Slavic Warrior Women, pt. 3: When Women Go to War

Link to full dissertation, Amazons, Shieldmaidens, and Daring Polianitsy: Slavic Warrior Women in Medieval Literature and Folklore: https://libraetd.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/r207tq787

Time for Slavic Warrior women, part 3! Today we’ll be talking about the Spirit of the Warrior, and what happens when women get involved. For funzies, I’ve included an old picture of me in uniform, for I remain a grumpy veteran.

This post will probably piss off everyone, on either side of the political aisle and of every gender identity. It is impossible to discuss warrior women without addressing gender, and as a cisgender woman who is both very comfortable in my womanhood and who spent a solid 14 years of her life living according to the Warrior Ethos, I have some pretty strong feelings about the matter of gender in the military. So tread carefully. I'm happy to engage in respectful dialogue about the topic, but I will immediately delete any disrespectful/hateful comments.

Taking a ride in a Black Hawk circa 2018 somewhere in Kuwait to administer the reenlistment oath to a couple highspeed NCOs

In contemporary society, war is mainly the province of professionals, but this was not always the case. As of 2018, approximately six per cent of the living population of the United States had served in the US military; active service members typically account for less than one per cent of the total population.^[1] For perspective, despite mandatory service for all adult men and a significant expansion of the armed forces following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian population currently serving in their military amounts to slightly over one per cent.^[2] When accounting for the devastating losses they have suffered since invading Ukraine in 2022, the percentage may be closer to two. However, as a result of various factors—a reduction in peer-to-peer military conflicts, changes in technology and culture, diversification of labor, to name a few—such a small percentage is a drastic departure from the percentage of the overall population who engaged in warfare in centuries and millennia past. While the military is now considered a profession, for the civilizations relevant to this study, war was closer to a way of life. Even when considering martial societies like Imperial Rome that employed standing armies, most warfare of the distant past was less a voluntary career than an ever-present fact of reality. ‘Warrior’ was not a job description; it was a permanent identity.

Participating in offensive operations like raids was an expectation of most able-bodied men in Viking societies, to include the Rus’, but whenever they were not invading their neighbors—which was, in fact, the majority of the time, as the raiding season was finite—these men were farmers, merchants, and craftsmen.^[3] Thus, although a heftier section of the population participated in warfare than many of their contemporaries, Viking raiders were not professional Soldiers as we would think of them today, but rather, the quintessential “weekend warriors.” Presumably, any Viking women who participated in these short-term offensive operations also did so on a seasonal basis, but her identity as a shieldmaiden would likewise extend beyond her immediate participation. Scandinavian kingdoms maintained no standing armies, no permanent military hierarchies in service of a singular king or state, but rather the regular populace conducted war in accordance with the seasons.^[4] In a society that so frequently participated in warfare, from seasonal raids to permanent colonization, the veneration of warriorhood was a natural development.

Centuries prior across the Eurasian steppes, warriorhood as an activity and as an identity was even more pervasive than among the Vikings. For many Scythian tribes, joining raiding parties was an obligation for all able-bodied men and women, with exceptions for those who were pregnant, nursing, or otherwise needed to tend the tribe’s children, elderly, and infirm.^[5] Even then, those women who stayed behind were expected to defend the camp against enemy incursions, which were likely to occur while the regular cavalry were otherwise occupied. Weapons, armor, jewelry, and other grave goods abound in Scythian burials, with nearly all male graves and most female graves containing, at a minimum, arrowheads.^[6] Scythian nomads were not just societies that contained warriors, then, but societies comprised almost entirely of them.

The idea that war was, is, or should be the exclusive province of men may be pervasive today, but it has no basis in history or reality. Some authors as ancient as Plato conceded that certain women could exceed the abilities of most men, including on the battlefield.^[7] Regardless of Defense Secretary Hegseth’s repeated claims that women are too risk-averse and maternal to effectively participate in combat, the thousands of women presently serving in official combat roles across the US Armed Forces, the tens of thousands who served unofficially in combat roles in recent decades, and the countless more women who participated in combat throughout the previous centuries of US history from the Revolutionary War onward, prove otherwise, and that is only in modern American history.^[8] Aggression, violence, vengeance, the desire to protect one’s loved ones – these qualities are not restricted to men, nor is the ability to act on them. The average man might be larger and possess more muscle mass than the average woman, yet as I will discuss in later chapters, literary warriors—male and female—are not meant to reflect the average, but the excellent. Therefore, the rules of what is ‘average’ do not apply.

