A well-written and informative article, here: http://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2013/05/we-have-always-fought-challenging-the-women-cattle-and-slaves-narrative-by-kameron-hurley/
A nice piece of historical revisionism, which is frequently vague, and doesn't include any concrete dates or numbers. This is by design, of course. It's harder to contradict an article when it jumps around from place to place, and is filled with highly general statements. Yes, there have been a few woman that saw military combat. Not many. It's not part of some evil conspiracy to suppress information, either. Anyways, if you want to write a story about an unbeatable female military company, all while considering it the shining truth based on a silly Internet article, go right ahead. You would hardly be alone nowadays. By the way, I got a good laugh that all the pictures the articles used were from fantasy/video game drawings. Way to illustrate your point!
Have no doubt that women have always fought, particularly in the various resistance movments. I thought that was pretty well established. But as to this article - I had a hard time getting past the llamas...
It's pretty well established, as least with respect to certain cultures (we have Roman accounts, I believe in Gaul and what became Britain). There's also an interesting book about Genghis Khan's daughters.... I like the llamas.
it all started with the amazons, of course [the greek ones, not wonder woman's clan]... and then there was boudica and her ilk... but women warriors have always been the 'exception' and not even close to 'the rule'...
I think there's also the question of literal fighting versus being part of the 'fight' - smuggling weapons to the resistance fighters versus firing those weapons, and how many women did one or the other or both. But then it starts getting down to whether the discussion is about 'warriors' versus 'dangerous positions' and all that rigamarole.
Not only are all the pictures fantasy, but they are done by men. This means that, far from being something unimaginable, the idea of women fighters have permeated our social consciousness. This article is interesting, but misses the real impacts of what it is talking about. For example, you've no doubt heard of female genital mutiliation, right? Nasty stuff. But, there's also male genital mutiliation and I don't just mean circumscision. I mean that some societies will take a young teen and, in order for that teen to fit into society, they must take a sharp object and slit the penis down it's length so that it can be opened like a hot dog bun. No body talks about that because our social consciousness has not yet absorbed the idea of males as victims of these sorts of things. So, the next time you start hearing all this "goddess and the alphabet' sort of nonsense and see "empowered feminists" marching on about how the "patriarchy" ensures that all the power goes to males, give them the middle finger and tell them to go shove it. In the real world, it just doesn't work the way the feminists claim.
Might want to bear in mind that not all feminists are nasty people - in fact, there are quite a few of us here and we all have varying degrees of vehemence and opinions. Stereotypes typically don't stand up to scrutiny, in other words.
I didn't mean to imply that all feminists are nasty people - just those who go marching on about how the "patriarchy" ensures that power goes to males. So, sorry if I gave the wrong impresssion.
On a more tangible historical note than anything in the article, did the Amazons actually exist? I have read a good deal about them from myths (including their unique methods for having sex!), but that was always in the context of gods, centaurs, fauns, and other fantastic creatures.
