Women War Heroines

Insofar as this book's plentiful anecdotes add up to a central point, it is that the search for an essential female pacifism is fruitless and ahistorical: "every nation has a history of women in war" despite an equally long tradition of sniggering and abuse... Though the book never directly states its larger claims, the wealth of evidence it provides renders the controversy over women in combat almost quaint--their presence on and near the battlefield is ancient, inescapable and irreversible [Publisher's Weekly]