How To Write The Future

154. World Building with Women Warriors, Interview with Pamela D. Toler

• BETH BARANY • Season 1 • Episode 154

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“There's been a long tradition of saying that women that women who ruled were exceptions, that women who fought were exceptions. That, you know, it's Joan of Arc, it's not GI Joan.,And that trap gets us over and over again, not just with women warriors.” — Pamela D. Toler


In this episode of How To Write the Future podcast, host Beth Barany interviews author, speaker, and historian Pamela D. Toler. Together they dive into the importance of women in history and discuss the significant challenges in documenting Women's History and how it can be tied into storytelling. They also discuss Pamela’s book, Women Warriors: An Unexpected History.


ABOUT PAMELA D. TOLER

Armed with a PhD in history, a well-thumbed deck of library cards, and a large bump of curiosity, author, speaker, and historian Pamela D. Toler writes historical non-fiction for a popular audience. She goes beyond the familiar boundaries of American history to tell stories from other parts of the world as well as history from the other side of the battlefield, the gender line, or the color bar. Toler is the author of ten books of popular history for children and adults, including Women Warriors: An Unexpected History and The Dragon From Chicago: the Untold Story of an American Report in Nazi Germany.

Website: https://www.pameladtoler.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pamela.toler

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pamelatolerauthor/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamelatoler/


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See also: Ep. 146 - How Ancient Female Warriors Shape Our Future

https://writersfunzone.com/blog/2025/03/31/how-ancient-female-warriors-shape-our-future/

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  • SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
  • SHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade

c. 2025 BETH BARANY

https://bethbarany.com/

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BETH BARANY:

Welcome to How to Write the Future Podcast. I'm your host, Beth Barany. I'm an award-winning science fiction and fantasy teacher, editor and filmmaker. And I care very much about humans being able to shape their own future, both through the stories we write, as well as the way we approach the world in the way we think about our future because I believe that we humans can create positive, optimistic futures through our stories and also through how we live our day-to-day lives. And so on that note, we are actually gonna do some history deep dive today because where we came from totally affects how we are today and how we perceive the future. And let's shed a light on one of my very favorite topics: women warriors. I am so excited today to have with me a special guest, Pamela D. Toler author, and fabulous human being. Welcome Pam. or Pamela, what do you prefer, Pam? Pamela?

PAMELA D. TOLER:

I prefer Pamela.

BETH BARANY:

Pamela. So welcome, Pamela. I'm so glad that you're here today.

PAMELA D. TOLER:

Oh, I'm delighted to be here.

BETH BARANY:

Let me read your bio for everyone. so they can learn about you. Lemme tell you all a little bit about Pamela. Armed with a PhD in history, a well thumbed deck of library cards and a large bump of curiosity, author, speaker, and historian, Pamela D. Toler writes historical nonfiction for a popular audience. She goes beyond the familiar boundaries of American history to tell stories from other parts of the world, as well as history from the other side of the battlefield, the gender line, or the Color Bar. Toler is the author of 10 books of popular history for children and adults, including Women Warriors: An Unexpected History, and The Dragon from Chicago, the Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany. Thank you so much for being here, Pamela. I'm really grateful that you took the time today and I just have to do a little showing off. I have your Woman Warriors book. And I also have your Dragon from Chicago book. So very exciting to have these both here. And I just wanna say it's really fascinating to me that you took the jump from having your PhD in history to deciding to write books for the popular audiences. I'm really grateful because we need people like you who can translate, and bring these stories to life. So I'm really grateful that you're doing this work. I do wanna invite everyone to check out Pamela D. Toler's material. Her links will be in the show notes and the article that accompanies this podcast. So everyone be sure to check those out. She has a fabulous column about history. I love reading it. Now I have a question for you that has been, I swear to you, plaguing me since I was a child. Which is...

PAMELA D. TOLER:

no pressure.

