Pandora's daughters: the secret history of enterprising women

by jane-robinson

This history, full of anecdotes and first-hand accounts, centres on women through the ages who have sidestepped restraint and raised the eyebrows of their contemporaries by choosing to make their own, often highly idiosyncratic, way of life. The pedigree of the modern career woman is not generally supposed to be long, reaching back only as far as those late Victorian pioneers who stormed the bastions of male professions. Jane Robinson looks back over some 25 centuries and proves that theory quite wrong. The 100 or so women portrayed here were busy behind the scenes of recorded history, in the course of earning an honest (or perhaps not) independent living. Their enterprize and flair led them to careers as diverse as they are improbable, ranging from engineers, plumbers and surgeons, to naval commander in the Persian Wars, a Dark-Age pope, a successful Orcadian wind-seller, some pirates, a Royal Marine and a stockbroker who ran for president of the US.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

222 pages, Hardcover

First published November 7, 2002

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a superb anthology of the women who, throughout history, pushed the barriers of restraint and accepted womanly behaviour to follow their own paths and making their own decisions. Robinson has separated the stories and anecdotes of these women into separate characters, each of which is afforded it's own chapter. Robinson provides insight into not only how and why these women took the routes they did but also analyses how this compared to the generally accepted place of women at the time and how it contributed to the freedoms women enjoy today, although, as Robinson elequently points out, there are still some glass ceilings yet to be broken. This book is easy and enjoyable to read and shows that women are far from being the weaker sex as we've had to face and conquer far more adversity to obtain our goals than those faced by men. This book makes you proud to be a woman...if you wasn't already.