founded Prague and built its imperial palace. She exercised her sovereign will by marrying a peasant, instituting a Council of Virgins, and giving women preference in the posts of state. When she died in 838 and affairs returned to the old footing, Valasca, her chief woman counselor, undertook to found a female commonwealth. Thus far more or less authentic history; legend adds that for a while the commonwealth really was, and that under it girls were trained to arms, while boys lost their right eyes and thumbs.

St. Bernard organized the Female Crusade in 1147, in which bodies of armed women marched. The tradition of fighting women was kept alive in western Europe in the Middle Ages by girls who accompanied their knightly lovers as pages, and with them entered the chants of balladry. It was nurtured by the romances of chivalry, in which disguised female warriors like Bradamante, "in prowess equal to the best of knights," figured. But when, for the first time in the modern era, the Amazonian impulse seized upon masses of women, there was needed, not the modulated voice of the trouvères, but the Gothic accent of a Carlyle to tell of it. The phenomenon is known as the Insurrection of Women, the march on Versailles of October, 1789.

This was the sudden inspiration of perhaps ten thousand women drawn from the Central Markets and other rallying places "robust dames of the Halle, slim mantua-makers, ancient virginity tripping to matins, the housemaid with early broom." The mob, continues Carlyle, storms tumultuous, wildshrilling, toward the Hôtel de Ville. There Theroigne de Mericourt leaps astride a cannon, her chariot on to Versailles. Mænads clamor behind. It is the cause of all Eve's daughters, mothers that are or that ought to be. "Paris is marching on us," exclaims Mirabeau in the National Assembly as the sinister murmurs come from afar. Soon the esplanade is covered with "groups of squalid, dripping women, of lank-haired male rascality." They break into the assembly, they compel the king and queen to show themselves, and they bring them back to Paris, leaving the monarchy in ruins behind them. The return, says Carlyle, is "one boundless, inarticulate ha-ha-transcendent world-laughter, comparable to the saturnalia of the ancients."

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Not as idealized figures of the Greek friezes, but as turbulent, blood-hungry corybantes of earlier Greek story the Amazons of France emerged, almost on the threshold of the nineteenth century-vanguard of the Revolution. Later the market women were enrolled in a brigade which wore the Phrygian cap, the tricolor, a baldric, a short skirt of red, white, and blue, and sabots. With pike and cutlass, it was their task to escort the carts which bore condemned royalists to the guillotine. There were also armed battalions of women and girls in the provinces. In the external wars of the Revolution about half a hundred women are known to have fought, young girls in the infantry, middle-aged women in the cavalry.

French Amazonism was partly portrayed, partly parodied in the person of Theroigne de Mericourt. She was a popular actress, in Carlyle's phrase "brown-locked, light-behaved, firehearted," who had "only the limited earnings of her profession of unfortunate female." At Versailles she cajoled the guard, "crushing down musketoons with soft arms." This woman rose high, and fell far. Suspected of being a Girondist, "the extreme she-patriots" seized, stripped, and chastised her on the terrace of the Tuileries, with Paris looking on agrin. Theroigne lost her wits from brooding over it, and passed out of the Revolution into a mad-house.

Olympe de Gonges, widow at sixteen, blue stocking, pretended natural daughter of Louis XV, entered the Revolution at middle age and countervailed the declaration of the Rights of Man with a declaration of the Rights of Woman. She tried the patience of Robespierre and he sent her to the guillotine, after a jury of matrons had found against her plea that she was “about to give the Republic a citizen."

Younger women aped men's attire and men's ways. Les Merveilleuses indecently imitated Roman costumes, going about in sandals with rings on their bare toes. When a man clad only in a loin-cloth paraded between two stark-naked women, the lurking sense of propriety, or of humor, was affronted, and the group was mobbed. La Maillard, the opera-singer, who was Goddess of Liberty at the Feast of Reason, wore trousers, fought duels, and with her female followers went about the streets to compel other women to dress as she did. This provoked re

action and the Committee of Safety decreed that women's political clubs should disband and no woman henceforth have part in government. Thus disappear the Amazons of France.

In domestic insurrections and in the defense of besieged cities, women, as might be expected, figure more largely than in field operations. Plutarch had told of the women of Argos who defended their city with such courage that a public decree gave to them the right to dedicate a statue to Mars, and to their daughters henceforth the singular privilege of wearing false beards on their wedding day. The Feast of the Valiant Women is celebrated in Majorca to commemorate the part taken by two women in repelling a pirate attack upon an island town. Spanish women manned the walls of Barcelona during the War of Succession and provided most of the soldiers that held Saragossa against the lieutenants of Napoleon. On the maid Agostina was conferred the honor of bearing the name and arms of Saragossa.

The most remarkable woman in the Amazon story and, save Joan of Arc, perhaps the most dramatic figure in the whole story of her sex, was born in July, 1889, in the Russian province of Novgorod. The attempt of Maria Botchkareva to prevent the suicide of her country in 1917, by taking the field with a force of women soldiers—the Battalion of Death-who were pledged to obey and not to debate, to shoot the foe and not to embrace him, has the romance of a lost cause and more. It is related in Yashka, her utterly frank autobiography, transcribed for her by Isaac Don Levine.

Out of her old life as misused peasant girl and misused wife this daughter of Russia marched away into another world where she could strike as well as be stricken. In the Tsar's uniform she seemed just a tall, powerfully built, round-cheeked young soldier. But under the hoyden of the surface there were commanding qualities; and it would almost seem that Yashka, as the soldiers nicknamed her, could see straighter than any man in the empire.

Her early experiences as a woman soldier in a men's regiment were such as perhaps might have been anticipated. She describes her first night's slumber in barracks and the blows and kicks she had to administer to the men on either side. "All