BETH BARANY:

No pressure, no pressure. And because I come from a family that prized itself on being a feminist family, but also I'm a child of the seventies, and okay, I just have to tell this personal story. When I was 16, I turned to my mom and I said, mom, how come women aren't equal to men? I thought they were. I was brought up to believe that they were. How come they're not? And she said to me, well, essentially social change takes a long time. It's takes generations. And my family had already been working on it for four generations. I have a great-great-grandmother who was an advocate for abortion. I know that's very controversial these days. but in the Midwest, it was illegal then, completely illegal and. and my great grandmother who was an advocate for women's rights and and her mother was the one who was, also pro education for women. And then here I am, five generations later in the seventies or eighties by then looking around, how come equality isn't here yet? And my mom was like, she's a realist. She's like, well, mm-hmm. Takes a long time. And I'm like, you know, sad about that. Yeah. So this segues me to our first question, which is: How is it that women have been disappeared or women disappear from history? We are 50% of the human population.

PAMELA D. TOLER:

There are a lot of reasons. and at some level, the first one comes back to: what people have thought were worth telling. What were the stories that were worth telling? And if history was the story of power, then you are largely talking about men in positions of power. And when you're talking about a woman in a position of power, she's always an exception for whatever reason, despite the fact that, if you look over the broad range of history, the number of women who have actually ruled, and in many cases ruled with an iron fist is extremely large, but a lot of their stories end up then getting erased or told with extreme prejudice by the people who record the history. They either remove women from history, which has happened in some really egregious ways. Hatshepsut of Egypt, where her successor simply takes their name off the monuments. So sometimes it's literal erasure, but you also get instances where someone who's writing the history, and a lot of times, particularly in the ancient world or even the Medieval world, we're getting sources that are written a long time after the fact and you get a lot of trash talking. You get a lot of: there was really a man behind her pulling the strings or, she was a horrible human being, or, she didn't exist, or she didn't really do what the records say she did. I was just astonished how many times, particularly in women warriors where I was reading secondary modern historians looking at older histories, making the argument that she's a metaphor: This isn't someone who actually was there. She's a metaphor, or, yeah, she was there, but all this other stuff has accumulated and she didn't really do what our actual source says she did. And not always in ancient times. There's a woman named Amina of Hausa who was a contemporary of Elizabeth the First of England, and there are historians who said, yeah, we're not really sure she existed. So yeah.

BETH BARANY:

So it seems like it's a lot of either overt erasure. What happened to the Egyptian? I don't know the name for the Egyptian leader.

PAMELA D. TOLER:

She's a Pharaoh.

BETH BARANY:

Pharaoh, that's right. Thank you. My brain went blip. Or just male, dare I say, male dominated bias.

PAMELA D. TOLER:

Mm-hmm.

BETH BARANY:

And, And woman couldn't do that- kind of thing. Would you say, so that seems to predominate over the last, I don't know, what, two, three, 5,000 years. it seems to have been for a long time.

PAMELA D. TOLER:

it's

BETH BARANY:

for a long time We really start having the idea of women's history around 1980.

PAMELA D. TOLER:

That's when women's history as a discipline begins and historians begin looking at different sources to tell us what women's lives were like. But also since then, you get increasing numbers of people like me going and bringing to life stories that are put in the footnotes, because a lot of times women don't disappear completely. their sources end up attached to their husband's papers is one thing. Or they just show up in a footnote. Or in more traditional writing, they get used as a horrible example: This is someone you don't wanna be. So it's really only about 1980 that you get a body of work that's attempting to bring women back into the light.

BETH BARANY:

That's fascinating and also explains a lot in terms of why that material wasn't handy when I was a child.

PAMELA D. TOLER:

And the other thing, I'm sorry, you have other questions, I know not just why women get erased, but it's also a question of what sources get kept. Yeah. Who decides what archives are worth keeping? If you're writing women's history, you're often having to work around the archives in some really interesting ways because papers may not have been kept.

BETH BARANY:

Yeah. That's fascinating.'cause you go back as far as you can to original sources, right?

PAMELA D. TOLER:

More or less original sources in some cases.

