IN NO ONE ARTICLE of dress is the ultra-feminine psychology more apparent than in the hat.

***

In ordinary life we have the well-known fact of the lasting beauty that shines in such severe simplicity as the white face-bands of the nun, or in many of the neat and unchanging caps worn by Puritans, Quakers and others. We even know, in that remote shut-off compartment of the mind wherein we keep our articles of faith, that ‘Beauty unadorned is adorned the most.’

Beauty, however, is far from our thoughts. With serene unconscious fatuous pride our women put upon their heads things not only ugly, but so degradingly ridiculous that they seem the invention of some malicious caricaturist. In ten years’ time they themselves call them ugly, absurd, and laugh at their misguided predecessors for wearing them. If honest and long-memoried, they even laugh at themselves, saying: ‘How could we ever have worn those things!’ But not one of them stops to study out the reason, or to apply this glimmer of perception to the things she is wearing now.

Any book on costume shows this painful truth – that neither man nor woman has had any vital and enduring beauty sense; and further that while man has outgrown most of his earlier folly, woman has not.

There is today no stronger argument against the claim of Humanness in women, of Human Dignity and Human Rights, than this visible and all-too-convincing evidence of sub-human foolishness.

In other articles of costume there have always been certain mechanical and physiological limitations to absurdity. In hats there are none. So that the wearer is able to carry it about, so that in size it is visible to the naked eye, or capable of being squeezed through a door – with these slight restrictions fancy has full play, and it plays.

The designer of women’s hats (let it be carefully remembered that the designers and manufacturers are men) seem to sport as freely among shapes as if the thing produced were meant to be hung by a string or carried on a tray, rather than worn by a human creature. There is a drunken merriment in the way the original hat idea is kicked and cuffed about, until the twisted misproportioned battered thing bears no more relation to a human head than it does to a foot or an elbow.

The basic structure of a hat is not complex. Its ancestry may be traced to the hood, coif, cap, the warm cloth or fur covering, still shown in ‘the crown’; and to the flat spreading shelter from the sun, now remaining in ‘the brim.’ In simplest form we find these two in the ‘Flying Mercury’ hat, a round head-fitting crown, a limited brim. The extreme development of brimless crown is seen in the ‘night-cap’ shape worn by the French peasant, the ‘Tam O’Shanter’ of the Scotchman, the ‘beretta’ of the Spaniard, or the ‘fez’ of the Turk. The mere brim effect is best shown in the wide straw sun-shield of the ‘Coolies.’

Among the Welsh peasant women we find the crown a peak, the brim fairly wide; among priests, Quakers, and others, we find a low crown and a flat or rolled brim; in the ‘cocked hat’ the brim is turned up on three sides; the ‘cavalier’ turned his up on one side and fastened it with a jewel or a plume. Among firemen and fishermen the brim is widened at the back to protect the neck from water.

There is room for wide variation in shape and size without ever forgetting that the object in question is intended to be worn on a head. But our designers for women quite ignore this petty restriction or any other. I recall two instances seen within the last few years which illustrate this spirit of irresponsible absurdity.

In one case the crown was lifted and swollen till it resembled the loathsome puffed-out body of an octopus; and this distorted bladder-like object was set on an irregular fireman’s brim – to be worn side-ways.

For forthright ugliness this goes far, but here is one that passes it for idiocy: Figure to yourself a not unpleasing blue straw hat, with a bowl-shaped crown, setting well down on the head, and a plain turn-up brim about two inches wide. Then a grinning imbecile child gets hold of it. With gay grimaces he first cuts the brim carefully off, all of it, leaving the plain bowl. Then, chattering with delight, he bends the brim into a twisted loop, and fastens it across the ‘front’ of the inverted bowl, about halfway up. There it sticks, projecting like a double fence, serving no more purpose than some boat stranded by a tidal wave halfway up a hillside. And this pathetic object was worn smilingly by a good-looking young girl, with the trifling addition of some flat strips of blue velvet, and a few spattering flowers – all as aimless as the stranded brim.

Five years ago it was customary for women to wear hats not only so large in brim circumference as to necessitate tipping the head to get through a car door, but so large in crown circumference as to descend over the eyebrows, and down to the shoulders. These monstrosities were not ‘worn’; they were simply hung over the bearer as a bucket might be hung over a bedpost. And the peering extinguished ignominious creatures beneath never for one moment realised the piteous absurdity of their appearance.

