The missing ones

An exciting, profound and entertaining account of the history of humanity from a female perspective.

Winner of the 2022 Best Essay Book Award, by the Madrid Booksellers Guild

Joan of Arc, Malinche, Sofonisba Anguissola, Mary Wollstonecraft, Victoria Kent, Jane Austen, Marie Curie, Simone Weil or Rosa Parks were also there. With brilliance and elegance, Cristina Oñoro constructs a fascinating narrative that dismantles traditional accounts of humanity and overturns inherited misogynistic discourses.

Drawing on a wonderful network of connections between female experiences, Cristina Oñoro tells another history of the world, using an endless array of memorable details and curious anecdotes, as well as the latest advances in specialized research on her protagonists. Las que faltaban rigorously explores significant historical moments, from the darkness of prehistoric caves to the War in Afghanistan, but also delves into literature, art, philosophy, and science to illuminate, with notable doses of irony and erudition, the shadowed areas where women have been relegated. The result is a new, daring, and powerful epic that demystifies the heroic and violent construction of the past in favor of a profoundly relational worldview open to possibilities.

With the author as a guide, the reader will discover Joan of Arc's friends, laugh at the linguistic confusions between Malinche and Hernán Cortés during the Conquest, and marvel at the Curies' juggling act to achieve some family balance so that Marie could also stay late in the laboratory. Without falling into the temptation of presenting her protagonists as exceptions, Las que faltaban traces an authentic genealogy, and in its pages, we see many other women parading through, such as the midwives of the classical world, Cleopatra's daughter, the writer Christine de Pizan, the ladies of Isabelle de Valois's court, Mary Shelley and Cassandra Austen, the students of the Residencia de Señoritas in Madrid, activists Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, or Chicana writers like Gloria Anzaldúa. Virginia Woolf's incisive observations, as well as a wide selection of images, accompany the reading of the book, which also subtly explores the history of feminist thought.

Critics have said...
«An extraordinary gallery of inspired women, so many of them silenced. A brilliant way to turn the history of the world on its head.»
Enrique Vila-Matas

«Passionate, rigorous, entertaining, exciting, and illuminating. It's history, it's an essay, it's literature, all at once. It's a celebration.»
Lara Moreno

«This book recognizes, from its title, the silences that accompany us. Cristina Oñoro revisits our cultural history, made of myths, and she does so with acuity, memory, and imagination.»
María Folguera

«A jovial and luminous book that shows us why these women made us better.»
José Luis Pardo