There have probably been more real-life woman warriors than we know. Until recently, archaeologists would determine the gender of a grave’s occupant based on the artifacts buried within; jewelry meant a woman, weapons meant a man. When skeletons are actually sexed (an imprecise process, often, but better than guesswork based on accessories), there turns out to be a small but existent number of women interred with weaponry.
Even then, some archaeologists—I’m willing to bet male archaeologists—are quick to caution that just because a woman was buried with weapons doesn’t mean she wielded them. Arms and armor in a man’s grave are martial, but in a woman’s grave, they’re symbolic. When the body of an Etruscan prince was unearthed in Italy in 2013, he was initially assumed to be a great warrior because his skeleton held a lance. The incinerated corpse on a smaller platform was thought to be his wife. Once it was determined that the prince was actually a princess, though, the lance magically became a metaphor for marriage according to a (male) researcher: “The lance, in all probability, was put there as a symbol of the union between the deceased.”
The lance could have been a symbol of power. It could even have been a symbol of war, the way it would be in the hand of a real-life Furiosa: an Amazon, for instance, or Boudica, the British queen who led a revolt against occupying Roman forces in around 60 A.D. But no, that’s not what women do; that’s not what women have. An unidentified skeleton with a weapon is a man; an unidentified woman with a weapon does not really have a weapon but rather, a very long, sharp wedding ring.
As I understand it, scientists can look at a skeleton and see what repetitive work (probably work that requires some muscular effort) a person did, which would be a way of finding out whether the women (or the men for that matter– maybe some of *their* weapons were symbolic) trained to fight.
An Amazon, seriously? She writes something to be taken seriously, and she places the historical Boudica in the same sentence as ‘ an Amazon’?! Are Amazons considered real in the US? She could not have gone for an example from the many nomad people whose armed women have kicked ‘civilized’ butt hard enough to have it recorded? The Sarmathians, the Scythians, the Bulgars, the Cumans…
Yes, there have been many, many powerful women who have led warriors. Yes, they have been female warrior societies. Yes, many cultures armed and trained their women, mostly as a last line of defense, because only idiots would throw their irreplaceable child bearers in combat unless it was a matter of survival.
And still, I would argue that a weapon buried with a woman is more likely to be a symbol of power than of martial prowess. Lets not forget that Boudica was not cutting down legionnaires from her chariot, after all… and that did not make her any less of a military leader who managed to inspire thousands to fight against the occupier. People like her, Jeanne d’Arc, 婦好, Bouboulina, etc… led men in battle, and were recognized for it. There are actual female warriors, who have made their mark on history, although they are quite rare. Successful female military leaders are much more common, and I would think that it is still more likely that a woman buried with full military honors is a leader, rather than a grunt.
The aside here bothers me a little. I don’t think the problem is the point that sometimes women buried with weapons didn’t wield them in life; I think the problem is in assuming that the men always did. One of those cases where there’s a conflict between an assumption and the prejudice it interacts, and then people start doing the right thing suddenly. Now the goal is to get them to do the right thing when the assumption is in line with the prejudice, not to get them to make the wrong assumption for a different group of people.
Pesho:
Most skeletons found buried with weapons are neither warriors who have made their mark on history nor grand leaders, and I think that’s what the first part of the article corresponds to, before the specific example of the Etruscan princess given. And I don’t think we know the rarity or lack thereof for ancient cultures, because of assumptions like buried with weapons = male. (I expect that they were mostly male, as fighters have been in times when we have more definite records; but exactly how frequent the exceptions were is somewhat harder to define.)
And I don’t think we know the rarity or lack thereof for ancient cultures, because of assumptions like buried with weapons = male. (I expect that they were mostly male, as fighters have been in times when we have more definite records; but exactly how frequent the exceptions were is somewhat harder to define.)
But we do. Leaving legends like the Amazons aside, we have records of many cultures in which a specific group of women was armed and trained. Never anywhere as many as males, let alone all, but enough to make it an organized practice, as opposed to a very uncommon exception.
In most cases, these are nomadic cultures where the availability of horses, and the prevalence of hunting made it pretty easy to allow a woman to participate in warfare in a way that would not require her to match men in sheer physical strength. Another situation in which women were trained in combat, and for which we have records, are periods of either exile or civil unrest, where the household was likely to come under attack.
