Hatshesut, (c. 1520-1483 BCE) ancient Egypt's greatest woman Pharaoh: After the death of her husband and half-brother, Thutmose II, this 18th dynasty queen was crowned Pharaoh c. 1503 BCE and ruled until her death in c. 1483. She lead men into battle in order to claim the masculine power to govern and rule. She worshipped for eight hundred years after her death

Deborah (active c. 1296 BCE) biblical judge of and prophetess in Israel who successfully lead troops in a war against the Canaanite invader Sisera.

Semiramis (9th century BCE) more legends than facts are known about the Assyrian Queen Sammuramat. After conquering Babylonia, she erected the famed Hanging Gardens and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World as a memorial to her success. For the first time in history, she expanded landlocked Assyria's borders to touch not one sea, but four. She repulsed attacks by Alexander and India then conquered Bactria and Ethiopia. Her army allegedly had 300,000 foot soldiers, 5,000 horses, plus cameleers and war chariots. She was worship after her death.

Pentesilea in the _Illiad_, Homer claims the Achilles' fame would rest on his defeat of the Amazon Queen, Pentesilea. If you ask, "Were there such things as Amazons?" I would reply, I can imagine that a group of women, women who had been abused, or women who weren't satisfied with their restricted lives in the company of men, or women who were lesbians, decided to form their own community. Such a community would require women to fill all necessary jobs including military ones. I think that they would become so notorious that legends about them, embellished legends perhaps, could survive for thousands of years. So, yes, in that sense, I believe that there were Amazons. Is Pentesilea real or legendary? I don't know but I sure do like the story.

Xanthippe, (late 5th century BCE) Socrates much maligned wife (if I was his wife I'd be fighting mad, too) and Amazon sabrer in the Attic War was lead by the Amazon Orithia.

Judith, an Israelite widow, while her city was under siege by the Babylonian General Holofernes used her wealth, her beauty, and her feminine wiles to gain access to the general's tent, where she drank him under the table. She decapitated the drunken general, placed his head in a bag, and strolled out of camp to return to her city. At dawn, the head was placed atop the city's wall and the enemy fled in terror. Most scholars take her story to be apocryphal but its a nice story about a woman resistance fighter using brains, not brawn, to defeat a much more powerful foe.

Boadicea (aka Boudicca) (d. 60/61 CE), Iceni warrior queen, lead troops in a revolt against Rome. After the death of her husband, the King, Rome seized her territory, she was tortured and beaten, her daughters raped, and her nobles enslaved. She raised an army, sacked several Roman settlements including Verulamium (St. Albans), and set fire to Londinium (London). The Roman historian Tacitus claims that seventy thousand Romans and Romanized Brits died. Her victory lasted only a year; she died either in battle or shortly afterwards. (There are conflicting stories about the time and manner of her death.) Her conquered troops were so conditioned to women warriors that when her troops were presented to the court in Rome, to the amazement of on-lookers, they marched straight for the throne of the Empress Agrippa and ignored the Emperor Claudius.

Zenobia reigned as Queen of Palmyra from about 250-275 CE. She ascended to the throne upon the death of her husband as regent for her young son. She extended her realm to include all of modern Syria, Egypt, and most of Asia Minor. She repulsed Rome's first attempt to conquer her country. After the defeated Claudius' death, his successor, Aurelian, launched a long campaign to subdue the Syrians. The defeated Zenobia was permitted to retire to a rich villa outside of Rome where she wrote a history of her nation.

Martial nuns and women warrior saints: During the Middle Ages, nuns fought for a variety of reasons: as self-defense against outlaws, to become adjuncts to the fighting minks of the Crusades, to defend their lands and convents in an unlawful age. From the sixth century to the sixteenth century, history is replete with stories of warrior nuns, abbesses, and saints. Saints Barbara, Catherine, and Ursula are patrons to many, including warriors.

Joan of Arc (1412-1431) probably the best known woman warrior of the modern era, the maid of Orleans, and the French national heroine successfully lead troops into battle against the English to liberate France. Captured, she condemned as a witch, in part for wearing men's clothes, and was burned at the stake.

      Closer to home and more recent in time, like women from earliest antiquity the world over, ordinary women fought America's wars, too. Colonists fought to defend their homes against Indian attack while Native American women fought to repel invaders from their homelands. Women fought in the Revolutionary War, in the War of 1812, in the Civil War, in both world wars, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Desert Storm and in many other wars and skirmishes in between. Women soldiers and sailors, later marines and airwomen, served for many reasons: to defend their homes, for the adventure, to stay with their husbands or lovers, for the pay, to keep their country, our country, safe and free.

      Often women fought in disguise because if they were known to be women, they would be sent home. We know of many of these women today only because their disguises were penetrated during the war when they were treated for illness or wounds, when they were buried, when they were captured, or through some other accident. (During the Civil War, six women had their disguises penetrated only when they gave birth) Even when women shared tents with their lovers, their identities went undetected. Apparently, men soldiers were more willing to assume that a fellow recruit was a homosexual rather than speculate that their fellow soldier was a woman. Some women concealed their identities until long after their war ended and they finally told their stories. Others took their secrets to the grave.