The entrenched cultural association of warriorhood with masculinity has led some scholars to question not just the veracity of warrior women in the first place, but also the gender identity of individual warrior women throughout history. These scholars suggest that figures such as the ancient Amazons or Viking Age shieldmaidens exist in a gender-liminal state by being biologically female but taking on traditionally male roles as warriors and hunters, which in turn requires them to adopt socially male traits, both external (clothing style) and internal (aggression, dominance, et cetera).^[9] Whatever these scholars choose to label this liminal state in which warrior women are theorized to exist—third gender, gender-fluid, nonbinary—the theory predicates on modern presuppositions about gender roles and identity, which are seldom applicable to past civilizations.^[10] 

The suggestion that, because long-dead warrior women do not fit neatly into the social binary of masculine or feminine according to the contemporary understanding of those terms, they must then occupy a third gender category outside that binary, is problematic, especially considering those long-dead women cannot speak for themselves. Placing warrior women outside the bounds of an acceptable gender binary also places them outside the bounds of acceptability, effectively othering them, hence their portrayal throughout the literary-historical record as transgressive, while simultaneously enforcing the binary. Instead, perhaps, it is our understanding of the binary that needs to change. There is nothing innately feminine about spinning wool or baking bread, nor is there anything innately masculine about wielding a sword or directing a battle. An activity has no gender, and so an activity cannot determine or invalidate the gender of the person engaged in it. Separating warrior women from their womanhood enforces the erroneous idea that women cannot be effective warriors and further serves to undermine the stories of extraordinary women. In other words, saying that warrior women are not really women is just another way of saying that women cannot be warriors.

Excluding warrior women from the acceptable gender binary is not the only, nor even the oldest, means of othering them. Another common trope regarding warrior women in literature is to portray them as foreign. Whenever Ancient Greeks and Romans wrote about Amazons and other Scythian nomads, they called them barbarians; conspicuously, they acknowledged no genuine warrior women among their own populations, though myths of such women existed.^[11] Even the rare incidence of female gladiators in Rome was regarded as a foreign indulgence.^[12] Likewise, when medieval authors discuss Viking Age warrior queens, they always come from somewhere else: Olga was a Varangian from Pskov who came to Kyiv; Sigrid was a Polish princess who came to Sweden. Even figures such as Libuše and Vlasta, though their chroniclers share their Czech origins, arose from the primordial otherness of a prehistoric matriarchy, not a recognizably Czech state. In Russian folklore, the polianitsy are also foreigners, arriving in Kyiv from a legendary version of Lithuania, Poland, or some distant, unnamed kingdom. In literature across the millennia, warrior women were more than just a foreign concept; they were portrayed as actually foreign since surely no women of the author’s native civilization would behave so improperly.

Because warrior women’s narratives are buried in narratives devoted to men, they are inevitably defined by their relationships with men. Consequently, one of the recurring topics that arises in any study of literary-historical women is how marriage affects their status, and this holds doubly true for warrior women. For the Amazons, marriage was taboo. Their relations with men were supposed to be temporary and solely for the purpose of procreation. The less fictionalized accounts of Scythians reveal a different approach to romantic relationships, but neither monogamy nor permanence were expected.^[13] Marriage for an Amazon represented not only a betrayal of her sisters, but a loss of her autonomy. The same pattern occurs for the shieldmaidens of medieval literature and the polianitsy of Russian folklore: marriage results in a return to the domestic sphere as they exchange their warriorhood and independence for traditionally feminine roles as dutiful wives and mothers.^[14] Meanwhile, widowhood had the opposite effect. The death of their husbands allowed such queens as Tomyris, Olga, and Sigrid to claim power and authority for themselves. There is abundant historical precedent for marriage reducing women’s agency and widowhood reversing that loss, but for warrior women, the contrast is especially stark.^[15]

Citations:

[1] Jonathon Vespa, “Those Who Served: America’s Veterans from World War II to the War on Terror,” Veterans, United States Census Bureau, effective June 2, 2020.