Now, those are the cultures for which we have records. Why would anyone expect that things were any different for the cultures for which we have no records? Males are physically stronger, and nowhere as precious for perpetuating the bloodline/society/culture. It makes no sense to risk women in combat unless the risk and expense is relatively small (Sarmathian horse archers) or the future of the clan is at stake (Japanese onna-bugeisha) So any female warriors who fight not as a necessity but a choice would be very rare. They would have to be extraordinarily skilled with their weapons, and able to face much stronger men.
On the other hand, history records female military leaders in any period of history. Usually, widows of men of power who through brains, guts and charisma managed to retain control over their husbands’ forces, and had the chance to display their military genius. But of course, there are also daughters and wives of the powerful, as well as women who rose on sheer will and presence, like Jeanne D’Arc. I could probably list 30 off the top of my head, and describe a hundred well enough to get their name with a single google search.
Most skeletons found buried with weapons are neither warriors who have made their mark on history nor grand leaders,
I do not understand why you are saying this. Who else would they be? Through most of history, power came through the ability to apply violence, either with your own hands, or the hands of those who follow you. The only people who rated a lavish burial were either the powerful, or their relatives who failed to become powerful in their own right only because they did not live long enough.
Just for the record, are we now at the point where saying women are historically less violent as men is considered a criticism of women?
Just for the record, no. Why do you ask?
Yes, Pesho, “Amazon” is a colloquial stand-in for “female warriors of [certain historical but ancient cultures in the Eurasian region]”. Zimmerman could have written in a more scholarly manner. So, let’s just substitute in one of the groups you suggest, and see what happens:
Why, it doesn’t change her point at all! So, that’s all right, and enough to be going on with.
Thank you for acknowledging that there have been many female warriors through history. That saves us some slogging on already well-slogged ground.
I agree with you that high-status individuals are the ones most likely to be lavishly buried, or to have graves which we can now locate. I agree that it’s physically easier to lead than to actually swing a weapon, and so statistical chance, holding all else equal (which of course it isn’t), favors a higher percentage of women in command positions than in line positions.
Also, note that there is a sampling bias in the historical accounts, of course, considering that no historian ever bothers to talk about that commoner soldier who was incredibly skillful with a pike, or that low-status archer who was an expert skirmisher, whether male, female, or in some other cultural category. Ancient historians were all about the starring roles. (I’m eliding here, a bit, but I hope we can all agree that, in general, history focuses on the people of high rank rather than the individual people who march in the middle of the cohort.)
Okay. And you could develop your argument on evidence, no doubt, and we could then have a scientific debate about the evidence if we disagreed. But that would be missing the point of Zimmerman’s essay, from which that is a lovely bit of pointed snark.
She’s talking about representation. She’s talking about not being able to see herself in fiction, growing up, because women in fiction weren’t written into certain roles, because people very commonly assume that women can’t do certain things, and that those things are things which not only can many women do, but historically, many women have done.
Her essay is part of the same conversation as Kameron Hurley’s We Have Always Fought.
These beliefs inform how we understand what we see. They inform how people interpret evidence. This Etruscan corpse is one example, but there are others.
But of course the Etruscan corpse is a starker example: when the corpse was understood to be male, the lance was simply the tool of his trade. But once the same corpse was realized to be female, the lance became not just not a tool of her trade, but a symbol of her relationship to a man. It is exactly what Hurley was writing about:
So, the point is that many, many people don’t readily acknowledge what you did at the outset: that women fight, and fought. That’s a thing we have to fight (heh) to prove. Because of the assumptions people bring to the narrative.
Note that you are conflating “full military honors” with “buried with a weapon”. Whatever “full military honors” might have meant in an Etruscan cultural context, it’s entirely probable that “buried with a lance” was not the long and the short of it. This is a good example of the sort of conceptual mission creep which happens to all of us, because we all bring our categories and pre-conceptions to everything we do.
