This may shock you, but women have literally been around for as long as humans have been around. As such, women have been not only present for every major event, time period, and development in human history, they have also been very actively involved. Just because the focus still so often lies on a few (white) men, doesn't mean we shouldn't carve out an equal space for the women who worked alongside them. She Caused a Riot tries to do this, to mixed results. Thanks to Sourcebooks and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My apologies for the delay.

It is a sad fact that women's history is not taught as extensively as it should be. In a sense the issue is that it has become a separate category. If we want to read books by female authors we have to find separate reading lists. If we want to know about women's involvement in historical events, the usual books or even usual university courses won't necessarily help you out. While this is getting better very slowly, it is nonetheless not there yet. She Caused a Riot is part of a certain movement to correct this, by bringing attention to historical women who often get relegated to footnotes or fun tidbits. What makes this slightly sad is that She Caused a Riot very much feels like the kind of listicle posted on Buzzfeed, where author Hannah Jewel worked. While it shines a light, and is therefore a good thing, the light is nonetheless a very specific one. Not every book can be a serious study, it is important to also have fun with women's history. But at times the tone of She Caused a Riot was a little too 'Oh my God, look at her go, wasn't she fabulous, yas girl', without actually underlining the real importance of these women and the difficulties they faced.

She Caused a Riot is split into different sections. There is 'Wonderful Ancient Weirdos' which features women like Sappho and Seondeok of Silla. There's 'Women with Impressive Kill Counts' which didn't feature Elizabeth Bathory but did cover Zenobia and Empress Wu. 'Women Who Were Geniuses despite the Fact That They Were Girls' gives us some amazing female scientists, from the famous like Hedy Lamarr to Emmy Noether, while also covering Hypatia and Fatima al-Fihri. 'Women Who Wrote Dangerous Things' introduced me to Phillis Wheatley and Sor Juana ins de la Cruz and was one of my favourite chapters. 'Women Who Fought Empires and Racists' was a really interesting chapter and featured a number of women who indeed were completely unknown to me before, like Te Puea Herangi and the Mirabal Sisters. 'Women Who Wore Trousers and Enjoyed Terrifying Hobbies' was probably my least favourite chapter and is also, I think, the shortest. Lots of flying women here! 'Women Who Knew How To Have a Good-Ass Time' gives us women like Julie d'Aubigny who rioted through the French countryside "liberating" her lover from a convent and winning duels. 'Your New Revolutionary Role Models', featuring George Sand and Josephine Baker, is good fun but also (slightly) covers important moments in Trans history. The book ends on 'Women Who Punched Nazis' which gives us perhaps one of the most insightful chapters because by the nature of what she's dealing with, Jewel's tone becomes a little more sober. While the title claims to discuss 100 unknown women, quite a few of these will be familiar to many. But I must commend Jewel on the breadth of the research she has done and on how widely she has searched for these women. She Caused a Riot does very much try to present an expansive and diverse set of women and gave me many new people to research.

Hannah Jewel very much sets out to write a fun book, while also probably expecting to start a riot with her irreverent tone. As I mentioned above, there is a distinct tone to this book which won't work well for every reader. I am usually very fond of the snarky aside, of supporting women's rights as well as women's wrongs. But She Caused a Riot is that non-stop, which made me realise that you can get very tired of it. It does, at times, get in the way of actually getting to know these women as it's dedicating more sentences to jokes than to their lives. It felt especially grating when she described the women I did know about because it was there I realised She Caused a Riot wasn't going beyond surface level. The question then does become whether this book has the responsibility to go beyond that. We should know more about these women anyway, we should have learned about them properly as is, so in a sense the fact that She Caused a Riot only whetted the appetite and didn't fulfil it is a good thing. As you can see, I'm a bit torn but overall did enjoy the book, as long as I dipped in and out of it.

She Caused a Riot was originally published in 2017 as 100 Nasty Women of History and that title immediately gives you an idea of what perhaps spurred this book, marking it as a clear product of the early Trump-era. I'm only mentioning this because it helped me understand the book better, now that I'm reading it in 2022.

