Tori Telfer

"Why do we love stories about scammers so much? Journalist Tori Telfer dives into the stories of historical female con women and explains why we are so enamored by their scams"--

Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Female Persuasion

Confident Women

Caitlin Snyder

Listened to the audiobook - great narrator!

I really liked learning about con women (we all know the names of so many con men but very few con women). I particularly liked the section on spiritualists and the idea that the popularity of spiritualists gave women a chance to be entrepreneurs.

Telfer points out, at the beginning and end of the book, how we generally view con artists as entertaining criminals who aren't "that" bad but they do in fact cause the ruin (and sometimes deaths!) of many people. I liked that while telling the story of these women she didn't completely ignore their victims.

Christine Liu

Reading Confident Women by Tori Telfer is a strange and slightly unsettling experience. The back of the book describes it as "a collection of diabolically clever con women who have made (us) their mark", and some parts of the book are certainly that. It's organized into four sections: "The Glitterati", "The Seers", "The Fabulists", and "The Drifters", each containing a few chapters detailing the lives and exploits of female con artists throughout history. I started this book thinking, "wow, this is really fun," but ended it feeling, ironically, a little conned.

In the introduction, Telfer writes that "perhaps there's a darker reason we cheer on the con artist: secretly, we want to be her." I can see how this idea applies to the women in the Glitterati section - Jeanne de Saint-Remy who posed as Marie Antoinette's best friend and swindled royal jewelers out of 647 diamonds, Cassie Chadwick who pretended to be Andrew Carnegie's illegitimate daughter, and Wang Ti who befriended Chinese celebrities and Olympic athletes while scamming them out of millions of dollars. It may even apply to some extent to the infamous Fox sisters who made thousands believe they could commune with the dead or the women who claimed to be the Russian princess Anastasia. But there are women in this book who committed some truly heinous crimes. Fake psychic Rose Marks preyed on vulnerable people who spent their life savings hoping she could cure them of terminal illnesses rather than seeking necessary medical treatment and even took millions of dollars from author Jude Devereaux while she grieved multiple miscarriages and the loss of her eight year old son. Ann O'Delia Diss Debar lured young girls into a cult and stood by while her partner raped them. There's a whole chapter on "tragediennes" who used real tragedies to exploit sympathy and goodwill for their own monetary gain. And Sante Kimes murdered three people for their assets.

What was most jarring to me while reading this book was its tone. Telfer writes in an irreverent voice that makes use of dark humor that at times feels inappropriate given the sometimes extremely troubling content. There are many parts of the book where she casually hints at trauma in these women's pasts - poverty, loss of family members, mental illness, abuse - but glides right over to make other comments that are meant to be humorous. Telfer hosts a podcast about female criminals, and while I have never listened to the podcast, I can see how her storytelling style could fit an audio format where inflections and nuances can be conveyed through the voice. But on the written page, it reads as glib.

I also have some minor issues with Telfer's research. In the chapter on Lauretta J. Williams, or Loreta Janeta Velazquez, the information on Loreta herself comes almost exclusively from a single source, a biography written in 2016 by William C. Davis that is considered to be a revisionist history. It's the only source that calls her a con artist, and compared to the others in this book, she didn't really con anyone except for changing her name, pretending to be a man, and writing a possibly untruthful book.

Confident Women Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Female Persuasion

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