When the conquistadores arrived in the Americas, they saw what they understood to be same-gender relationships which in many cases were probably thought of by the people in question as opposite-gender, or other-gender relationships. They condemned what they saw. Balboa famously had some apparently gay natives literally fed to his dogs for the crime of sodomy, which had never existed before in that culture and which he imported into the region himself by force of arms. Cabeza de Vaca described “effeminate men” who dressed as women and who married “other men” — almost certainly people modern Westerners might now think of as trans — though that’s still bound to be wrong, as it’s still applying a cultural category from one culture to another. Later, some Europeans described the existence of such people in various indigenous cultures, referring to them as “berdaches”, which I’m told meant roughly “catamites”, which was certainly not their cultural role or representative of the cultural understanding of them.
And, of course, in the modern day there’s the reflex equation of “gay man” with “pedophile” — even though it’s not acceptable to say it in public anymore, and the reflex equation of “trans woman” with “sexual predator”, which is perfectly acceptable still, at many dinner parties, and routinely used to prevent trans women from having access to public accommodations and healthcare.
Sorry for going on a bit. This is a bit of a fascination of mine, this viewing everything through the imperfect lens of our own understanding.
Grace
[edited for grammar]
Well, I guess it’s a matter of perspective. Ethnically, I am a Tatar with roots in Volga Bulgaria, and I grew up in Bulgaria (two different countries on two different continents, both founded by hordes of the same horse nomad tribe) The idea that women did not fight would have been considered quaint to begin with. The word “Amazon”, on the other hand, refers to mythical matriarchal warriors, and is used exclusively jokingly. If you want to point out that a woman is warlike, you liken her to one of the more famous female warriors, mostly from World War II: a Russian sniper or Night Witch, or a Bulgarian partisazanka (resistance fighter) and yes, we have well-established female nouns for these.
But something else that you wrote makes me think even more about language drift. You think that ‘berdache’ is equivalent to catamite. In Bulgaria, the same word is exclusively used to describe the children enslaved by the Ottomans as part of the blood tax on Christians – Janissaries are a subset of ‘berdatzi’. It’s funny how two words that evolved from the same Arabic word came to mean something completely different.
Thanks, Grace. Yes, this is the point I was trying to make.
Pesho: In many American dialects of English, “Amazon” is just a word that means “female warrior” or even just “large, strong woman.” I agree that it’s unfortunate that it draws on the fictionalized version of ancient female warriors, rather than the real history, but language does what it does, and here we are.
yrs–
–Ben
Pesho:
That is close to the sense in which some Western English speakers use “Amazon”, which, as Ben notes, can also mean a physically large and capable woman. Since I transitioned and started presenting as myself, more than one person has referred to me as an “Amazon”, intending it as a compliment, and as far as we can tell my ancestors do not include any nomadic tribes, except in the sense that everyone’s ancestors include nomadic tribes. (Thanks partly to my endocrinological history, I am much taller that the average woman, and broader across the shoulders, and, of course, my profession sometimes involves conflict using weapons.)
But part of this has to do with physique, not just warlike capability. For a woman of average size, even one who is skillful at violence and tough as nails, I probably would not think to describe her as an “Amazon”. In this sense, it’s a description of seeming rather than actuality. Style over substance.
I’m working from memory, here, from college many years ago, but as I recall it, it came into English from French, as a term for two-spirit and third- or fourth-gender Native Americans, because French fur traders making first European contact saw them and understood them through their own cultural lens, and applied the French term for their concept of a younger, feminine, more passive role in gay sex (and let’s not even start to unpack all the problems with that). The French got it ultimately from Persian, I think.
Y’know, this is what the Internet is for. So I found this, which matches what I recall being taught:
(Note also that for many Native Americans it’s an offensive term, as one might imagine, and has been replaced with “two-spirit”, a word in English proposed and adopted by Native Americans themselves. Best to use the term used in the language of the specific people under discussion, but if you need a generic, use “two-spirit” rather than “berdache”.)
That’s part of what makes linguistics such fun! Words slip and slide and morph, changing meaning and even reversing meaning. My favorite is “tawdry”, originally from “tawdry lace”, a contraction of “St. Audrey’s Lace”, which was a fine silk or ribbon. But being lace, they were easily bedraggled, whereupon they looked cheap and worn. Such laces came to be sold as cheap fripperies at fairs, and after that “tawdry” came to mean “cheap and worn”. And that’s all within a couple of centuries, inside one language.