Yet it is perfectly easy to show the effect by putting the shoe on the other foot – that is, the hat on the other head. Imagine before you three personable young men in irreproachable new suits of clothes, A., B., and C. Put upon their several heads three fine silk hats, identical in shape and style, but varying in size: upon A., at the left, a hat the size of a muffin ring, somehow fastened to his hair; upon B., in the middle, an ordinary sized hat, fitting his head perfectly; upon C., at the right, a huge hat, a hat which drops down over his ears, extinguishes him, leaves him to peer, with lifted chin, to see out from under it in front, and which hangs low upon his shoulders behind. Can any woman question the absurdity of such extremes –  on men?

When some comic actor on the vaudeville stage wishes to look unusually absurd, he often appears in a hat far too large, a hat which, seen from the back, shows no hint of a neck, only that huge covering, heaped upon the shoulders. In precisely such guise have our women appeared for years on years, with every appearance of innocent contentment – even pride. They had no knowledge of the true proportions of the human body, the ‘points’ which constitute high-bred, beautiful man or woman. They did not know that a small head, one eighth the height of the person, was the Greek standard of beauty; that a too large head is ugly, as of a hydrocephalic child, or of some hunched cripple whose huge misshapen skull sits neckless, low upon his shoulders. They deliberately imitated the proportions of this cripple. Seen from behind a woman of this period was first a straight tubular skirt, holding both legs in a relentless grip, as of a single trouser; then a shapeless sack, belted not at the waist, but across the widest part of the hips (a custom singularly unfortunate for stout women, but accepted by them unresistingly); and then this vast irregular mass of hat, with its load of trimming, as wide or wider than the shoulders it rested on. In winter they would add to this ruthless travesty of the human form by a thick boa, stole, or tippet, crowded somehow between shoulders and hat, so that you could see nothing of the woman within save her poor heel-stilted feet, the strained outline of those hobbled legs, and part of the face if you ducked your head to look beneath the overhang, or if she lifted her oppressed eyes to yours.

At present the Dictators of our garments have changed their minds and we are now for the most part given hats of the most diminutive size, whose scant appearance is ‘accented’ by some bizarre projection, some attenuated crest of pointed quill, or twiddling antennae.

What accounts for this peculiar insanity in hats? Why should a woman’s hat be, if possible, even more absurd than her other garments? It is because the hat has almost no mechanical restrictions.

When a woman selects a hat; when she tries one on, or even looks at one in a window, she sees in that hat, not a head-covering, not her own spirit genuinely carried out through a legitimate medium, but a temporary expression of feeling, a mood, a pose, an attitude of allurement.

The woman’s hat is the most conspicuous and most quickly changed code-signal. By it she can say what her whole costume is meant to say; say it easier, oftener, more swiftly. Because of this effort at expression, quite clearly recognised by the men who design hats, they are made in a thousand evanescent shapes – to serve the purpose of a changeful fancy. Did he see her in this and think he knew her? He shall see her in that and find she is quite different. Man likes variety; he shall have it.

***

If a woman wants to judge her hat fairly, just put it on a man’s head. If the hat makes the man look like an idiot monkey she may be very sure it is not a nobly beautiful, or even a legitimate hat. If she says: ‘Oh, but it is so cute on me!’ let her ask herself: ‘Why do I wish to look cute? I am a grown woman, a human being. Mine is the Basic Sex, the First, the Always Necessary. I am the Mother of The World, Bearer and Builder of Life, the Founder of Human Industry as well. My brother does not wish to look ‘cute’ in his hat –  why should I?’

Women, supposedly so feminine, so arbitrarily, so compulsorily feminine, so exaggeratedly and excessively feminine, do not realise at all the true nature, power and dignity of the female sex. When they do, even in some partial degree, there will be nothing in the long period of their subservience upon which they will look back with more complete mortification than their hats.

Feminist writer and sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman originally published her polemic on hats, excerpted above, in 1915, as part of a series of essays in her magazine The Forerunner. It later became a chapter of her book, The Dress of Women.

