Bloody Brilliant Women

Cathy Newman will be well known to any Brit as a presenter on Channel 4 News. She's a wonderful storyteller, knows how to present a lot of information in an engaging manner, and you can feel her enthusiasm for the topic, women across British history, buzzing through the pages.

For an in depth analysis of history and the lives of these women, this is not your book. The book is structured with fairly long chapters, but within in theses chapters names fly by and are mentioned, perhaps, only in passing, and no more than a few paragraphs are dedicated to a single woman. At times it felt like a long list of anecdotes, rather than anything building to a larger conclusion. That's not to say that Newman bring up any of her own opinions or build any conclusions (the section on Thatcher was particularly good and well argued, as well as the discussion of the wars' impact, or lack thereof, on women's role in society, the links between historical events and today's headlines on the gender pay gap, and I was pleased to see intersectionality discussed, however briefly), but as a starting point to inspire and direct readers into learning more about many fascinating historical figures this book does remarkably well. Personally, I am excited to learn more about these fabulous women I was introduced to reading this book:
- Cicely Saunders, a nurse best known for her role in the 1960s improving palliative and hospice care, who “tore up existing rules dictating the frequency with which patients could be given painkillers. Her mantra was: ‘Constant pain needs constant control.'” (p.265).
- Dina St Johnston, a computer programmer who in the 1950s noted the computing industry was limiting their potential customers of computers by going along with the assumption that “no one but a science department or a technical firm employing their own programs would want one.” (p.228)
- Stella Browne, who campaigned for the access to safe abortion in the early 20th century.
- Flora Sandes, who became a soldier in the Serbian army and was “promoted to the rank of Sergeant Major and awarded one of Serbias highest military honours” (p.85), when she was wounded by a grenade in 1916.
- Mary Seacole, a contemporary of Florence Nightengale, but far less known.

Recommended for an accessible and enjoyable overview of a massive topic.

The publisher gets -1000 points for including a comment from Piers Morgan on the blurb, however.