While I had some quibbles with She Caused a Riot I did very much enjoy reading it. It is such an irreverent tour of amazing and fascinating women, written with a deep love and also a good dose of fun.

LOVE THIS BOOK. The accessibility is fantastic, and I can recommend this to my students with ease. It's a great supplement to our conversations about erasure in history.

The book looks generally good. I got access to excerpt of this book. I wished to have access to the full book to provide a more deep review.

Interesting stories and women highlighted, however between the very casual tone and instances that bordered on “man hating” I don’t think this is the right book for my library. Women must be celebrated, but others should not be torn down in the process.

Beautiful, necessary collection! Loved the sassy undertones and the fact that this highlighted little or under known women!

Who knew that there were so many wonderful, talented, world changing women in the world? Not a lot of us because sadly women aren’t as celebrated throughout history as men have been. Don’t get me wrong, men have made some amazing contributions to how we live now and world history but so have women; a lot of them.

This is the subject of Hannah Jewell’s book She Caused a Riot. Through this book we traverse through time and space (world space not like interplanetary space) and look at the amazing women who have – as the extended title of this book suggests – crushed it.

Hannah Jewell’s acerbic sarcasm is so hilarious to read. She makes it very clear how much she thinks that the patriarchy sucks and you find yourself chuckling away with yourself as you read this it. I happened to be reading it in a hospital waiting room. Didn’t make me look strange, not one bit.

I made a mistake when I read She Caused a Riot. I tried to read it all in one go when really I should have dipped in and out of it. Especially when I had something coming up that made me feel like I needed the inner strength of one of the 100 women featured in She Caused a Riot. Never mind. It was still a jolly good, eye-opening book.

She Caused a Riot – 100 Unknown Women Who Built Cities, Sparked Revolutions, and Massively Crushed It by Hannah Jewell is available now.

For more information regarding Hannah Jewell (@hcjewell) please visit her Twitter page.

For more information regarding Sourcebooks (@Sourcebooks) please visit www.sourcebooks.com.

This is a unique book in that it will make you angry but in a good way. To hear about the struggles and injustices that these women overcome is uplifting and powerful.

This book was so amazing, I bought a physical copy for my classroom library. I love the format, the author's voice, and the stories included. A highly recommended read.

An excellent book that covers an important and often overlooked women of history. Anyone who has a slight interest in learning about these women will find concise information and bio's. A great starting off point and introduction to a history that researchers should dig deeper into. All of these women deserve their own biographies and stories told for the mass audience.

There have been a lot of "fun feminist biography" books coming out recently, but this one is a complete standout. The book covers 100 women from all races and places and times throughout history, broken down into chapters like "Wonderful ancient weirdos" and "Women who wore trousers and enjoyed terrifying hobbies." Hannah Jewell brings these 100 women to life in the pages of She Caused a Riot - she gives each one plenty of space to tell their stories, and her wit, snark and sarcasm had me literally LOL-ing at times - and makes you want to find a time-traveling phone booth so you can go hang out with them all. Jewell even imagines what that party might be like:

