Warrior Women

For my birthday, I was given a hefty non-fiction book entitled ‘Warrior Women: 3000 Years of Courage and Heroism’ and approached it with caution. I know all too well that misogyny is still a major problem in Western society, despite the progress made towards bridging the inequality between men and women, but I’m still wary of any attempt to portray strong women. The term, ‘strong women’ seems to be a very relative one that’s up for a heated and controversial debate.

I don’t like it when people think that feminism is about hating men, or portraying women as being superior to men. I’ll only mention Steven Moffat and his female characters in Doctor Who and Sherlock very briefly, as he makes me angry and rant like the depraved, vigilante lunatics he thinks all ‘strong women’ are.

So I was afraid that this book would be very one sided, elevating women to a godlike status with a derisive tone towards the opposite sex. But I was pleasantly surprised, in a way, to discover that it’s a faithful historical account of significant women throughout history. In another way, it was all too unpleasant as the book makes it abundantly clear how neglected women are in history. As my progressive college course pointed out in a clever and reverential way, is history really ‘his story’? Well, yeah. Kind of.

I already knew that Hollywood and the world of television is largely one sided in how much media coverage male-centred stories get, but come on! Why has no epic film been made of Hatshepsut, the first female ruler of Egypt for 2,000 years? Malinalli Tenepal, who took part in the Spanish conquest of Central America? Isabella I of Spain, who expelled almost all the Jews from her country? Alright, I said they were ‘warrior women’ not ‘saintly darlings’; a lot of them were arguably terrible people who waged war and occasionally murdered their own children. But my point is that these things can be argued, they’re not just one sided figures who were morally superior to their male counterparts.

Instead of teaching about Henry VIII and his six hapless wives, why not look at Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, or Margaret of Anjou and Henry VI, or Aethelflaed who was King Alfred the Great’s daughter and ruled in her own right as Queen of the Mercians? Oh no, we don’t get any of them in school history lessons; it’s all “Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived.” As far as I remember, very little attention was even given to Elizabeth I apart from the fact that she never married, which is obviously the most important fact about her.

I do encourage you all to google those names, I can’t tell you how long I spent sucked into Wikipedia reading about all these women who made such an impact on their eras. My personal favourite isn’t even in the book I was given: Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples and Sicily, whose political cleverness gave her a better fate than that of her sister, Marie Antoinette.