IN THE LAST FEW years, the word ‘feminism’ has gained a new currency in the fashion industry. Several designers have claimed and embraced it as a sort of manifesto term for women’s empowerment and employed it in the launch of their collections, on runways or in their media campaigns. At Chanel in 2015, Karl Lagerfeld designed clutches printed with the phrase ‘Feministe mais Feminine.’ In her 2017 Spring-Summer collection, Maria Grazia Chiuri, creative director of Dior, used the slogan ‘We should all be feminists’ as the title of her collection.¹ Emblematically written on a white T-shirt, the phrase sounds like a manifesto, yet it arguably fails to dialogue with the long history of feminism, the women’s liberation movement, and their intersections with the history of fashion.

Rosa Genoni (1867–1954) was a seamstress and fashion creator, a feminist and peace activist. She lived in that period of enormous change that coincides with what is identified as historical feminism, the beginning of the twentieth century, a time when women did not have the right to vote and yet were still protagonists of history, social movements and fashion.²

Feminism was not a slogan for Genoni, but an integral part of the design process, built into the very fabric and draping of her garments. At a time when Paris dominated the fashion world, she imagined and advocated for the creation of an ‘Italian fashion.’ Her work and writings trace a path of significant narratives of fashion that are intimately connected to the process of nation- building. Genoni called for an ‘Italian fashion,’ not only as an abstract concept but as a tangible and organized industry, a project that was in the context of the first decade of the twentieth century ‘utopic.’ It would not be until the end of the Second World War and later in the 1970s and 1980s that we see the full implementation of Genoni’s dream: the global success and recognition of ‘Made in Italy.’

The story of Genoni’s life is one of multiple but parallel and intersecting tracks: her initial work in dressmaking led her to become a designer in her own right and a leading figure in the call for the development of a home-based and distinct Italian fashion industry. That led her to teaching in Milan’s Società Umanitaria (a philanthropic institute founded in 1893), which in turn exposed her to the plight of workers and women’s labour force and brought her into contact with the city’s women’s and socialist circles (where she also met her life partner and father of her daughter, the well known lawyer and socialist Alfredo Podreider). Contact with those circles, in turn, led to her forceful opposition to Italy’s entry into World War I and to the fascist regime that came to power a few years after the war ended. For Rosa, her work in fashion; her ideological commitment to the workers’ and women’s struggle; and her all out opposition to war and fascism were all overlapping and intersecting activities.

She achieved international recognition as a result of her opposition to World War I. Together with Aletta Jacobs from the Netherlands, and the US’s Jane Addams and Emily Balch, who would later be recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, Genoni took part in the First International Women’s Conference in The Hague of 1915 as the sole Italian delegate. She was also part of an informal diplomacy mission as one of the envoys of the Women’s Congress in 1915, visiting heads of governments of warring and neutral states, including the US President Woodrow Wilson, and proposing a range of measures to stop the bloodshed and build a durable international legal order.³)

The dynamism of her mind and life, her travel and work abroad, especially in Paris, and her ability to capitalise on these experiences, gave her the awareness and strength to elaborate her multidimensional feminist revolution. She advocated for women to be authors of their own image and style, and not to limit themselves to being passive followers of fashion. Fundamental to her project was the fact that she lived and worked in multiple places and inhabited multiple domains. These included the fashion atelier, and the places of her socialist political activism, her humanitarian and pacifist initiatives, where she encountered other women working in the international feminist movements, and with writers, journalists, and workers. However, her enthusiastic embrace of modernity and her dream of a more egalitarian and democratic society were politically annihilated by the outbreak of the First World War, which she forcefully opposed, and the triumph of fascism, which she also, equally forcefully, opposed.⁴

The Tanagra Dress that she designed in 1908 materialises Genoni’s ideas on beauty, women’s activism, and the force of intellectual commitment. She wore the dress when she attended and spoke at the first Italian National Congress of Women held in Rome at the end of April, 1908. She made the same dress to be worn by one of the most important Italian theatre actresses of the time, Lyda Borelli, a leading figure in the genre that would become known as the ‘diva film’ in the 1910s. The Tanagra dress is notable because it is one of the first examples of dynamic dress on account of its use of different fabrics, accessories and details, as can be seen in several photographs. In Genoni’s mind, the Tanagra dress was a statement of a strong female identity and personality.