"If they all gathered in one place, it could make for a very awkward dinner party. Julie d'Aubigny would stab Mercedes de Acosta with a sword as they both tried to flirt with Hedy Lamarr, who would just ignore them because she was excitedly talking about math with Emmy Noether and Hypatia. Josephine Baker and Coccinelle would get naked and dance on the table while Nana Asma'u and Hildegard von Bingen blushed furiously and muttered prayers under their breath.
Ida B. Wells and Frances E. W. Harper would greet each other as old friends and excuse themselves to the kitchen because they had a LOT of gossip to catch up on. Sappho and Ulayya bint al-Mahdi would languish in a corner on some cushions, whispering dirty poems and cackling to each other. Noor Inayat Khan would compare spycraft with Policarpa Salavarrieta, and Rosa Luxemburg would be hiding in a closet plotting the downfall of capitalism with Alexandra Kollontai and Luisa Moreno. Everyone would avoid Khutulun as she kept challenging people to wrestle, except Lozen, who'd distract her and then steal one of her horses and gallop away into the night.
Sojourner Truth would make a rousing speech that brought the room to tears, and Susan La Flesche Picotte would kindly invite Margery Kempe to go upstairs for a cup of tea and a medical check-up to try and find a cure for her incessant wailing. Wang Zhenyi would be getting her mind blown by Annie Jump Cannon and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin filling her in on 200 years of astronomy. Lucy Hicks Anderson and Pancho Barnes would produce the smuggled liquor, and Gladys Bentley would play the piano all night while Miriam Makeba sang. Annie Smith Peck would climb up on a cabinet and refuse to come down, shouting about how she held the altitude record for the party. Tomoe Gozen would accidentally almost murder someone, and the whole thing would be shut down by the cops when Zenobia, Ching Shih, and Artemisia of Caria tried to invade the next-door neighbor's house. Nellie Bly would write a tell-all memoir about the whole disastrous thing.
Actually, that sounds like the greatest party ever. It sounds like a riot."

This book’s target audience is a group of high school girls. Although the short biographies of these are very entertaining, they are also intellectually and historically suspect.

I took my time with this book for 2 reasons. Firstly because if I read it all in like a week or so, the women would all get jumbled in my mind and I wouldn't have enough time to reflect on each of them individually. Then secondly, because this book made me so mad, that I had to put it down at times. Just reading about the injustices women faced, oooh it boiled my blood and there is only so much I could take in one sitting. You can guess some of the injustices that women faced (and still do face) but I guess it was the less obvious ones and the particular examples that really ticked me off. I'll tell you one that really irked me -In 1894, Annie Jump Cannon started working as a computer for some man in Harvard who employed women because he didn't have to pay them as much as men. They were trying to figure out how best to use a classification system for stars and nobody could work out the best way to do it. Annie came up with a way to do it and that classification system is STILL USED TODAY because it is that effective. She published nine volumes of work between 1918 and 1924. Now here is the really fantastic and super awesome part... the system she created wasn't named after her. It was named The Harvard system and Jewell explains that it's ironic because she "was not made (or paid as) a member of the Harvard Faculty until she was in her seventies in 1938, just three years before she died." WOOOOOW. ALSO for years, she wasn't even allowed to use a telescope by herself because it was too dangerous for women: "What if she saw something in the heavens that caused her to faint or win a Nobel Prize?" That story just really angered me. There is even more to the story, I'm just giving the basic version but you get the picture.

Of course this book didn't just make me feel anger. It made me feel so proud to be a woman. Reading stories of women who were so bad-ass and who just took no shit, was honestly a breath of fresh air. There were so many different women, the book was very diverse and inclusive. What I also loved was the fact that there were also stories about women who weren't good and pure. Stories about women who were ruthless and powerful and scary. At the start of the book, Jewell mentions to pick one woman from the book and look her up in more detail after finishing the book. I chose a few women but my number one gal, is a lovely woman known as Empress Wu. She was known as "Treacherous Fox" and her story is so awesome and basically, I want a Netflix show about this woman. I will be reading up on her as I want to know more about her. Other women that I found to be very drawn to were: Ching Shih, Artemisia Gentileschi, Julie D'Aubigny, Lozen, Coccinelle (aka Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy), Noor Inayat Khan, Irena Sendler and Constance Markievicz.

I think the best thing about the book is the writing. Jewell is so hilarious and she really has a way of putting things. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the amount of history, names and dates, I felt very at ease reading all of these stories because they were written with so much humour, compassion and care. I highlighted quite a bit in the book, just because the passages were funny. I do wish the whole thing was written in chronological order but putting them into different chapters was fine. I also wish some stories were longer but I know that it is hard to get information on some of the women.

I would definitely recommend this. This is required reading for everyone! Everyone should know about these women and it's just a shame that more people don't know about the women of the past.

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"Such is the anxiety of civilization after civilization over the idea that some women may have no interest in men, despite men being so endlessly interesting."

