• Acknowledgements; List of figures; Prologue; Part I. The Ballads and Their Heroine: 1. Popular Balladry, Mary Ambree, and the Beginnings of the Female Warrior Motif, 1600–1650; 2. The Fashion for Female Warrior Ballads: New 'Hits' and Old Favourites, 1650–1800; 3. The Museum Life of Mary Ambree and the Decline of the Female Warrior, 1800 to the Present; 4. The Female Warrior Motif as an Idea; Part II. Reading The Female Warrior: 5. The Female Warrior and Everyday Life in the Early Modern World; 6. The Female Warrior and the Construction of Gender; 7. Hic-Mulier: Imaginative Preoccupation and Genotype for the Female Warrior; 8. The Female Warrior, Gay's Polly, and the Heroic Ideal; Epilogue; Notes; Appendix; Selected bibliography.

"Women Warriors raises urgent and important questions about treatments of gender in the eighteenth century, about the relation between historical conditions and cultural works, and, particularly, about the interaction between the conventional and referential dimensions of those works--including the ways that the conventions of traditional forms may themselves become one of the conditions of life." Modern Philology