Forgotten Warriors: A History of Women on the Front Line (Paperback) - Sarah Percy

From the Amazons to the Ukraine conflict, women have always been on the front line of war: this is their surprising and heroic history.

'Ambitious, wide-ranging and learned' Times Literary Supplement

'Vivid and extraordinary' Wall Street Journal

From Boudicca to Ukraine, battlefields have always contained a surprising number of female fighters. We have all heard of Joan of Arc, but not the cross-dressing soldiers whose disguises were so effective the men around them never realized who they were fighting with.

Forgotten Warriors shines a light on women in war, from the Mino,the all-female army the protected Dahomey from the West for two hundred years, to the Night Witches, Soviet flying aces that decimated the Nazis. Against a backdrop of sieges and desperate battles, rebellions and civil wars, Sarah Percy brings these extraordinary women to life, and sets the record straight.

'Vulnerability, strength and defiance . . . in exploring the history of women in combat, Forgotten Warriors tackles their exclusion from the historical record' The Spectator, Books of the Year

'Fascinating' BBC History

'Magnificent . . . could not be more timely' The Monthly

'Truly impressive and rigorously researched, this book should be in all libraries' New York Journal of Books

About the Author

Sarah Percy is Associate Professor at the University of Queensland. She was formerly Fellow in International Relations at Merton College, Oxford, where she was on the steering committee of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War. Author and presenter of an acclaimed ABC radio series on the Cold War, her acclaimed previous book, Mercenaries, examined another unconventional military history, over multiple locations, from the medieval period until the present day. This is her first trade book.