A thoroughly entertaining and darkly humorous roundup of history's notorious but often
forgotten female con artists and their bold outrageous scams?by the acclaimed author of Lady
Killers.From Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Delvey to Frank Abagnale and Charles Ponzi audacious
scams and charismatic scammers continue to intrigue us as a culture. As Tori Telfer reveals in
Confident Women the art of the con has a long and venerable tradition and its female
practitioners are some of the best?or worst. In the 1700s in Paris Jeanne de Saint-Rémy
scammed the royal jewelers out of a necklace made from six hundred and forty-seven diamonds by
pretending she was best friends with Queen Marie Antoinette.In the mid-1800s sisters Kate and
Maggie Fox began pretending they could speak to spirits and accidentally started a religious
movement that was soon crawling with female con artists. A gal calling herself Loreta Janeta
Velasquez claimed to be a soldier and convinced people she worked for the Confederacy?or the
Union depending on who she was talking to. Meanwhile Cassie Chadwick was forging paperwork
and getting banks to loan her upwards of $40 000 by telling people she was Andrew Carnegie's
illegitimate daughter. In the 1900s a 40something woman named Margaret Lydia Burton embezzled
money all over the country and stole upwards of forty prized show dogs while a few decades
later a teenager named Roxie Ann Rice scammed the entire NFL. And since the death of the
Romanovs women claiming to be Anastasia have been selling their stories to magazines. What
about today? Spoiler alert: these ?artists? are still conning. Confident Women asks the
provocative question: Where does chutzpah intersect with a uniquely female pathology?and how
were these notorious women able to so spectacularly dupe and swindle their victims?
