Quick Synopsis

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.

Publisher’s Synopsis

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?

Book Review

Confident Women is a look at the often overlooked con women of history. The women in this book span centuries and continents with two things in common: their confidence and their ostentatious acts.

Tori Tefler provides readers with vignettes of charming or conniving women up to no good, including those who claimed to be Anastasia, saw disasters as opportunities, and laid the foundations of the French Revolution. However, Tefler ignores the context for these women, the society that left some of these women with little agency, choice, or ability to provide for themselves. And at no point does Tefler contrast the stories of these women against the men of their time periods, who were often lauded for the same exact scams.

Tefler does not allow the seriousness of the women’s crimes to dictate the narrative’s tone. Instead, Confident Women does not take itself too serious, maintaining a light tone and highlighting the outlandish nature of its subjects. While I think the audio version failed to depict the book’s sarcastic nature, it was an easy, entertaining listen.

While this book made me think about what gives rise to con women, Confident Women lacks a strong thesis to tie the chapters together. I enjoyed learning about the women but feel like there was a grand missed opportunity to explore the psychology and sociology that created these women.

Overall, Confident Women was an interesting premise that could have been improved with better execution. Still, I recommend it, especially for those who are true crime lovers, fans of First Lie Wins, and tired of the news giving more airtime to conmen rather than con women.

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