"...a Syrian scholar Bar Hebraeus quoted a bit of poetry in describing [Sorghaghtani Beki]: "if I were to see among the race of women another woman like this, I should say that the race of women was far superior to men." Which is basically the thirteenth-century equivalent of a guy saying, "You're not like other girls...""

"...a woman studying medicine was totally unheard of, let alone a woman treating the king. I suppose if you're the only one who can cure a man, they bend the rules. "Hmm, on the one hand I'm very ill and only you can save me. On the other, you seem to have a vagina. Whatever shall I do?""

"The next time you look at the night sky, make sure to remind whoever is attempting to share a romantic moment with you that so much of what we know about the stars is down to a room full of underpaid and underappreciated women scientists. If they are not put off by this fact, you may kiss them."

"It's possible that Murasaki [Shikibu] joined the court when her husband died after just two years of marriage, having been presented with the option to either remarry, or to join the women-only literary salon of the empress. What would you choose?"

"What a man you gave me, Lord of all givers.
He's a nasty old lump of wrinkles with shrivelled finger
bones and a bent back like a croaking crow." - an ICONIC poem (translated from Arabic) about a husband by a woman known only as Juhaifa Addibabiyya.

"Unfortunately, however, it was the 1870's, a time when many great men of learning and science firmly believed, in their logical and rational way, that higher education for women would lead to their infertility and deaths."

"Once, annoyed by an instructor giving her a "check ride" to verify her pilot's license, Pancho [Barnes] cut the engine mid-flight to freak him out and demonstrate how far beyond him she was in skill."

"... some tax collectors believed they could judge if girls were fifteen, and therefore old enough to be taxed, by stripping them and looking at their breasts. I would try to explain the logic of these assholes to you, but I fear it would do irreparable damage to both of our brains."

"One of Lillian [Ngoyi]'s earliest and most affecting memories was when she and her brother went to deliver laundry to one of her mother's white clients, and they were not allowed inside the house -but a dog was."

"You are a pansy, a bugger, a fornicator, a cuckold, a swine and a thief. If a phallus could become a palm tree, you would turn into a woodpecker." - another ICONIC poem by a woman named Wallada bint al-Mustakfi.

"Women have been there all along. They've been there, and they've been doing things! They've been relentlessly doing stuff, whether you knew about it or not!"

Annoyed that the history books are filled with the exploits (and mistakes) of men? Well then, look no further because in She Caused A Riot, Hannah Jewell explores the amazing contributions that one hundred or so women have had to the global stage. Focussing on women throughout history and from all around the world, this book explores the (largely forgotten and/or ignored) lives of some of the women who have fought dictators, rose to power, survived impossible situations or simply just thrived living the life that they adored.
In She Caused a Riot, all readers will find a perfect spring-board opportunity to delve more into the lives of simply extraordinary women. In its pages, and despite its jokes that admittedly fell rather flat, anyone wanting to learn about female contributions to all matters of the social sphere, can use this book as a first step towards an enlightened and far more well-rounded view of this world’s history.
After-all, after reading this, most will certainly take a step back and wonder why they had no idea that any of these women ever existed. Certainly, every single one of these women should be instilled in the brains of society’s children - because every-time someone tells us, or our daughters, or our sisters, or our friends, that they cannot achieve the desires of their hearts, there is almost certainly a woman within these pages who has gone before us and absolutely kicked arse doing it.
These women are the trailblazers, the ones who show us that anything is impossible and for that, I will always be thankful that this book fell into my lap.

I was really into this book for the first half...snarky comments, kick ass women taking on everything and everyone. However, there was no sources and after a while all of the women blended together. Overall an important read, just too much information with too little sources.

This book is Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls for grown ups; hilarious, sarcastic, snort-worthy sweary stories about over one hundred largely unknown women throughout history who didn't let being female hold them back. A brilliant, inspiring collection that asserts (if you ever needed it) that despite what patriarchal society likes to argue, women can and have changed civilisations and are anything but the weaker sex.