Women Warriors In World History

This article explores how women fighters tell their stories in relation to the dominant state narratives about a partisan war. In addition to engaging their individual stories, it explores how they speak, write and act as memory entrepreneurs, creating collective memory about a past that they have experienced instead of allowing others to select actors and events for historical narratives. It argues that memory regimes and gender cultures are intertwined, and that gender cultures are essential in understanding the cultural choices made by memory entrepreneurs in memory making. The article analyses the oral testimonies and written memoirs of two women, Rakhel’ Margolis and Aldona Vilutienė (neé Sabaitytė), who were partisans in Lithuania during the Second World War (Margolis) and its aftermath (Sabaitytė) and created the first museums dealing with the Second World War and its legacy in post-Soviet Lithuania. Read as stories about what it was like to be a woman during a partisan war, the narratives include some common themes: widespread betrayal, the difficult physical conditions that they had to endure as women and the vulnerability that came with these experiences. Read as stories told by memory entrepreneurs, the narratives reveal that the two women acted as mnemonic warriors fighting for competing memory regimes built on opposing gender ideologies.

This is an original translation of the coming-of-age section of the Sirat al-Amira Dhat al-Himma / Epic of the Commander Dhat al-Himma. It includes a scholarly introduction, English translation, and facing Arabic text. It is ideal for undergraduate classrooms, but will also be of interest to academics and general audiences who read sources relating to medieval history, oral literature, pre-modern Arabic literature, and women warriors.

Vojna istorija antike po pravilu se bavi herojskim podvizima ratnika, presudnim bitkama i umećem legendarnih vojskovođa. Ženama u njoj gotovo da neme mesta, osim kada se tek usput pominju kao neizbežne žrtve. Nametnuta podela na ratište kao isključivo muški i kućište kao ženski zabran u antici ipak nije bila tako isključiva. Rat je menjao sva ustaljena pravila, pa je ova podela bledela i nestajala povlačeći se pred nužnom potrebom da se zaštiti i odbrani grad ili država. Kada je pošast rata došla do kućnog praga, žene antike su znale i umele da odbrane sebe i svoje najbliže. Mnogima od njih usud je podario da učine herojska dela jednaka onima koja se pripisuju legendarnim herojima antike, ali je Suđajama za njih ostalo tek malo pređe da od nje načine kratku, ali bleštavu nit koja i danas sija kroz vekove.
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As a rule, the military history of antiquity deals with the heroic deeds of male warriors, decisive battles and the mastery of legendary military leaders. There is almost no place for women in it, except when they are mentioned as inevitable victims. However, the imposed division into a battleground as exclusively male, and a home ground as a female space, in antiquity was not as exclusive. The war changed all the established rules, so this division faded and disappeared, retreating before the necessity of protecting and defending of the city or state. When the plague of war reached the doorstep, the women of antiquity were able and new how to defend themselves and their loved ones. Many of them were destined to do heroic deeds equal to those attributed to the legendary heroes of antiquity, but the Moirae had little yarn left to make a short, but shiny thread for them that still shines through the centuries.

Some information has been found in the ancient sources concerning some noble women called Rhodogune from the Persian royal family. The most important ones among these sources are Aiskhines, Appianos, Dion Khrysostomos, Hieronymus, Iustinus, Philostratos, Plutarkhos, Suda and Valerius Maximus. This article aims to compare the information on Rhodogune mostly given by Anonymus Mulieribus and Polyainos with that of other authors and thus to interpret the place of this warrior queen within the historical context. In this regard, a new perspective will be suggested by analyzing the very limited information on Rhodogune. At this point one should question whether a trauma that the Persians had suffered before could have affected and shaped the history of Rhodogune or not. On the other hand the question about who Rhodogune is remains unanswered for now. Because there is no guiding information about the time she lived, her place and position in the Persian palace, her personal relationships, family life, relatives, about other events that she was involved in, or about any other talents or activities of her. Yet Rhodogune is seen as a rather strong woman with self-confidence about her gender in the patriarchal Persian society. Rhodogune is in complete contradiction to Atossa, another Persian queen, because of this profile.

I first observed the confident, sad, yet hopeful face of Nabat Fayiaq Rahman through the black screen of the TV. She was wearing a traditional, completely black Kurdish outfit that matched the stage curtains designed for the anniversary of the Anfal genocide, marked on April 14th of each year. The Kurdish Anfal genocide in Iraq was perpetrated by Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s. Human Rights Watch (1994) estimates that as many as 182,000 Kurds were buried alive in mass graves; many of these mass graves were found after Hussein was overthrown. More than 2.5 million people were displaced, 4500 villages destroyed, and 250 towns and villages exposed to chemical weapons.

