things will. This woman, called Enheduanna, lived from 2285 to 2250 BCE in the Sumerian city-state of Ur, southern Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). Hers was one of the earliest known civilisations, up there with Ancient Egypt and China and the Minoans.

Imagine, 2 300 years before the birth of Christ, there lived an educated woman who had access to writing materials and today, 4 500 years later, we can read the 42 temple hymns, three long poems to the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna (whose high priestess Enheduanna was) and three poems to the moon god Nanna that she wrote.

Enheduanna is the figure with whom Kate Mosse opens her book Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built The World, the first of around a thousand women we get to know across almost 400 pages.

Warrior Queens is not a book you read like a novel. Don’t try. It will leave you with little more than a jumble of names bouncing around in your head. It is, however, a treasure chest to dip in and out of, and the perfect match for a personality (like mine) that revels in accumulating did-you-knows.

The book’s 10 chapters shine a brief spotlight on hundreds of women who had contributed to literature, the legal profession, education, warfare, governance, civil rights, entertainment and invention. Some of them you would never have heard of before, while others – like American Supreme Court jurist Ruth Bader Ginsburg – are icons of our own time. Each woman only gets a paragraph or two, but the cumulative effect is one of awe and wonder (and rage – how had we lost track of them?).

Mosse uses a very personal story, a potted biography of her great-grandmother Lily Watson, to give narrative structure to her book. Each chapter is prefaced with an element of Lily’s life that relates to the theme of the chapter that follows.

Having always thought she was the first novelist in her family, Mosse was astounded to discover that her great-grandmother had written 14 novels, several volumes of poetry and many devotional works. For more than 50 years, she was a correspondent for The Girl’s Own Paper (now Woman Magazine), writing hundreds of articles and critical pieces. When her most famous novel was reprinted in 1897, the foreword was written by a former UK prime minister.

And yet Lily has left barely a trace. All of her books are out of print, and she is not mentioned in anthologies of Victorian literature. Even her own family, only a few generations later, had lost sight of her public achievements. As Mosse says: “Her absence from the official record, from history, tells the story of so many women.”

Warrior Queens had its roots in January 2021. With the UK in another Covid lockdown, Mosse asked her social media followers a simple question: who is the one woman from history you would like to celebrate or you think should be better known? The response was immediate and overwhelming. On 8 March that year, Mosse and her team published the first thousand names to mark International Women’s Day. But names kept flooding in, inspiring Mosse to write a book to “shine a spotlight on exceptional women and to light the touch paper for readers to seek out others; to marvel at amazing lives from all over the world and from every era.”

In much the same way that one book cannot do justice to all of history’s remarkable women, this review does not do justice to Warrior Queens. At best I can urge you to start exploring the power and contribution of women through the ages with Mosse as your guide. Among so many other things, you will discover that there were female Pharaohs in Ancient Egypt. Who knew?