While at Heathrow Airport in London, waiting to board my flight back to the States after several fantastic months travelling and studying in Europe, I found myself in the worst situation known to any reader.
I had nothing to read.
Thankfully, there was a shop with books only a few feet away, my plane was delayed, and I had a few British pounds I needed to spend before returning to the land of the dollar. Into the shop I went.
Amongst all the bestsellers and YouTuber books was a section about history. As I’d just spent three months going to historical sites, I was drawn to this section in particular. On the shelf was a book that caught my eye: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History’s Most Notorious Women. Bingo.
Elizabeth Kerri Mahon’s short, historical book is very enjoyable. Firstly, it’s about some pretty badass women, which I will always enjoy in any capacity. Joan of Ark, Cleopatra, Calamity Jane, and Ida B. Wells are only a small selection of the historical figures covered.
Second, it tells the truth about these ladies. Cleopatra gets the reveal she deserves. After centuries of old men turning her into a sex symbol, she gets the credit she is due as a statesman and leader of her country. The woman was willing to do anything to keep Egypt independent, and she was able to succeed for quite a significant period of time. And then she was erased from history by men who were threatened by her. Ask anyone who Cleopatra is, and they’ll reply that she was the lover of Mark Antony. Ask them about her skills as a leader, and you’ll often come up with nothing.
Can you tell I’m now a big fan of Cleopatra?
Finally, the book is short. The stories are nicely condensed, which is good considering the stories start to really blend together by the end.
The ratio of white women to women of color in the book is a little staggering. The section that features the most women of color, “Amorous Artists”, takes quite a while to reach. Even the section called “Warrior Queens” has only Cleopatra listed, when in fact there are countless queens around the world whose stories could have been referenced.
The issue with this lack of diversity is not only that there are people whose stories are missing, but also that the stories we get begin to sound similar. Most of the women were born into poverty, found love and fortune, then lost it and ended up alone and desolate. There are only so many stories I can hear about the same situation in one single book. Asian and African women are completely missing. I attribute that to a lack of intense research, as a quick Google search will pull up plenty of scandalous, pioneering women who stand out from both of those continents. I feel like the book missed an opportunity to talk about women who aren’t quite as well-known in the West, but notorious in other geographic regions. I would be insanely interested in reading something like that (suggestions).
Scandalous Women is an interesting work. It covers so many periods and countries (in the West, mostly). The book is great on many accounts, but I did begin to feel the stories were repeating themselves. Beyond the stories themselves, the writing style wasn’t that sophisticated (I’m a firm believer that slang doesn’t belong in anything written in third person, especially in a historical book).
Still, I would definitely read another book by Elizabeth Mahon. She takes an interesting look at history that historians are only now bringing to light. These are women that actually had immense power and influence, but have often been pushed aside for the male figures, or to extol their sex appeal. Mahn provides a refreshing change.
Oh, the Struggle 