BETH BARANY:

Let's segue to our next, my other very fascinating, I would say, obsession that I've been dabbling in for years and hope to do something very definite with at some point. I loved your book on woman warriors. I was also frustrated at the limitations of history, like we only have certain historical documents, but it sounds like you took your time to figure out who to include in your book. And so how do you define women warriors for- I'm just gonna show it on screen for everyone. Women Warriors: an Unexpected History, beautiful cover. And, and

PAMELA D. TOLER:

Defining turned out to be really important because despite the fact that in some ways there's this sense that women didn't fight. In point of fact, I had so many examples that I had to make hard choices, and I went in with a really simple definition, which was I wanted women who literally fought, that this is not women for whom fighting was a metaphor. These were women who picked up a rock or a gun or a sword and actually fought. And that's a pretty good definition if you're talking about women on the front lines in any way, whether they are regular soldiers or are defending a besieged castle. It gets less clear when you're talking about commanders because there's a real wide range that women commanders can take. On the one end there is Elizabeth The First on her white horse with her silver cuirass over her gown saying, I have the weak body of a woman, but the heart of a king. And she's sending people off to fight, but she's not going into the field. And at the other end, you have someone like Boudica so just stay in the British Isles, who clearly is right there, sword in hand fighting. And you've got everything in between. I ended up using a modern American military definition called a"combatant commander," where they might not necessarily be holding a weapon. After all, you don't think that general Eisenhower wasn't a warrior in World War II, even if he wasn't shooting. But where they're at the front, they're making command decisions. They may be making tactical decisions, logistical arrangements. So someone who is actively involved in the the unwinding of a war where they're, they are hands-on, even if they are not physically fighting with a weapon. The other decisions that I needed to make- I really did want this to be a global history. So I took time to choose people from all around the world and from across time, beginning from the second millennium, B. C. E. I think the last person I talk about was actually in the Falklands War, but she's almost a footnote because basically I didn't go much past World War II in looking at active combatants. So, no. Tibet and with the Chinese invasion, but first half of the 20th century is where I end. So I also had to make those kinds of decisions. And I didn't want all queens and I wanted regular women. I didn't want it to be a whole book of exceptions. I wanted ordinary women fighting because they needed to as well. So lots of choices that had to be made.

BETH BARANY:

You can't include everyone. On this book, what was the most surprising thing that you've discovered about women warriors?

PAMELA D. TOLER:

Really just how many of them there were. I went in with a really fat folder of stories that I had been accumulating for 20 years, maybe before I even thought about writing the book, but I just kept finding more and it became clear that even if individual women were exceptions in their times and places, there's a point at which: How many women do you have to have over the history of time for it to stop being an exception? So the real thing that just got me was how many they are and how unexamined that is.

BETH BARANY:

So I appreciate that you have taken your time to ask all these incredible questions, including this next one that I would love to explore with you, which is: how does the trap of the individual exception, and you're gonna have to define what that means, contribute to the erasure of women from history?

PAMELA D. TOLER:

There's been a long tradition of saying that women were exceptions that, that women who ruled were exceptions, that women who fought were exceptions. That, it's Joan of Arc, it's not GI Joan. And that trap gets us over and over again, not just with women warriors. I recently was reading a book called The Swans of Harlem about black dancers in our lifetime, and how that book got triggered by Misty Copeland being treated in the news as if she were the first, as if she were an exception, and this journalist going back in, finding this group of women. So what the trap of the exception does is it stops you from looking more broadly. It stops you from seeing who that exception built on. It stops you from seeing who else is doing something that looks a lot like that. In the case of women warriors, the other thing that the exceptional does is if we start defining women warriors as exceptions. If you start dubbing the black women who fought in Dahomey as the black Amazons of Dahomey. If you call women who are national heroines, because they fight the Joan of Arc of wherever it is, you start creating a definition that means this is something you can't aspire to. This is a big heroic thing that stands apart. But you person who is having to defend your home because the Nazis are marching into Russia, you're not really a warrior. So the real trap of the exception is not even that it means we don't see it, but that we don't think we can be it. I guess we come back to that:"If you can't see it, you can't be it" phrase. But it's true and it's very much true as a historian looking, is that exceptionalism idea will get you every time.

