Let Me Be Frank: A Book About Women Who Dressed Like Men to Do Shit They Weren’t Supposed to Do
Armed with her passionate, ultra-feminist irony, a mountain of research, and an appropriately witty title, Tracy Dawson takes aim at ancient patriarchal traditions by giving fierce, rule-breaking women, both known and little-known, a voice for their defiance. Each one of these remarkable women put their stamp on the world at great cost to themselves, and they remind us how much, and perhaps how little, has changed over the centuries.
From ancient times to the modern day, from cross-dressers, pirates, impersonators, and writers to athletes, slaves, and doctors, from Hatshepsut to Jeanne D’Arc, from Cathay Williams to Mary Shelley and the Brontës, from George Sand to Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, Dawson’s narrative is warm, humorous, saucy, and irreverent, and crammed with enlightening and fascinating material. And lest our millennial complacency tell us this battle is won, Dawson reminds us that Joanne Rowling’s publisher thought her name much too feminine to appeal to wand-waving boys!
This small but weighty illustrated anthology would be a bonus to anyone’s library of luminaries who have fought for rights which were theirs in the first place, but which must be taken back.
