Women in Military History: Warriors, Leaders and Strategists

Hidden figures of the battlefield

Military history has usually been written as a story about men, but women have played critical roles in war throughout recorded history: as queens who led armies in person, as commanders of ships and garrisons, as strategists and spies, and as the workforce that kept modern armies supplied and informed. Their visibility in the record is limited more by who wrote the sources than by what they did.

Ancient warriors and queens

The ancient record includes several women who held military command at the highest level. Artemisia I of Halicarnassus commanded her own squadron on the Persian side at Salamis and, according to Herodotus, was the only one of Xerxes' commanders to advise against fighting there. The British queen Boudica led a revolt against Roman rule in 60 or 61 CE that burned Colchester, London and St Albans before it was crushed. Cleopatra VII brought her own fleet to Actium in 31 BCE. Zenobia of Palmyra conquered Egypt and much of the Roman East in the 270s before Aurelian defeated her.

• •Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae, defeated and killed Cyrus the Great in 530 BCE, according to Herodotus
• •Tacitus puts the dead in Boudica's revolt at 70,000 to 80,000 Romans and provincials, though ancient figures are unreliable
• •Archaeology on the Eurasian steppe has found armed women in a significant share of Scythian and Sarmatian warrior graves, the likely origin of the Greek Amazon legends
• •Fu Hao, a consort of the Shang king Wu Ding around 1200 BCE, led armies according to oracle-bone inscriptions and was buried with weapons

Joan of Arc and medieval women at war

Joan of Arc is the most famous woman in Western military history. In 1429, aged about seventeen, she joined the demoralised French army at the siege of Orleans and within nine days the English had lifted a siege that had lasted seven months. Her leadership was both practical, in pressing for aggressive assaults, and symbolic, in restoring the belief that the Dauphin's cause could win. The campaign that followed took Charles VII to his coronation at Reims and turned the Hundred Years' War. Beyond Joan, medieval history is full of women who held castles under siege, raised and led troops in their husbands' absence, and ran the military affairs of their kingdoms.

Beyond the Western canon

The usual list of warrior women centres on Europe and the Mediterranean. Looking further afield produces a longer and more varied roll.

• •Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi led cavalry charges during the 1857 Indian Rebellion and died in action near Gwalior
• •Trieu Thi Trinh led a rising against Chinese rule in third-century Vietnam and is remembered there as a national heroine
• •Nzinga Mbande, queen of Ndongo and Matamba, fought Portuguese expansion in what is now Angola for three decades in the seventeenth century
• •Ching Shih commanded a pirate confederation in the South China Sea in the early nineteenth century that, by contemporary accounts, ran to hundreds of ships
• •The Agojie of Dahomey, an all-female regiment, fought through the nineteenth century and inflicted real defeats on French forces before the kingdom fell in 1892
• •Lozen, an Apache warrior and strategist, fought alongside Victorio and Geronimo in the 1870s and 1880s

The Second World War

The Soviet Union fielded the largest force of women combatants in history. More than 800,000 served in the Red Army, tens of thousands in combat roles as snipers, machine-gunners, tank crew and pilots. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was credited with 309 kills as a sniper. The all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment, the Night Witches, flew more than 23,000 sorties in slow wood-and-canvas biplanes. In Britain and the United States women were mostly kept out of combat but flew aircraft between factories and airfields, served in air defence, and went behind enemy lines for the Special Operations Executive.

After 1945 the story was uneven. The Soviet Union pushed most of its women veterans back into civilian life. Israel conscripted women from 1948 but restricted them to support roles for decades. The United States opened all combat roles to women only in 2015. Every military that has integrated women has worked through the same practical questions of training standards, unit cohesion and deployment, and the answers keep changing.

• •Around three-quarters of the wartime staff at Bletchley Park were women, many operating the machines that broke Enigma traffic
• •The SOE sent 39 women agents into occupied France; Virginia Hall was hunted by the Gestapo as one of the most dangerous Allied agents
• •Women in the Soviet partisan movement served as couriers, saboteurs and fighters behind German lines
• •The US Women Airforce Service Pilots ferried more than 12,000 aircraft during the war

Women behind the lines

Direct combat is only part of the picture. Intelligence, codebreaking, logistics, medicine and resistance work have often been where wars were actually decided, and in every conflict with detailed records women's share of that work turns out to be far larger than the battle narratives suggest. The Enigma decrypts that shaped the Battle of the Atlantic, the resistance networks that fed D-Day planners, and the field hospitals of every modern war all depended on women's labour and judgement.

Recognising their battles in the game

Several battles in the game are directly connected to women's command. A French army rallying under a banner at a besieged city is the siege of Orleans and Joan of Arc. An Egyptian fleet in the Ionian Sea is Actium and Cleopatra. Greek triremes in a narrow strait is Salamis, where Artemisia fought on the losing side and escaped by ramming one of her own allies. Find all three in the Battle Encyclopedia.