Forgotten Warriors by Sarah Percy

The definitive history of women in war, revealing how women have always been an essential part of combat

From Boudicca’s rebellion to the war in Ukraine, battlefields have always contained a surprising number of women. Some formed all-female armies, like the Dahomey Mino of West Africa; some fought disguised as men; some mobilized in times of national survival, like the Soviet flying aces known as the Night Witches. International relations expert Sarah Percy unearths the stories of these forgotten warriors. She sets the historical record straight, revealing that women’s exclusion from active combat in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a blip in a much longer narrative of female inclusion. Deeply researched and brilliantly told, Forgotten Warriors turns the notion of war as a man’s game on its head and restores women to their rightful place on the front lines of history.

Sarah Percy is associate professor at the University of Queensland. The author of Mercenaries, she completed her MPhil and DPhil as a Commonwealth Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. She lives in Brisbane, Australia.