This paper focuses on the lives of two of the most well-known female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Within this paper I analyze different documents that relate plausible histories of these two women’s’ lives and differentiate between the accuracy of sources. I question modes of discussing these women and utilize a variety of secondary sources to examine primary sources and their impacts. This paper critiques standard discussions and histories of these two women, instead offering a more humanizing and historically accurate way of seeing them that exists outside of popular culture’s romanticism and mythologization of them.