      Women were camp followers, too. Often they are portrayed as prostitutes but many of them were wives of the soldiers who cooked, cleaned, and cared for their husbands and who nursed them if wounded. The services these women rendered were no less important to the successful completion of the war than the services rendered today by soldiers who are not front line troops.

      So this Memorial Day, when talk turns to the many men who died defending their homes and country, talk about the many women, high born and low, who died defending their homes and country, too.

Burgess, Lauren Cook ed., _An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman alias Pvt. Lyon Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers, 1862-1864_, Burgess, The Minerva Center, 1994

Salmonson, Jessica Amanda, _The Encyclopedia of Amazons: Women Warriors from Antiquity to the Modern Era_, Anchor Books, 1991

Encarta

Upon women the burden and the horrors of war are heaviest. . . . When she sees what lies behind the glory and the horror, the boasting and the burden, and gets the vision, the human perspective, she will end war. She will kill war by the simple process of starving it to death. For she will refuse longer to produce the human food upon which the monster feeds.
            Margaret Sanger (1883-1966) _Women and the New Race_, 1920, entry 1328.5

As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send someone else.
            Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973), Prologue (c. 1941), quoted in _Jeannette Rankin: First Lady in Congress_ by Hannah Josephson, 1974, entry 1292.1

The cult of "arms and the man" must reckon with a newer cult, that of "schools and the woman." Schools, which exalt brains above brawn, and women, who exalt life-giving above life-taking, are the natural allies of the present era.
            Katharine Anthony (1877-1965) _Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia_, 1915, ch. 2, entry 1247.3

. . . all wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and who therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them.
            Emma Goldman (1869-1940) "Address to the Jury", _Mother Earth_, 1917, entry 1152.16

Suddenly, one day, war drums on horseback came like thunder, tearing off the sky, And all glorious flowery days were gone forever.
            Wang Ch'ing-hui (fl. c. 13th century), Untitled, _The Orchid Boat, Women Poets of China_, Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, eds. and trs. 1972, entry 176.1

Quotable Quotes taken from _The New Quotable Woman, The Definitive Treasury of Notable Words by Women from Eve to the Present_, compiled and edited by Elaine Partnow, Meridian, 1993

Hundreds of women marched steadily up to the mouth of a hundred cannon pouring out fire and smoke, shot and shell, mowing down the advancing hosts like grass; men, horses, and colors going down in confusion, disappearing in clouds of smoke; the only sound, the screaming of shells, the crackling of musketry, the thunder of artillery. . . through all this women were sustained by the enthusiasm born of love of country and liberty.
            _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Gage, taken from An Uncommon Soldier_ (see below for full reference) page 2

      A farmer's daughter, Rosetta Wakeman was educated enough to be literate. The oldest of nine children and a good farm hand, by leaving home to earn money to send back to her father to help support the family, she also reduced the number of mouths her father had to feed. In an age were it was less common to see a woman wear pants than it is today to see a man wear a dress, she dressed as a man and passed for a man because job opportunities and pay were much better for men than for women.

      After leaving home, she worked for two weeks in the nearest big city, Binghamton then signed on to a coal barge. After first trip on barge, on August 30, 1862 she signed up with the 153rd Regiment for the $152 bounty, over a years' wages for the "male" Rosetta. Rosetta became one of four hundred women known to have been Civil War soldiers. Her regiment embarked for Washington, D. C. on Oct. 17, 1862; arrived on October 22, 1862, and was posted to Alexandria for nine months to repel expected attacks and to perform guard duty. On July 20, 1863, her unit was transferred to Washington to guard against expected draft riots. She did her job well and stayed out of trouble.

      Finally, in February 1864 to her joy, her unit was ordered to the field: they joined Major General Nathaniel P. Banks' ill-fated Red River Campaign in Louisiana. On April 9, 1864 Private Wakeman finally went into battle, at Pleasant Hill, which she survived. Like many other soldiers, she developed chronic diarrhea. Indeed, disease was so widespread among soldiers that of the approximately 620,000 men who died in the Civil Was, 80% died from illness or disease, not from battlefield wounds. She reported to the regimental hospital on May 3, was transferred to a hospital in New Orleans on May 22, and died June 19, 1864. Although her illness was severe enough that she probably could not take care of her physical needs, none of her nurses, attendants, or physicians betrayed her secret. There are no indications in the military records of Private Lyon Wakeman that "he" was in reality a "she." She is buried in a grave marked Lyon Wakeman in Chalmette National Cemetery, New Orleans. How many other women soldiers are buried in graves with headstones containing an assumed name, a man's name, will never be known. Neither will we ever know how many women soldiers survived wars with their secrets undiscovered and took them to the grave.

_An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman alias Pvt. Lyon Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers, 1862-1864_, edited by Lauren Cook Burgess, The Minerva Center, Passadena, Maryland, 1994

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