Bold in her Breeches is written as an accessible book. Serious scholarship - maritime history, and gendered mobility and crime - is intentionally presented in an attractive way. The pictures are great, too.
It explores the history of the thirteen best-known women pirates, from 300 BC to the 1980s, woman by woman.
The focus is international: Chinese women are there, as well as Filipinas. The book has been translated into Japanese, too. If I was re-writing it today I'd focus much more on race as well as gender and class.
Several specialist contributors - Ann Chambers, Dian Murray and Jule Wheelwright - tackled Granuaille; 19C Chinese pirates; and early 18C pirates such as Mary Read and Anne Bonney , respectively. I myself wrote eleven of the fourteen chapters.
As an expert on the gendered sea, I can't subscribe to the enjoyable but simplistic idea that pirates are glamorous, and that women pirates are an embodiment of Girl Power. They clearly were not Johnny Depps and Tina Turners - though it's a thrilling fantasy. Just as black taxi drivers see minicab drivers as cowboys, so I view pirates as ocean cowboys, a serious problem for seafarers.
From my general research into gender on ships it seems some of the women were pirates because they were as widows 'keeping the family business going'. Younger women may well have been targets of the systematic sexual abuse which still goes on today in the enclosed distant world of the ship at sea. (See my blog and stories of Akhona Geveza as a tragic example of this maritime bullying).
Women were not only pirates but profited from association with maritime larceny. Chapter eleven suggests the relationship of women in ports to pirates: they were fences, sex industry workers, laundresses, seamstresses, landladies, ships chandlers - and sometimes hosts and friends.
Women's mobility - especially working-class women's - has long been restricted by gendered norms.Bold in her Breeches is about some fascinating exceptions, and the mythology that surrounds them.
You can read my recent, popular, article on women pirates in Herstoria magazine, but not on line. See http//www.herstoria.com/spring2009.html
Women pirates are most productively understood in the wider context of seafaring women and cross-dressing itinerant women - not as sexy heroines. But landlubbers' modern construction of these woman as such heroines is worth attention. Why DO we need these gorgeously heroic hoodlums? And what is it about being at sea that adds such an alluring patina to working lives?
