HEROINE’S VS HERO’S - HOW WOMEN SHAPED HISTORY

I have been reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s mighty tome, The World: A Family History of Humanity; I admit that it has taken me some months, and there is so much to take in from it!

What has resonated strongly for me, especially with regard to my own stories and my heroine Rebecca Tempest, is the number of women in the highest, most powerful leadership positions throughout history.

It is a narrative that appears to have been lost from around the eighteenth century to now; from Sumerian Queen Kubaba, to Boudica Queen of the Iceni, to Catherine the Great, to Empress Dowager Cixi of China, to name drop a fraction of them. He shows a compelling argument for family as a tool for power and control, but within it, the pattern of progress that it projects. Kings and Emperors predominated, but as they say, behind every successful King is a mighty Queen (and a few thousand concubines)!

And, when it comes to powerful women of history, they do not come much bigger than Agrippina the Younger. Directly associated with three Roman Emperors, helping forge a dynasty. She was Caligula’s sister, Nero’s mother, and only marginally less innocuously, the wife of Claudius! Great-granddaughter of Augustus, and daughter of Germanicus, nephew and heir apparent to Tiberius, the second emperor and Agrippina the Elder, she is described as being domineering, ruthless and ambitious, virtuous attributes for securing power, and essential for keeping it.

Agrippina the Younger

Her skill set would have served her well throughout most of history, since it is only in the last two centuries that war mongering lost its role as a key economic driver for just about every country on the planet. Agrippina was born in a world that revolved around empire-building, when male leaders were off fighting throughout the campaign seasons.

I suspect that whilst the development of martial skills by the men was critical to their power and success, their wives and the women surrounding them honed complementary political talents, making them equally formidable leaders.

Who is your favourite heroine, either fictional or historical? What are you expecting from Rebecca Tempest in my next novel?