The Bulgarian meaning of “berdache” seems closer to the Arabic meaning of “bardaj”. In French it appears to have drifted farther, which happens. The fact that in French it came to mean, at best, the less powerful member of a gay male relationship — that’s a sinister indicator of the sexual use to which child slaves could be, and were, put. That meaning certainly does not reflect the documented lived reality and cultural place of the individuals the French applied it to in the context of the European invasion of the Americas.
Grace
Harlequin:
I don’t think the problem is the point that sometimes women buried with weapons didn’t wield them in life; I think the problem is in assuming that the men always did. One of those cases where there’s a conflict between an assumption and the prejudice it interacts, and then people start doing the right thing suddenly. Now the goal is to get them to do the right thing when the assumption is in line with the prejudice, not to get them to make the wrong assumption for a different group of people.
That was my exact thought.
A little tangential to the OP: about 10 years ago, I read a book about the Dahomey female professional soldiers, a relatively-late-in-history-but-pre-20th-century example of female fighters.
“Just for the record, no. Why do you ask?”
Because we seem to be very satisfied by archaeological/historical proof of high levels of female violence, while I would think it would be saddening.
From one angle, we could say that toxic masculinity has infected feminism. (See a book called Blackout by a woman who became an alcohol partly because she thought hard drinking and casual sex were important parts of being a strong person.)
From another angle, we could say that being successfully violent is a necessary part of being human. Unfortunately we don’t have much archaeological evidence of the best diplomacy. Or possibly we aren’t looking for it?
From my perspective, the excitement here is about two things:
1. Just being right. We’ve been making assumptions for a while that were untrue; now we’re getting better at finding the truth. That’s good in general.
2. One of the things that sexism does is proscribe certain elements of the human experience from one gender or another. I don’t think it’s good women are violent sometimes, just as I don’t think it’s good that men are; but knowing that humans are sometimes violent, I think it’s valuable to point out that women are included in that “humans”.
Again, on the subject of truth: I’m in favor of anything that gets the popular perception closer to the fact that there are often differences in the average behaviors of men and women, but that in-group variation is larger than out-group average differences. Even if it makes women seem worse (eg violent) instead of better (eg math ability).
Tamme – Finding proof that historically, women have been involved in violence and violence culture is heartening to me, not because I approve of violence – I definitely don’t, but rather because it serves as evidence to the view that violence culture is a detachable part of being human. If women have similar capacities to violence as men do, but are more succesfully discouraged from violent action by our society, that means there are ways to discourage violence. It allows us to ask the question “Why are men more violent *now*?” in a way that will give answers other than “Because biology”, and hopefully, those answers will allow us to understand violence better and once we understand it, figure out how to reduce it universally in our society. And even if it’s not possible to reduce or eliminate violence completely, it should be possible to stop using it as a tool by one sex to oppress the other. I’d rather live in a society where no one is violent, but if I can’t have that, I’d rather [not] live in a society where I’m encouraged to be violent and my female loved ones are encouraged to be afraid.
[Inserted a word that I’m pretty sure Eytan intended to be in there, unless I’m utterly failing to get his meaning. –Amp]
@Tamme:
At first I wasn’t going to chime in because I felt like Nancy, Harlequin, and Eytan had it covered. And I think they make important points. But if I’m honest, that’s not ALL of it for me. There’s a reason why I, like Jess Zimmerman, enjoyed Song of the Lioness, a reason why I played D&D with a female paladin character, a reason why Red Sonja is the only traditional-American-serial-comic-book I’m following… I don’t know exactly why these stories capture my imagination, and probably it’s partly due to the cultural elevation of masculine-coded pursuits over feminine-coded ones, and probably it’s partly the same reason that any nerdy kid, boy or girl, might like stories about Warriors From Ancient Times… Anyway, I don’t see “historically less violent” as a criticism of women, but my reaction on finding out about Warriors From Ancient Times who are women is still, “Cool!”
Amp – thanks for your correction, you were entirely right in my intended meaning.