A thoroughly entertaining and darklyhumorous roundup of history’s notorious but often forgotten female con artistsand their bold, outrageous scams—by the acclaimed author of Lady Killers.From Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Delvey to Frank Abagnale andCharles Ponzi, audacious scams and charismatic scammers continue to intrigue usas a culture. As Tori Telfer reveals in Confident Women, the art of thecon has a long and venerable tradition, and its female practitioners are someof the best—or worst.In the 1700s in Paris, Jeanne de Saint-Rémy scammed the royaljewelers out of a necklace made from six hundred and forty-seven diamonds bypretending she was best friends with Queen Marie Antoinette.In the mid-1800s, sisters Kate and Maggie Fox began pretending theycould speak to spirits and accidentally started a religious movement that wassoon crawling with female con artists. A gal calling herself Loreta JanetaVelasquez claimed to be a soldier and convinced people she worked for theConfederacy—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 Burtonembezzled money all over the country and stole upwards of forty prized showdogs, while a few decades later, a teenager named Roxie Ann Rice scammed the entireNFL. And since the death of the Romanovs, women claiming to be Anastasia have been sellingtheir stories to magazines. What about today? Spoiler alert: these “artists”are still conning. Confident Women asks the provocativequestion: Where does chutzpah intersect with a uniquely female pathology—andhow were these notorious women able to so spectacularly dupe and swindle theirvictims?
