7 Women Warriors

Years of taxation, ill-treatment, and enslavement had worn down the Celtic tribes of East Anglia. They didn’t need much rallying to rebel against the Romans. Shortly after her husband died, the queen of the Iceni, Boudicca, was stripped of her possessions, flogged, forced to see her young daughters raped and tortured. She didn’t want to take it any longer and gathered the troops. Before she died, she and her troops razed the towns of Camulodunum (Colchester), the capital of Roman Britain; Verulamium (St. Albans); and Londinium (London).

The time was the early 15th century, the place France. Caught in the seemingly endless French and English skirmishes over territory and succession to the French crown, Joan (who was a farm girl) felt compelled to act. Relying upon her faith in God and the guidance of long-dead saints, she took her courage in hand and led French troops in many battles, notably to victory in Orléans. After her capture, she was tried for heresy and burned at the stake. This trial was movingly rendered by the film director Carl Theodor Dreyer in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).

A warrior of a different sort was Cleopatra. To be sure, she won wars, but not for her the battlefield: her soldiers did the work. She preferred to conquer men in other ways. As Shakespeare put it:
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.

The Amazons of Greek mythology present the original portrait of woman warriors. They were a society of women who forswore the society of men—except to mate with them for the purpose of increasing their all-female tribe. Many are the stories of their bravery in battle, though Greek writers seem to have made use of them simply as valiant enemies to be defeated in Amazonomachies ("Amazon-battles"). One of their bravest leaders was “[t]he ferocious Penthesilea, gold belt fastened beneath her exposed breast…a warrioress [bellatrix], a maiden who dares to fight with men.” (Virgil)

These words of Thomas Jefferson were quoted by suffragist Susan B. Anthony at her trial in 1873 for voting. She was fined $100 for her act of civil disobedience. Though she didn’t literally take up arms, no one can deny that, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others, she fought the good fight for woman suffrage and helped pave the way for the passage—14 years after her death in 1906—of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which extended the right to vote to women.

The mother of the U.S. civil rights movement, Rosa Parks, knew that someone eventually had to say "No, I’m not moving to the back of the bus." Turned out that she was that someone. With her refusal to give in, she helped launch the Montgomery bus boycott and changed American civil rights history.  

One of the more courageous American heroines was abolitionist Harriet Tubman. She proved to be one of the most effective conductors on the Underground Railroad. "Conducting" was an unsettling and dangerous job for anyone, let alone a female former slave. But her motto was simple: "I can’t die but once."