With the increase in women terrorists in places as far afield as Iraq, Palestine, and Somalia, a flurry of books have recently been published attempting to explain women's motivations. Most of these monographs, books, and articles either lack any theoretical content or are replete with factual and historical errors. From Freedom Fighters to Terrorists is a welcome respite from the general mediocrity of books on women and terror.

Paige Whaley Eager provides an excellent accounting of various types of violent movements in which women are active in both support roles and as front line activists. She clusters terrorist groups by type: right-wing movements, left-wing guerilla groups, ethno-national political violence groups, and those groups that employ suicide terrorism. In doing so, she compares and contrasts very different movements, such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, which share certain ideological characteristics as ethno-nationalist movements. This comparative analysis methodologically employs a most dissimilar case analysis, but by doing so, Whaler Eager is able to extract extremely useful comparisons in which she holds culture, religion, and region constant while simultaneously providing excellent contexts for each of the cases and of the specific women involved. Throughout the chapters, she examines the macro, micro, and meso levels of analysis reminiscent of the work done in political sociology and by social movement theorists, and shows how these levels of analysis are interconnected.

Whaley Eager makes a serious contribution to the study of gender by analyzing the use of women in terrorist movements through the lens of very diverse strains of gender studies and feminist theory. Disaggregating the feminist theories allows her to focus on what different scholars have to say about women and terrorism and to what extent this matches the reality of women's involvement. Adept at destroying some of the myths about why women are involved, the author rightly points out that “societies, regardless of culture and/or religious influences, seem especially uncomfortable with women who are violent” (p. 3). This can be explained not only as a result of patriarchal societies that disapprove of women's leaving the home, but also because “women, especially as mothers, are viewed in all societies as the embodiment of the nation due to their biological role in reproducing future generations” (p. 168). However, given this societal discomfort and the fact that women serve the cause by reproducing the next generation, the book cannot explain the seeming contradiction of the increasing numbers of women as front-line activists, such as suicide bombers. While Whaley Eager does not resolve this seeming contradiction, she nevertheless does an excellent job of presenting the very context-specific factors that lead women in various societies to choose violence—emphasizing their agency in doing so and providing details about the bombers themselves.

The author is correct in concluding that no one explanation can sufficiently explain such a diverse group of women under such different circumstances, but the deficiency lies with the available evidence. Ultimately, we really do not know what motivates women. In the absence of solid ethnographic field research, using structured or semistructured interviews, it is nigh impossible to know what the motivations for women really are, rather than how they are portrayed. Whaley Eager successfully provides important contexts for violence, but she cannot reconcile the issue of women's agency with the structural conditions or root causes she highlights.

The issues aside, the book makes an extremely important contribution to both the fields of women's studies and terrorism studies in its systematic analysis, its application of theory, and the excellent details in the case studies. The book is highly recommended for students and experts and is a serious corrective to several melodramatic and less rigorous analyses of women and terrorism. The major drawback is the price; the book is only in hardcover and costs almost $90.00. This places it outside the reach of those professors who would adopt it for the classroom.