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Summary: A Bit of Silliness For the Couch Potatos
Review: Someone gave me this book as a gift -- why, I have no idea. This book is about as intelligent as a TV sitcom, about as funny as a TV sitcom, and generally at the level of a TV sitcom. I found it neither funny, inspiring nor interesting. It is, in the final analysis, proof that any book that purports to be about "strong" or "outrageous" women will immediately sell thousands of copies, regardless of the piffle between the covers, and is thus a triumph of marketing over everything. Probably best for teenaged girls who don't read much. It's no worse than TV, I guess.
Rating:
Summary: don't let your intelligence be insulted
Review: The author needs to quit writing these pseudo-history books and/or just call them historical fiction to be taken with a very large grain of salt. It seems people either really like this book and ignore its glaring flaws or really dislike it and point out those flaws. I definitely side with the latter. Having minored in Women's Studies in college, I have to say I've never read anything so poorly conceived and executed (pun intended? perhaps). The author really murders her subject matter when she crams it into her idealized notion of what an "uppity woman" is. Who cares whether or not a woman is uppity? And why should we care who the author considers to be uppity? She's no scholar, that much is clear in her lack of a page of resources and/or choice to not refer the reader to a list of books for further reading. So many women seem to think this book is important or worth reading, don't let yourself be one of them.
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Summary: Add these cheeky women to your vocabulary--fiat uppity!
Review: These women--their voices, their deeds, and their daring--delighted me as I discovered them--I hope you get the same burst of energy from meeting them, too
Rating: 
Summary: We Love UPPITY WOMEN!!!!!
Review: This author, Vicki Leon, is so darn uppity, but hey, it sure is fun! Who ever thought reading history could be all that fun? Honestly, this is a book for the girls, about girls who didn't take no for an answer and who didn't just get pushed around. Great role models!!@! Buy all of these cool books and give them to everyone at Christmas. Long live all the Uppity Women!
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Jumping off point, if you want to study.
Review: This book is chalk full of woman who did "amazing" things in the middle ages. First of all, not all of it seemed that amazing, infact some of it sounded like everyday living for that time period. Second, not all woman were from the mideival period, some were from the ancient times and others in the Elizabethan Era. Third, the author is almost insulting when she dumbs things down. I was put off by her writing technique and her attitude. I would have liked more facts and more insight about these "uppity" women. Even the title is insulting. Uppity insinuates that these were rich girls with nothing better to do than stick their noses in the air. I'm sorry, but if a woman is struggling to support her and her family, I would not call uppity unless I wanted to get punched. I would never buy this book if I were you, I would check it out in the library, or buy it if I could return it.
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Summary: Her message is belittled by her language.
Review: This book's main weakness lies in its overly apparent lack of scholarship. If the language were not so slang-ridden, if the information were not so clearly dumbed-down, I would be willing to recommend this to my cousin in highschool if only as a springboard to further women's studies research. It disturbs me to find a book that falls into the women's studies/history category that only makes the rest of this category look like bad research done by airheads. This book should have had a detailed bibliography, and while reading I could not help but wonder if the author had pulled most of these thumbnail bios out of thin air. It's great to be enthusiastic about medieval women's history and to educate the rest of us, but books like this make women's history read like a lurid comic book. This book is bad scholarship for the same reason Joseph Campbell is bad anthropology, historical events and people get taken completely out of context and reworked to fit an innappropriate agenda shaped by cultural biases. The result? Some people seem to like and encourage it, unfortunately.
Rating: 
Summary: Fun reading, that's all
Review: This is a fun and sometimes funny book. However, I think it's ridiculous to consider it an important scholarly work addressing issues in womens' history. I enjoyed it for what it is, a cute and fun book. Personally, I don't think previous reviews are bizarre. I can see that if taken as a scholarly work this would trivialize the experience of women of the past. As a history major I've seen nothing cute about being a woman in ancient times. Like all women, "uppity" women got put down far more often than not. But I thought it was clear that this book was meant as entertainment, nothing more, so no big deal that it doesn't fit with what I know about history. What I think is bizarre is reviewers taking offense at reviewers and offering spitting-mad reviews of the negative reviewers. I think the negative reviews of this book made strong points, many of which i agree with, so read them I won't repeat them. Often seems as if those offended are authors themselves. I like seing negative reviews, like those found for this book, helps inform my purchases, helps decide what books I will devote time towards. Imagine if there were no negative reviews? Seems like that would be dull and uninformative. But I guess I can understand how an author would want all reviews to be positive. I recommend this book for a fun read.
Rating: 
Summary: A good compendium
Review: This is a wonderful compendium of fascinating women from medieval times - from churchwomen to queens. The format is succinct making it very readable. Women and girls of today need to know of that brave and sometimes eccentric women (what I call "pushy broads" - I can say that 'cause I'm a woman and a pushy broad myself) have existed all down through history. My favorites are two women who were (will wonders never cease) Doctors of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages - Hildegard of Bengin and Theresa of Avila. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Frustrating for what it could have been
Review: This is essentially the same review that I wrote for the same author's "Uppity Women of Ancient Times." Unfortunately, the same comments apply to both... I received this book and its companion on Ancient women as gifts. One lives in the bathroom (unfortunately, the most appropriate place for it...) and one by my bed. I am deeply interested in history and was looking forward to learning about an often-overlooked segment of the population - the women, famous and not, who directly or indirectly influenced and contributed in large and small ways to their times. It's clear that Ms. Leon has done a lot of research, but her writing style is terribly irritating and ultimately gets in the way of the material. She could have written it in an informal conversational style that would have served the same purpose, that of making the material accessible and interesting, but she chose instead to use a dated, "cool" Daddy-O style that just doesn't suit the material or ring true to her voice. Hip jargon is cool only briefly, and people who try to be funny usually aren't; why did she find it necessary or appropriate to trash her research and insult the intelligence of her readers with her silliness? I appreciate her obviously extensive research (but not the fact that she neglected to include a bibliography, for those of us with more than a passing interest in the subject of womens' history) and the fact that she included ordinary women as well as movers and shakers, because we really know very little about women in history, but then she undermined her own efforts with her ridiculous writing style. That's why I rate the book a 3 instead of 5 - the content is worth a 5 but it's hard to take seriously a work that its own author obviously didn't.
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Summary: Absolutely hysterical!
Review: This was the first "Uppity" book by Leon that I read. Its great reading for many reasons. The mini biographies are well written, get right to why anyone should care about the place of these women in history, and are formatted in such a way that a person can read one bio or twenty in a sitting-- depending on how much time the person has. Also, Leon's sense of humor keeps the bios interesting and makes for easier reading.
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