Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages

by Jo Stanley

The world of piracy has traditionally been seen as the preserve of men. This book reveals the extent to which women have been involved in piracy, skulduggery and seafaring over the centuries. This book is divided into several parts.

Genres: Pirates, History, Nonfiction, Historical, Womens, Research, Feminism

283 pages, Paperback

First published March 6, 1995

Reviews

[Melki · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm pretty sure this was someone's dissertation - scholarly as hell, but not entertaining.

In other words, there's a bit too much conjecture about phallic women, and not enough PIRATES!

[Dfordoom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jo Stanley’s Bold in Her Breeches is a book about women pirates that aims to tackle this subject in some depth. It puts piracy in a context of pirates interacting with communities ashore in a variety of ways – in some cases exploitative, in others co-operative and supportive. And it puts women pirates in a context of women being involved in piracy in many different ways – as wives, as prostitutes, as victims, as merchant sailors, as businesswomen. It looks at women s both victims of violence, and perpetrators. It has intriguing details of women at sea as crew members of naval ships. There’s also some remarkable information about modern piracy. And some very cool stuff about 19th and 20th century Chinese women pirates. All this is fascinating stuff. So far, so good. Unfortunately there are a couple of major problems with the book. It’s very badly organised. It’s rambling and repetitive. Even worse is the tone of the book – much too preachy. It’s not that I disagree with some of her points about male violence towards women, not at all, but she tends to labour the point. And then she labours it again. And then, just to make sure, she labours it a third time. The psychoanalytic stuff in the opening chapters seems rather dubious, and in fact a little silly. The book ends up not really going anywhere very much – it never really gets out of port and onto the high seas. Despite its extremely interesting subject matter I really can’t recommend this book all that highly, but since there are precious few books about women pirates if you happen to be interested in that subject (and isn’t everyone?) then you’ll probably need to buy it anyway.

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

A history of female pirates faces formidable challenges: career criminals tends to be systematically sensationalized and mythologized, pirates were overwhelmingly from a socio-economic class virtually ignored by traditional historians, and the doings -- or even presence -- of women is likewise ignored by many historical sources. A handful of female pirates left a verifiable history by being caught and tried, and perhaps just two -- Grace O'Malley, the "Pirate Queen of Ireland" and Cheng I Sao -- secured their place in the annals by commanding fleets simply too powerful to ignore. (Artemisia and Alfhild also had impressive military careers, but I don't think Stanley made a good case for them as pirates per se -- although exactly what constitutes of piracy is often in the eye of the forcibly boarded.)

Principal author Stanley addresses the paucity of solid information with some inventive, but not necessarily well-supported gambits: she assumes that the numbers of cross-dressed women passing as men apply equally to naval walks of life as to shore-based professions, and she further assumes that the gender demographics of pirate ships are comparable to other ships. She relates aspects of pirate life in general and muses speculatively on how female pirates would have participated in and/or reacted to them. I learned a lot that I didn't know about pirates: I had always assumed that the officer/crew divide in a pirate ship would be even more brutal than in a merchant or military vessel, but Stanley establishes that they were likely far more egalitarian (and demographically broad) than their legitimate counterparts. Stanley also points out that women must have been a necessary part of the pirate economy (on- or off-board) as seamstresses, victualers, nurses, prostitutes, romantic partners, et cetera. Stanley acknowledges the unreliability of her sources, from Herodotus to Philip Gosse, but is forced to lean heavily on them, because there is nothing better available. I was particularly bothered by the stories of Lo Hon-Cho and Lai Choi Son in the early 20th century. The careers of both women sound suspiciously like that of Cheng I Sao, they are each supported by a solitary source, and both of those quoted sources use novelistic if not downright purple prose (I was reminded of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels).

Three experts in particular pirates provide chapters on their subjects. These seemed less speculative than the rest of the volume, and, interestingly, all three explicitly addressed the gap between authoritatively sourced or corroborated material and the evolution of the pirates' stories beyond the original texts; I thought they were the strongest and most compelling chapters overall.

Anne Chambers spent four years researching the woman known as Grace O'Malley, Granuaile, Granny Imallye and other variants. The story that emerges from her labors is of a wily tactician and tenacious political presence. Granuaile illustrates the difficulty of labeling piracy as such: she often operated under state sponsorship, but thanks to complex tensions between England, Ireland, and Spain, not always of the same state. (Chambers also makes the case that the shift underway in Granuaile's lifetime from Irish Brehon law to English common law was one of increasing sexism.)

