Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

I’m a bit hesitant on picking up a book made from a blog.  It’s just the content of some blogs don’t really lend themselves that well to physical media.  And that’s where most of my problem with this book comes in.  When I’m on the internet, I am totally down to read listicles because I’m usually looking for quick bites of information as a sort of short break from something.  If something in the list interests me, I have the whole internet at my fingertips to go down a wiki-hole if I’m so inclined.  It’s a bit harder to do that with a real book made of paper and ink.  really, my main issue is that this isn’t the type of book I’m really into; I’d rather pick up a full volume on Boudica than read a few pages.

But that’s just personal preference.  My other gripe has a bit more substance (I’m in a ranting mood, as I just went on a tangent about curry in my last review.)  Ida B. Wells is one of the most amazing women to ever have been born in America.  She doesn’t get her due because she’s black and she wrote about lynchings, a part of US history that people like to shove under a rug and pretend never happened.  She is one of my feminist idols.  And in this book, her section comes AFTER Rose O’Neal Greenhow.  Who was Rose?  Honestly, and I’m not trying to be spiteful, she was mostly of no consequence.  Her behavior that got her included in this volume?  She was a women during the 1800s that spoke her mind and was a spy.  And by speaking her mind, I mean she loudly announced at dinner parties how she thought slaves were “subhuman”.  And by spy, I mean for the Confederate.  I’m down with celebrating women that stand up for their ideals…but Rose’s ideology is the exact same ideology that caused Well’s to take up her campaign.  People thinking like Rose is how 3000+ black people were lynched in post-Civil War era America.  You know, the kind of thing Ida B. Wells spent her life fighting against.  So it really burns my toast that Rose was given a place in this book, let alone appearing before Wells.