[2] “Russia,” CIA Factbook, effective November 4, 2024.

[3] William R. Short, Viking Weapons and Combat Techniques (Westholme, 2009): 25.

[4] Anne Pedersen, “Military Organization and Offices: The Evidence of Grave Finds,” Settlement and Lordship in Viking and Early Medieval Scandinavia, ed. Bjørn Poulsen and Søren Sindbæk (Brepols, 2012): 47.

[5] Mayor, Amazons: Lives & Legends, 132; A. I. Melyukova, “The Scythians and Sarmatians,” trans. Julia Crookenden, The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, ed. Denis Sinor (Cambridge University Press, 1990): 106; Eileen Murphy, Iron Age Archaeology and Trauma from Aymyrlyg, South Siberia (BAR Publishing, 2003): 15; Valeri I. Guliaev, “Amazons in Scythia: New Finds at the Middle Don, Southern Russia,” World Archaeology 35, no. 1 (2003): 121.

[6] V. Iu. Murzin, “O pogrebeniyakh skifskikh nomarkhov,” Elita v istorii drevnikh i srednevekovykh narodov evrazii, ed. P. K. Dashkovskii (Izdatel’stvo Altaiskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2015): 63; Mayor, Amazons: Lives & Legends, 64.

[7] Blythe, “Women in the Military,” 243.

[8] One of Hegseth’s primary points in disparaging women in combat is that allowing women into combat roles “lowers the standards.” However, according to the National Defense Authorization Act of 1994, it is illegal for occupational standards to be altered in any way to allow women entry to a specific position. When the Army finally opened Ranger school to allow women to apply, the physical and academic standards remained unchanged; all of the female Ranger graduates—and there have been over a hundred now, though for their own safety the Army no longer publicly releases the names of its female Ranger graduates as they received significant harassment and death threats—met the exact same requirements as all male graduates. No standards were lowered.

[9] Frieda S. Brown and Wm. Blake Tyrrell, “ἐϰτιλώσαντο: A Reading of Herodotus' Amazons,” The Classical Journal 80, no. 4 (1985): 302; Ken Dowden, “The Amazons: Development and Functions,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 140, no. 2 (1997): 97; Ben Raffield, “Playing Vikings: Militarism, Hegemonic Masculinities, and Childhood Enculturation in Viking Age Scandinavia,” Current Anthropology 60, no. 6 (2019): 820; Kathleen M. Self, “The Valkyrie’s Gender: Old Norse Shield-Maidens and Valkyries as a Third Gender,” Feminist Formations 26, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 145.

[10] Holt N. Parker, “The Myth of the Heterosexual: Anthropology and Sexuality for Classicists,” Arethusa 34, no. 3 (2001): 345; Ruth Hubbard, “Gender and Genitals: Constructs of Sex and Gender,” Social Text 46/47 (1996): 158; Tatar, Heroine with 1000 Faces, 7; Anastasios G. Nikolaidis, “Plutarch on Women and Marriage,” Wiener Studien 110 (1997): 27; Penrose, Postcolonial Amazons, 8.

[11] Penrose, Postcolonial Amazons, 4.

[12] Anna McCullough, “Female Gladiators in Imperial Rome: Literary Context and Historical Fact,” The Classical World 101, no. 2 (2008): 202.

[13] Larissa Bonfante, ed., The Barbarians of Ancient Europe: Realities and Interactions (Cambridge University Press, 2011): 17; Mayor, Amazons: Lives & Legends, 132.

[14] Self, “Valkyrie’s Gender,” 148.

[15] Cameron, Feminism: Brief Introduction, 16; Gillian Clark, “Roman Women,” Greece & Rome 28, no. 2 (1981): 206; Carol J. Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Representations 44 (1993): 5; Nancy Ries, “The Burden of Mythic Identity: Russian Women at Odds with Themselves,” Feminist Nightmares. Women at Odds: Feminism and the Problems of Sisterhood, ed. Susan Ostrov Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner (New York University Press, 1994): 243.