Julie Wheelwright discusses the little about Ann Bonny and Mary Read that can be established from the court records of their trials and other reliable sources, and the gap between the facts and the myths that have arisen around them (starting with Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates). The women acquire aspects of dominatrices, with both their cruelty in battle and their sexuality (in various ways, depending on the time period in which the myth is being enlarged) exaggerated beyond anything in the historical record.

Dian H. Murray studies the two near-contemporaneous accounts of Cheng I Sao, who commanded a fleet of roughly 400 ships with as many as 60,000 crew operating off the coast of what is now Vietnam. The two works basically corroborate each other (although Murray has to make some allowances for the Englishman Richard Glasspoole not always understanding what he observes). Inaccuracies begin to enter the picture even in the first English translations of the other text: Charles Friedrich Neumann renders "Tung-hai Pa" as "Scourge of the Eastern Sea," but he gets the wrong version of the character "pa": "Uncle from Eastern Sea Village" would be more accurate. Further expansion of Cheng I Sao's story follows a pattern very similar to Bonny and Reads: her bloodthirstiness and general hot-bloodedness, as well as her beauty, are increasingly emphasized.

[Lord Beardsley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I consider myself a feminist, but the liberal amount of assumptions about women and men that were grandiously made throughout this book with little to back it up with got on my last nerves. In fact, the extreme ends this author went to actually came off as patronising, ignorant, and reverse sexist!

There needed to be less bias, and more history, less assumption and more truth, less long-winded justifications and mass generalisations about women and men...

Oh yeah...and not to mention...

WRITE ABOUT PIRATE LADIES FOR CHRIST SAKE, LADY!

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by feminist historians, this book is an introduction to the few known female pirates, spanning both history and geography. With chapters on figures of myth from ancient Greece and Denmark, real historical women like Grace O'Malley, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and Cheng I Sao (and the myths that surrounded them) and even pirates in the twentieth century, Stanley and her contributors set out to prove that piracy was not just a man's world. Each chapter weaves together both historical fact and the historian's educated guess; there are so few records for pirates in general, not to mention the women among them, that many things must be guessed at. While historians have long believed that pirate crews were made up entirely of men, Stanley argues that those men did not exist in a world completely devoid of women. The pirates' female relations, landladies, seamstresses, laundresses, lovers or prostitutes, and even the women who purchased the stolen goods the pirates were selling were all a part of their lives, and may well have taken part in their piratical activities. While Stanley sometimes digresses into feminist theory (for instance: she posits that men have been fascinated with the idea of female pirates for centuries because they admire the fearless, adventurous temptress who has no problem with violence and can wield a sword with great skill because they secretly see her as a "phallic woman") she also presents a great deal of historical research with well-cited sources. While this book is primarily about women pirates or other seafarers of dubious intent, it also fits into the realms of maritime history, the study of women warriors, the cultural history of piracy in general, and the study of myths.

[Errol Cavan · Rating 1 out of 5]

A really terrible book, full of assumptions, conjectures, assertions and idiocies in an attempt to make something out of nothing. It may be worth a laugh, and I laughed outloud at times, but do not waste your time reading it or your money buying it. Alas I did. At least I managed to throw it away, the first time I have ever done that with a book I bought or was given. If this is the state of modern academia then God help us all.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

It seems to be a good overview of the concept of women pirates and their individual stories, or at least how much we do know about each individual pirate, since there are very few records to be found on them. This is more directed towards a popular audience but each chapter does include a great deal of notes and sources as to where she acquired the information. Jo Stanley is a radical cultural worker who has compiled a variety of material usually about women's work and representation. The main contributors to the novel, Anne Chambers, Dian H. Murray, and Julie Wheelwright are all known historians with backgrounds in women's studies.

[Lea · Rating 3 out of 5]

In looking for a historical non-fiction account of the lives of women pirates, I came across this title after a short search. There isn't much to add after the other reviews: The novel gave an account for each of the best known women pirates while pointing out several of the myths and fallacies that exist within each. Informative, but at times the author tended to roam on a personal tandem. The author's constant claims at being a feminist became a distraction and occasionally sexist in her own right.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Jo Stanley & others search for the truth about women pirates amidst all of the myths & legends surrounding them. My thoughts: Not so much women pirate sword fighting that you would expect; that's more of legend. The women pirates are more likely to be disguised cabin boys than pirate queens. Still a very interesting read, and great for those excited about pirates.

[Pippa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not very interesting - basically because almost nothing is known about women pirates! This is one of the rare books that I didn't finish. It bored me totally.