If we compare the photograph of Genoni wearing the Tanagra dress at the National Congress of Women with those of the other women participants, as we can do by looking at the cover of the magazine Domenica del Corriere where the women are portrayed, we immediately see the deep contrast between Genoni’s notion of fashion and the dictates of the fashion of the time. The other women wear tight sartorial jackets on top of a corseted body; whereas the Tanagra highlights fluidity, movement and draping. It is easy to see why the Tanagra was Genoni’s manifesto for revolutionising women’s dress and its visual impact on public space. The dynamism of the dress bears intimate links with the history behind the Greek figurines that give the dress its name. Recent studies have examined the historical significance of the Tanagra sculptures with particular reference to the use and representation of clothing. The Tanagra figurines came from Tanagra in Greece, and were found towards the end of the nineteenth century.⁵ The Tanagra statues represented distinguished mortal women, not goddesses, portrayed in public spaces during social occasions and religious rituals. The women appear elegantly dressed and self-confident in their gestures and composure. As has been noted, these women knew how to wear clothes and how to control the images they projected as indicators of their social standing. The beauty of the draping, their performance of femininity in social space and their display of women’s agency as actors on the scene must have fascinated Rosa Genoni and inspired her design.

Genoni’s use of draping was quite different from other designers of the time; It is clear that Genoni was thinking of draping the female figure in order to free her movements in line with, but going much further than, similar fashion experiments of the time. The dress attempts to create a balance between the stitched and the draped. But it was in its transformative function and its versatility that the Tanagra dress is the fusion of modernist avant-garde and classical inspiration, but also of Eastern and Western draping. With her completely new dimension of draping and reconfiguration of posture, Genoni was also thinking of different versions of the same dress, using different fabrics and small decorative details, silk and lace sleeves, different colours and headpiece accessories. The Tanagra Dress is the embodiment of a style of an assertive personality who demands to be taken seriously in the world of fashion – Genoni, as the sarta artista and in the world of film, Borelli, the actor as an artist. A diva such as Borelli was to contribute decisively to legitimise cinema as art, while Genoni was to conduct a battle to legitimise fashion as an art, and Italian fashion in particular.

The Tanagra Dress represented Genoni’s signature look and the fusion of beauty and intellect, Eastern and Western sensibility, a harmonic combination of the tailored and the draped, of tradition and modernity. This style of dress must have been very dear to her not only as a designer but also as a woman who was a political activist. In a letter written by her companion Alfredo Podreider, dated May 3, 1915 (seven years after the first appearance of the dress), one finds the following line: ‘Would you like me to send you the Greco-Roman dress?’ (NYPL, Schwimmer- Lloyd Collection, Ms. Col 6398, Box 58). This letter was sent to Genoni while she was engaged with the other feminists in the International Congress for Peace at The Hague in 1915 and as an Italian delegate. Although the Tanagra dress in its intents and design, in Genoni’s mind, aimed at revolutionising the art of dressing in the beginning of the twentieth century, it has still today a strength that undermines the diktats of fashion. The revolutionary draping of the dress allows the wearer greater freedom of movement than did conventional women’s dress. And the fact that the dress can be worn and draped in multiple modes gives the wearer a great degree of autonomy and the creativity to design her own style. Rosa Genoni designed the Tanagra dress she wore when she delivered her speech at the International Women’s Congress in Rome in 1908. One passage from the speech reads thus:

In these days when women’s congresses and feminist demands are so fashionable, it might first appear to our female readers as frivolous and light that we concern ourselves with the demands of fashion. Already in some of these heads we hear a refrain trotted out: Finally! Women will have something else to occupy themselves with other than their usual dresses and little hats! A Huge mistake, also for the feminist ladies. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter of fact in order to conquer those fields that are still contested, a woman must not disregard the field in which she, by unanimous consent, has a complete and uncontested sovereignty. It is necessary, now more than ever, not to allow ourselves to be criticized and censored for the way in which we have until today exercised this sovereignity.⁶

Is it not an overly simplistic feminism that limits itself to writing slogans on white T-shirts or bags; is this not a PR form of activism that creates a veneer of militancy by way of fashionable words and discourses? And does such high fashion sloganeering do anything more than make clothing more attractive to those already ’empowered women’ who enjoy access to power and money? Does the word ‘feminism’ make female consumers feel better about themselves? And most importantly, how do the work and struggles of women today lineup against the struggles of feminists of yesteryear such as Rosa Genoni? She designed her Tanagra dress to translate her ideas of women’s empowerment and legitimation in society and as a step toward a utopian dream of a world without war and violence. In Rosa Genoni’s thought and action, in her fashion design and political activism, aesthetics and politics march together. This is the exact opposite of an aestheticizing politics of feminism. A historical glance backwards might help us to gain greater perspective on the way the fashion industry today makes such an easy use of words such as feminism that have a past that is often ignored or dismissed.

