Lena Birkthal grows up in a bourgeois family. Her mother is a judge; her father is a popular lawyer. By the age of twelve, her father starts the introduction of a weird ritual he carries out every day and in presence of the mother: He takes pictures from Lena when having clothes on and when she´s naked. She was explained that this was being done for the purpose of documenting her development.
At the age of 28, her parents lose their life in a car accident. The weird behavior of the parents´ friends while and after the funeral makes her pricking up her ears. Besides that, these friends try time and again to get into her house. Soon, she realizes that there must be a secret.
The first thing she does is to inspect the whole house. Apart from weapons, guns, and knives, she finds plenty of photo albums which had been hidden in the darkroom of her father. The pictures don´t only show her but also other girls and women in various poses.
She haves her house secured to prevent the parents´ friends from invading into it and begins to search for clues. Thereby she meets women who had also been photographed in the same manner by their parents.
Moreover, she meets a woman, who stands up for women´s rights and opens her eyes by showing her the real world. Grown up under protection and isolation, her mind simply boggles and only now, she gets an idea of the actual number of women and girls being victims of exploitation, slavery, and mutilation.
As the inherited fortune assures her a life without financial worries, she travels around the world, in order to find out the reasons why so many women allow men to abuse them and if there had ever been a time, when women were in power. During her journey she comes across oral traditions, whose contents are being worked out by her in this book.
Over thousands of years, there had been large areas under the rule of matriarchy, places where peace and prosperity were prevailing. Due to indifference and credulity, these islands of peace got lost one after another - despite of technical and cultural superiority.
By means of dramatic pictures, the author describes the battles for power, the women´s flight from the armies of men, the new beginning and the fall. The history starts with tales from time immemorial and ends in the present time while focusing on stories from great "queendoms" in Asia and Africa which had been ruled by women, the empire of the Amazons and on the first feminists of nowadays.
Exciting history being told from another perspective
