Review: 'She Caused a Riot: 100 Unknown Women Who Built Cities, Sparked Revolutions, and Massively Crushed It' by Hannah Jewel

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.

Pub. Date: 3/1/2018
Publisher: Sourcebooks

Often women in history are made to sound as if they spent their entire life sighing, and gently rebuking their oppressors. That isn’t how life works, and it never has been. The empowering, no-holds-barred history book She Caused a Riot gives 100 powerful examples of women getting their hands dirty, and inspires a courageous new movement to do the same.

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.

I give this book...

3 Universes!

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.