Eugenia Paulicelli is a Professor of Italian, Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies at Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Rosa Genoni: Fashion is Serious Business.

1. Chiuri, in fact, here borrows the title (and the principles she declared she embraces) of a well-known 2014 essay and Ted talk by the feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. ↩

2. This essay is based on my book, Rosa Genoni. Fashion is a serious business (bilingual edition), Milan: Deleyva editore, 2015 and new edition in 2017. See also my entry on ‘Rosa Genoni,’ http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/rosa-genoni_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/ ↩

3. Rosa Genoni was also in London, on May 14th, 1915, together with Jane Addams and Aletta Jacobs, to discuss with Sir Edward Grey, UK Minister of Foreign Affairs, the terms of a possible neutral mediation for ending of the war. To enter the floor of international relations, peace and security politics (almost one century later accepted as UN SC resolution 1325) can be seen as a break-through affirmation of women’s global identity. See: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/wps/1925? (last accessed September 4th, 2014 ↩

4. In the exhibit I curated, ‘The Fabric of Cultures: Systems in the Making’ I have curated (Art Center, Queens College, NY October 5 through December 15) we have presented a recreation by Christina Trupiano of Genoni’s Tanagra dress. See also the catalog, The Fabric of Cultures. Systems in the Making, Art Center, City University of New York: 2017. ↩

5. S L James and S Dillon, eds., A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, especially the chapter by S Dillon, ‘Hellenistic Tanagra Figurine,’ pp. 231–236, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; P A Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art, Kent State University Press, 2003; A Cooper Albright, Engaging Bodies: the Politics and Poetics of Corporeality, Wesleyan University Press, 2013 ↩

6. Rosa Genoni, ‘Arte e Storia del costume. Rivendicazioni femminili nella moda,’ in Vita d’Arte: Rivista mensile illustrate d’arte antica e moderna, Vol. 2, 1908, fasc. 11, pp. 202-207. ↩

LOOK AT GREEK VASE paintings in a book or at a museum, you can always spot an Amazon by the way she looks. Greek patriarchal women are very femme, they wear loose, flowing chitons and are very nice to the men who share their space on the vases. The Amazons wear bold, striking pants, tunics and weapons, and are busy killing the men.

It is incredible the way our heritage is denied us. I never studied about Amazons in school. My twelfth grade Ancient History textbook never even mentions them. In order to write about Amazon clothes I first have to bust my ass trying to find information about Amazons themselves, information which isn’t readily available, and what is available is mystified, obscured and held by men who don’t want to part with their precious knowledge. Information Imperialism! (There is one excellent book, Mothers and Amazons, by Helen Dinar.) We should have learned about our Amazon foremothers before we learned about George Washington. We are never taught about women. Every book that mentions Amazons (excluding Dinar) says they were a mythological race of women. The concise English Dictionary calls them “A fabulous race of women warriors, masculine women.” Men cannot stand the idea that women preferred to live without them.

The Amazons were a strong, powerful group (or groups) of women-identified women who lived according to their own determination, without men. They were forced to fight for survival against a growing patriarchy. Their existence has been documented as early as 1760 BC, when Queen Eurypyle captured the Amorite capital in Babylon. They lived in many different places, migrating frequently, conquering new lands. There were Amazons all around the Mediterranean area, in southern Russia, north of the Black Sea, in Asia Minor and in northern Africa. There were two major groups, the Libyan (Libya being the place we now refer to as Morocco) and the Thermodontines. The only pictures of Amazons are those on Greek Vases (and some sculptures), usually depicting the great war between the Athenians and the Thermodontine Amazons, whose territory extended from the Saramatian Planes to the Aegean Sea (which is roughly southern Russia, the Balkan countries, Greece and Asia Minor). This is the story of that war:

In the thirteenth century BC, a group of Greek men (Hercules and Theseus, according to one version) sailed to Themiscyra, the Thermodon capital on the southeastern coast of the Black Sea, to steal the belt of Hippolyte, the Queen. It was a gold and crystal sword belt, one of the Scythian insignia, inherited from their ancestors. It symbolised virginity, which meant unmarried rather than unfucked. It was more than the belt they were trying to steal. Patriarchy was trying to conquer and dominate Matriarchal authority. Stealing the belt was a symbol of this intended domination. If the Amazons surrendered their virginity, they surrendered their independence, as every Lesbian/feminist knows.

