4/5 stars
I've read a lot of feminist anthology type books like Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World and I've loved them all for different reasons!
Bad Girls Throughout History has my favorite art of all of the ones I've read so far, with gorgeous illustrations that really capture the spirit of the woman represented. Ann Shen also includes little phrases by each image that encapsulates what that woman is known for or what she did. For example, Harriet Tubman's image says "Never lost a passenger."
The information on each of these women is relatively short (just a one or two paragraphs) but I didn't mind because they put across the essential information about each woman, with enough details to make her interesting but also persuading me to look into each of these women myself. I looked up a lot of them online while I was reading this book! The author herself says in the introduction that “The short essays are meant to whet your appetite for exploring more on your own.”
I liked the mix of women that Bad Girls Throughout History included, because there were some who were more well-known and included in a lot of books like these, such as Amelia Earhart or Queen Elizabeth I, but she also included some more unknown women that most people have never heard of, like Belva Lockwood (the "first female lawyer to argue in front of the Supreme Court") or Mary Quant (who "invented the definitive mod look of the 1960s"). There were also several women I had never seen in books like this but that I knew of, and who I was really excited to see in Bad Girls Throughout History, like Edith Wharton (one of my favorite authors) and Nellie Bly (a super cool investigative journalist).
The only thing that I didn't much like about this book was that the selection of women was largely American and European. There were some more global picks, like Empress Wu Zetian of China or Junko Tabei of Japan, but by and large these were Western women, mostly American. A lot of them were "first American woman to do this" or "first woman in the United States to do this." Obviously all of the women in this book were wonderful and inspirational, and really fun and enlightening to read about, but it would have been nice to have a more global selection.
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