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Essay on Warrior Women and How They Were Viewed Throughout History
John Keegan is one of the most respected military historians of our time with numerous books to his credit, including perhaps his most important one, A History of Warfare, published in 1993. (Alpern S. B. 1998) This otherwise commendable exploration into many dimensions of war ends its opening chapter with the startling conclusion that although women are said sometimes to be able to become "messianic war leaders," warfare is, nevertheless, the one human activity from which women, with the most insignificant exceptions, have always and everywhere stood apart. Women look to men to protect them from danger, and bitterly reproach them when they fail as defenders. (Adams D. B. 1983) Women have followed the drum, nursed the wounded, tended the fields and herded the flocks when the man of the family has followed his leader, have even dug the trenches for men to defend and laboured in the workshops to send them their weapons. Women, however, do not fight. They rarely fight among themselves and they never, in any military sense, fight men. If warfare is as old as history and as universal as mankind, we must now enter the supremely important limitation that it is an entirely masculine activity.
In that same year, another well-regarded historian, Martin Van Creveld of Hebrew University and a former Fellow of War Studies at King's College, Cambridge, agreed with Keegan: "Women have never taken part in combat--in any culture, in any country, in any period of history. The myth of Amazons is just that--a myth.
That Keegan and Van Creveld could reach this conclusion is remarkable in view of the fact that British popular historian John Laffin wrote a book called Women in Battle as early as 1967, which, if sometimes embellished, nonetheless provided considerable evidence that women have fought against men in many times and many places. And Laffin was hardly alone.....
