On the Trail of the Women Warriors by Lyn Webster Wilde

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wilde will not convince readers that the Amazon existed-at best, she will leave them wondering why they plowed through her anticlimactic, derivative survey.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. The most satisfying section of the book is the last few pages, where Wilde turns her attention to the legacy of the Amazons. Though some feminists and lesbians have reclaimed the legacy of the women, most feminists are put off by their “masculine” penchant for violence.

Wilde examines 20th-century commentators, too: Eva Meyerowitz, a scholar of the matriarchal society of the Akan people, claimed to have met real Amazon women in her African travels. It was said that men visited them at certain times of the year and had sex with them in hammocks the Amazons raised the daughters that resulted from these couplings, but they were rumored to kill their sons. The 17th-century Jesuit Cristobal de Acuña claimed that he encountered Amazon women in South America. In the middle of the Black Sea, however, the women rose up and overcame their captors, and they eventually landed on the shores of the Sea of Azov and settled down with the Scythians who already lived there. Herodotus, the “father of history,” claims that Greeks took Amazon women captive and put them aboard ships to bring them home as slaves. Wilde then turns to the ancient Greek sources. Wilde begins her survey with etymology, examining the two theories about the origin of the word “Amazon”: it is either Greek (“without breasts”) or Armenian (“moon-women”). They do not, it turns out, come from the river Amazon in South America rather, the Amazon women first appear in ancient Greek writings. The women of the Amazon, legend has it, were powerful, fierce fighters who lived without men-once a year they sought out male company in order to reproduce, but for the other 364 days they were fine on their own. An unsatisfying Cook’s tour of Amazon legends.įilmmaker and broadcaster Wilde suggests that the Amazon myth is not so mythical after all.

On the Trail of the Women Warriors by Lyn Webster Wilde