Law examines the female soldiers of the West African kingdom of Dahomey, a corps drawn from the royal wives and known to Europe through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers, above all Frederick Forbes and Richard Burton. The name fastened on them was European; in Dahomean usage they were ahosi, women of the palace.

He begins by prising them apart from the classical myth. The Amazons of antiquity were imagined as a community that kept no men, which Law reads as an expression of male anxiety rather than a description of anywhere real. Dahomey's were a female corps inside a largely male army, which leaves it unclear whether they represent women's power or one more use made of women.

Working through the contested question of when the corps was founded, he then examines the idioms casting them as mothers, wives and daughters of the king, and the songs in which they claim war as their work and leave the farming to men.