At any rate, the Greek men fell upon the undefended city and its Queen, while Oreithyia, the other Queen was away defending the borders with her army.

Amazons always had two Queens, one to administer and one to lead the armies. The men stole the belt, killed the remaining townswomen, and abducted Antiope, Hippolyte’s sister. When Oreithyia heard the news, she came rushing back, but the men had already left, so she led her army to invade Athens. They besieged the Acropolis, but were not victorious. Antiope (and maybe Hippolyte) fought alongside the Greek men, and the war ended with a compromise. Oreithyia died of grief and shame. Few of the remaining Amazons every reached home again. They were discouraged and almost totally defeated.

This war is the one that is usually portrayed on the Greek vases. Some others show the Amazons, led by Penthesilea, fighting the Greeks in the Trojan War. The earliest vase paintings were done in the seventh century BC, most were done in the fifth century BC, eight hundred years after the Thermodontine-Athenian War. But clothing styles didn’t change as rapidly as they do now, so there’s a good chance that the Amazon clothes depicted on the vases are accurate.

There is no one Amazon clothing style. The clothes change with place of origin, but there was much migration and communication between locations. The most striking clothes are those that come from Asia Minor, around modern Turkey, near the Amazon capital, Themiscyra. They wore an outfit that looked like a body suit covered by a tunic. The front and back pieces were oblong, sewn together on the shoulders and down the sides, with openings left for the arms. There was a single seam in the arms sewn on the undersides. These coats were usually made of leather, and sometimes wool. They wore tight fitting knit hose with bold geometric designs, checkerboards, stripes, circles, stars and zigzag.

Some sources say that the Amazons were tattooed on their arms and legs, but this is unlikely. The shirts and tunics had tight sleeves, close fitting at the wrists, and were also boldly patterned with geometric designs. They frequently wore long soft red leather boots. The toes of the boots were often curled up, indicating a northern origin. Shoes like this are usually worn in snowy, rocky climates.

They wore a variety of hats and helmets. One popular hat was from Phrygia (150 miles due east of Lesbos). This was a tall conical cap, knitted in one piece or made of felt. It had a broad flap which hung over the nape of the neck and two other flaps which came to the shoulders and could be tied.

In battle the Amazons carried crescent or double crescent shaped shields, emblems of the Moon Goddess, and they frequently wore the crescent emblem on their helmets. They carried bows and arrows, darts, javelins, nets and, of course, the Labyris, double-edged axe, symbol of the matriarchy. They wore armour made of red leather, and sometimes were greaves, armour for the shin area. Some pictures show them wearing no trousers, though I tend to doubt that any self-respecting Amazon would ride into battle without her pants. She would be too vulnerable.  Some pictures show them wearing earrings. Their hair is shown tied back, or is hidden by the helmets.

There are no pictures of Amazons alone with each other, having fun, making love, eating, sleeping, building houses, training horses, playing with the children, or doing anything else but fighting. After all, men were not allowed to hang out with the Amazons, so the only way they would have been able to see them was in combat. There are no remnants of Amazon art or artifacts (that I have found, anyway). Probably everything was destroyed.

Amazons were our great, great, great grandmothers. The patriarchy almost defeated them, but not quite. Here we are, the North American Amazons. The Amazons are dead. Long live the Amazons!

Bibliography

Mothers and Amazons – Helen Dinar (available in paperback) The best book about Amazons so far.

Amazons In Greek Art – Dietrich von Bothmer. Complete collections of Amazon pictures.

Les Guerilleres, Monique Wittig (paperback). Not specifically about Amazons but gives, I think, a sense of an Amazon Community.

Liza Cowan writes about about art, ephemera and collecting at her blog, SeeSaw, and makes art and design objects for Small Equals.