BETH BARANY:

I actually do love that you've tied it back to,"if you can't see it, you can't be it." I know, Geena Davis uses that in her promotions. Because it's really true. When I was a child, I wanted to be a doctor, or at least that's what I told all the adults.'cause that was what impressed them the most. But also, I had a deep desire to help people and I knew that hospital thing. But when I went looking for other doctors, women who were doctors, my parents were like, there's this woman, It's like they couldn't give me very many stories when in fact there was probably a lot more stories out there that existed. They just couldn't give them to me'cause it wasn't because of this whole exceptionalism thing. Yeah. So I really appreciate you explaining the whole exception because it does one more thing that I notice, which is it, it removes us from community. oh, look at, oh, look at my grandmother who did this, and my auntie who did that, and my neighbor did this. Like It isolates women, which I think is one of the tools that have been used to take away our power is to isolate women.

PAMELA D. TOLER:

There's a wonderful Peanut cartoon where Lucy is making a report in school and she stands up and talks about what her grandmother did in World War II and then says, you should go ask your grandmother what she did.'cause it's not just all baking cookies. It does. it isolates you. And the whole idea that you go home and you don't talk about it. And admittedly, a lot of men who fought in World War II also went home and didn't talk about it. The difference is that we knew men fought in World War II, and with the exception of Rosie the Riveter, we didn't have a real clear sense of just how much women did and what they did. And those stories are only starting to be told now. And some of that's because there were documents that were not able to be released until a certain number of years after the war. So that's the reason some of the stories don't get told, but also there's a sense of going home and not talking about it. And the Russian government actually told the women who were fighter pilots and bombers and mechanics in World War II not to talk about their service.

BETH BARANY:

Wow.

PAMELA D. TOLER:

And obviously the Bletchley Park people had signed secrecy act documents to not talk about their service. But yeah, sometimes it's just an act of we don't talk about this.

BETH BARANY:

And that's really too bad. That goes back to my, how come we don't know the stories? And people are being told actively not to talk about it. And I feel like maybe because I come from a family of storytellers who tell the stories of their communities, but I feel so strongly about bringing forth these women warrior stories because women being brave, I don't want it to be an exception. I want it to be part of our characteristics. And that's why I write stories about brave young women on the one hand in my fantasy worlds. And then in my sci-fi, I've got this lead investigator doing The Brave. And, As a matter of course. Like of course women get to be brave. Women are brave. And so I feel like, Pamela, we could keep going for a long time. You're such a font of information and, I really like finding out how women were represented, but also bringing women back into the conversation and into the dialogue, by telling their stories. Again, everyone check out Pamela's books. I'll put these up on the screen and I'll put links to these books. and I know you're working on more projects. as we wrap up today, Can you speak to the future since this podcast theme is about looking toward the future and how do we wanna make our future? And of course there's many futures, but as you look to the future, maybe, one thing that's personal, like what you are working on, and also your wish or hope for the writers who are listening to this and those who care about the future. Those are my audience. A lot of writers listen to this. What can you tell us about helping us write more positive, optimistic, and inclusive futures?

PAMELA D. TOLER:

First. I don't know what I'm working on right now. I'm looking so that I can't help and right now what I really want is for us to not lose what we gained. But if we're talking about trying to write about a more positive world, about a world where it's assumed that women are strong and smart and doing whatever men do, and on the alternate side that men have the option of being the one to stay home and take care of children, to be caretakers too, because those two things go together. Again, to use something that gets said a lot, but women's rights are also men's rights. I would say, keep that in mind with whatever you are writing about whatever future world you're creating is that if you open the opportunities for one group, it doesn't mean you're closing the door for someone else. You are not taking something away from someone else. You in the best versions of that, you are actually making the opportunities broader for everyone.

BETH BARANY:

I love that. That's a great note to end on. Oh my goodness. Thank you so much, Pamela. I just wanna encourage everyone to check out, Pamela's resources, and I'm gonna end on this, everyone. Write long and prosper.