All the Single Ladies

Question: How many cultures allowed women to become warriors? We hear about them in popular culture, but how true is it considering that the gods have such fierce female warriors like Sekhmet, Ishtar, the Morrigan, Athena, and Kali?

It's time for History Corner again! Women warriors are indeed a real phenomenon in various cultures throughout history, but they are generally the exception; it's much more common that the vast bulk of warriors were male, with a few female exceptions such as the Spartan women who fought at Troy or the pre-Islamic Persian women who marched into battle along with their men. It's more likely that you'll see a few really famous or important names as generals or advisors than that you'll find evidence of women being common in the military itself; soldiers' graves and archaeological evidence usually point toward the overwhelming majority of warriors and soldiers being men, but once in a while you'll have a woman in a position of tactical or wartime power, and history tends to remember them exactly because they were rare and impressive.

But those women who are warriors are pretty much exclusively badasses, from Boudicca (or Boadicea, for the old scholars in the audience), the Celtic queen who led one of the most successful revolts against the Roman Empire, to Ahhotep, the Egyptian queen who kicked the Upper Kingdom's ass until it settled down, to Vishpala, a Hindu warrior who had her lost leg replaced by an iron prosthesis so she could go back into battle, to Empress Jingu, who just shrugged and tied her belly up so that pregnancy wouldn't inconvenience her enough to stop her from conquering Korea. It's a lot less common, but there are also occasional tales of full units of female warriors, particularly as you get east - Scythia is famous for having mass graves of female warriors as well as males, something you rarely see in western Europe.

Warrior goddesses are interesting, because they really represent how that culture feels about the idea of women as powerful or warlike forces; their presence doesn't always mean that women were considered to be appropriate as warriors, but it does always have something to say about the culture's perceptions of gender roles. Amaterasu's impressive war dance, which frightens even Susano-o into not fucking with her for a little while, recalls the ancient Japanese matriarchy, illustrating that she's a powerful figure through the metaphor of war; the Morrigan's ironclad control over who lives and who dies in battle is a not-so-subtle reflection of the Celtic fear of women in power being able to rule or destroy lives (Queen Medb in the same stories is another, smaller-scale examples of this). Other goddesses, like Ishtar, Sekhmet, Oya or Kali, instead represent the unfettered chaotic power of the female, which must be harnessed and controlled by a male (Tammuz or Ptah/Ra or Shango or Shiva, in their cases) to prevent it from rampaging around destroying everything; they're both acknowledgments that women could be considered powerful and examples of why they had to be controlled in their societies to prevent them from raining that chaotic warlike power down on everyone. Some war goddesses, like Athena, Anahita or Freya, are female to reflect the exact opposite - level-headedness, tactics and reason in war, in contrast to the more masculine warrior ideals of bloodlust and physical strength (and there's usually a male warrior god - for those examples, Ares, Mithra and Odin - to show the contrast between the two ideas).

Even the absence of female warrior goddesses tells you something about that culture; for examples, the Aztecs do not have a major goddess associated with war, and instead considered the struggle of childbirth to be a woman's equivalent to battle (up to and including according her the same honors as a fallen warrior if she died while giving birth). In a sense, this makes all Aztec goddesses (and all Aztec women) warriors, since they're almost all associated with fertility and childbirth - but when they take on the traditionally masculine role of a warrior, as in the myth of Chimalman/Coatlicue confronting and fighting Mixcoatl, they are invariably punished in some way for messing around with the natural order of things. It's a culture that considered all its people to be warriors, but that did not have room for a female trying to move to the "male" warrior role.

Of course, these are all ancient perceptions, and furthermore it's a case where the rules of humanity don't necessarily apply to the gods - just because we have no record of any women ever being warriors or military commanders in Babylon doesn't prevent Ishtar from being the queen of the divine battlefield. It's one of the many areas in which female Scions can really shine and make some choices and decisions that affect the divine landscape; they're modern people with modern ideas, including modern perceptions of women, and as such they may challenge the status quo or make the more male-dominated pantheons uncomfortable with their new ideas. Several in our games have started doing so, from Eztli, who some of the Aztec gods have started referring to as Tlazohtlaloni's husband, performing both the roles of childbirther and warrior, to Jioni, bringing new women into the traditionally very male Loa and campaigning for their equal rights in councils and politics, to Aiona, who has managed to systematically avoid exhibiting any of the expected traits of Greek goddesses, leaving her looking like a confusingly neutral-sex creature to the patriarchally traditional Dodekatheon.

Not every game is going to be into having a subtextual Women's Studies class every game, of course, but for those that are interested in the topic, shaking up the ancient ideals of women and replacing them with new ones is a worthy goal and a legendary quest for any Scion, male or female (or swapping between the two, I'm looking at you, Undeniable Resemblance-users).