Mutinous Women
Sometimes a book comes along that really wakes me up. It takes a lot. I have been reading one to two history books per week for the last several years and I was a History major in college so I feel like I have a pretty good sense of these things. But, Mutinous Women by Joan DeJean was quite the eye-opener for me. First, I will admit that we tend to be very Anglo-centric in our approach to the settlement of North America. I am originally from Wisconsin so I am well-vested in the French Fur Traders of the colonial period but beyond that, I'm not sure I can say a whole lot of substance. The Spanish were Florida and Mexico. The French, well, the middle I suppose. Second, how often do we talk about women in early modern history? And to add to that, how often do we talk about poor women? Hardly ever I would say and that needs to change.
DeJean does a great job in her book giving us the lives of almost two hundred women who, without historical attention, might have disappeared. Thank God they did not. Her story is part crime drama, part economic cautionary tale, and part a testament to the human spirit. She follows the story of Manon Fontaine et al as they find their ways erroneously thrust into a Parisian prison and thence onto a ship born to the New World. Was all this planned? No. Did the French authorities do a good job of vetting their “colonists”? No. And on every page of this book greed almost literally drips off the corners, off each syllable, off each period. Greed drives everything in this story.
And it is a story well-worth picking up.
Score: 5/5