In Greek myth, Amazons were fierce women of exotic lands who gloried in hunting and war. The greatest Greek heroes, Heracles and Achilles, proved their valor by killing Amazon queens. But were Amazons mere fantasy? Thanks to archaeology, we now know they were modeled on real steppe nomads of Eurasia. The Greeks were not the only ones to describe warlike females. Amazons appear in other ancient cultures, but with a twist. Non-Greeks desired the warrior women as allies and companions. This paper describes the archaeology of warrior women and recounts Amazon tales of the Caucasian steppes, Greece, Persia, Egypt, the Caucasus, and Central Asia featuring Penthesilea, Tirgatao, Tomyris, Sparethra, Amage, Zarina, Valdusa, Blue Lotus, Saikal, and Gulaim.

Se oggi in Italia si dibatte sul tema del rapporto tra donne e politica, è perché la presenza femminile all'interno dei luoghi della politica, dai partiti alle istituzioni locali e nazionali, è così platealmente scarsa da non poter essere non percepita come un problema. In Italia ...

En este ensayo compongo un contra-archivo que ofrece una visión alternativa para entender la visibilidad de las mujeres en las fotografías de la Revolución Mexicana (1910). Asimismo, cuestiono los paradigmas de masculinidad y feminidad a través del concepto de masculinidad femenina de Jack Halberstam. Este contra-archivo congrega imágenes de mujeres en su papel como soldadera o revolucionaria durante la fase armada de la Revolución Mexicana, cuyas poses y ornamentos denotan un grado visible de premeditación. Para analizar estas fotografías sigo lo que Gayatri Gopinath ha establecido como una practica curatorial queer. Esta técnica invita a curar y reordenar imágenes que han sido devaluadas o desechadas en otros archivos, para así dar cuenta de su potencial para contar nuevas historias. Finalmente, propongo analizar la fotografía como la creación de un evento transtemporal, consciente de sí mismo, cuyo significado recae en la relación entre los sujetos que son fotografiados, el fotógrafo y los espectadores. Para establecer este entendimiento, elaboro un diálogo entre la práctica de Gopinath y la invitación que Ariella Azoulay hace sobre ver las fotografías como un contrato civil.

"Una constante, cuando nos referimos a la mitología griega, consiste en que, a menudo, parece que traspasa la realidad, de manera que ambos mundos, el real y el imaginado, se mezclan. En lo que respecta a las amazonas, existían diversos mitos y, dentro de ellos, diversas versiones de cada mito que a lo largo del tiempo fueron generando, en el imaginario colectivo, una visión estereotipada de ellas y de los acontecimientos que las rodearon. En lo que respecta al ámbito económico, el comercio griego no solo abarcó todo el Mediterráneo sino que a través de él los griegos se pusieron en contacto con culturas tan alejadas de su órbita como los iberos o los escitas.

En este sentido, y a tenor de los recientes descubrimientos de numerosas tumbas de mujeres guerreras entre los escitas, sármatas, saurómatas, etc. que habitaron en las estepas rusas situadas al norte del Mar Negro, pretendo establecer una relación entre estas y la gran cantidad de piezas cerámicas que con representaciones de amazonas se han localizado en las colonias griegas situadas en las estribaciones de la costa norte del Mar Negro. Sobre ellas, hay que destacar que esta zona se ha conformado como la tercera región (tras Etruria y la propia ciudad de Atenas) en que se han localizado un mayor número de estas piezas (tras un análisis que he realizado sobre cerca de 1700 piezas cerámicas en todo el Mediterráneo). De forma que podría ser posible intentar trazar algún tipo de relación entre los motivos que estas piezas presentaban y la cercanía de dichos asentamientos a culturas como las mencionadas donde la capacidad bélica de la mujer parece haber sido importante y que quizá podría tener conexión con los tradicionales mitos sobre las amazonas.
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The idea that women would choose to go to war is one that has perplexed men for centuries. Whilst the historical examples are extensive, the idea is still spoken as if it is an abstract and anomalous occurrence within different time periods.
Even within the modern ideal of gender equality, we still fall foul of discussing women in war as a strange and abnormal concept that counters ‘natural’ order: women are designed to nurture, ergo they must not want to fight. Yet the list of examples of this ‘natural order’ going unheeded is so vast that it does not even allow for a singular, overarching narrative to tie them all together. They are spread so far geographically, socially and technologically, that trying to link, for example, the nomadic women of ancient Sarmatia, to the crack force of medieval Islamic female archers seen in 11th c. Spain, is unthinkable outside of the realms of gender.
We could ask questions like why or how these groups were allowed to fight – but this does little more than reinforce our own preconceptions of gender roles, and point to these examples as anomalies of that norm. No, it is sometimes best to just let the stories and the people speak for themselves.