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On 4 September 2020 a group of historians, writers and educators from across the world came together online to talk about some of the most inspirational women warriors of the last few centuries.

Dr Matilda Greig

UCD Centre for War Studies

Videos: Wonder Women & Rebel Girls

Free online workshop tells women warriors’ stories

On 4 September 2020 a group of historians, writers and educators from across the world will meet online to talk about some of the most inspirational women warriors of the last few centuries – and the stories we tell about them – in a free online workshop open to the public.

Meeting a female cavalry officer among the ranks of his army was a bit of a surprise for Napoleon, one sunny day in 1806. ‘What!’ he is reported to have exclaimed, ‘You are a woman?’

Today, more than two hundred years later, it shouldn’t be such a surprise: women now serve in combat roles in many armies and female superhero-warriors top the billing in blockbuster Hollywood films, though the battle for acceptance and equal representation carries on.

The online event, ‘Wonder Women & Rebel Girls: Women Warriors in the Media, 1800 to today’, is organised by Dr Matilda Greig from University College Dublin, and opens with a talk by Dr Emma Butcher, recently featured on BBC 2’s ‘Being the Brontës’, BBC Radio 3, and Dan Snow’s History Hit.

The videos of conference papers are now available to watch on History Hub’s Youtube channel. Topics include everything from Furiosa to the French Resistance, Indigenous histories and heavy metal bands. 

Keynote

'War is an Ecstasy, Risk is Wild’: Girls Writing War in the Nineteenth Century by Dr Emma Butcher (Edge Hill University)

Play Video

Panel 1: Gender and Sexuality

Current video

‘Female’ military masculinities: gender non-conforming women warriors and beyond
Dr Catherine Baker (University of Hull)

Panel 2: Nationalism and Propaganda

Current video

French Invasion Heroines and their Afterlives
Professor Alison Fell (University of Leeds)

Panel 3: Activism and Exclusion

Current video

Guerrilla Girls, Wonder Women, and Menstruating Mothers: Iconographies of IRA Women in Armagh Gaol, 1970-1980
Samantha Haddad (New York University)

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