The topic of gender in ancient armies and fighting classes seems to come up a great deal. The idea that the majority of fighters in a low tech, pre firearms societies are probably male has been labeled everything from a mistake to a practical conspiracy to promote a sexist view of women's role in history. This site for example:

http://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2013/05/we-have-always-fought-challenging-the-women-cattle-and-slaves-narrative-by-kameron-hurley/

What is the deal on this? Have I been mislead/mistaken? I'm not a major history buff.

I suspect that this is one of those topics where the scope and scale of what's being assessed are important when forming an answer. That is, it's highly likely that you'll be able to find some female fighters in any given conflict - and people will often trot such instances out as being an iron-clad refutation of the "all battles are fought by men (and men alone)" narrative - but that's not what's really being asked (in my view).

What's more germane to the topic is to what degree were female fighters institutionalized in a given society (either in all-female units, or as part of mixed-sex units), and how did such units compare to all-male units in terms of their size, number of engagements, ratios of victories to defeats, etc.

In other words, there's a difference between citing outliers and citing standard practices, something that gets blurred a lot when history and personal ideology don't mesh as well as one would like.

That said, in answer to the questions you actually asked, I have no idea; I'm not a history buff either.

Like a great many things, the answer to this issue is, "it depends". Not all cultures are alike, so there isn't a general one size fits all answer.

I remember reading recently that many of the bodies recovered from Viking burial sites that were buried with weaponry have turned out to be female and that in times past, archeologists didn't bother identifying the gender of skeletons discovered in such graves and assumed they were all male.

So the shield maiden is one  historical example of females in a military role.

Every culture needs to be examined individually.

When talking antiquity, for the most part fighting was an aristocratic pursuit. Only those wealthy enough to afford their weapons and armour (and if wealthier still, a mount and collection of remounts) could fight. So that immediately rules out the vast majority of the population.

Moving on to particular cultures, in most settled, agrarian peoples, men did the fighting. Many practised some form of closeting of women (Greeks, Romans, etc), though again that was more relevant to the higher echelons of society, poor women had to work.

Many nomadic or mobile cultures had less qualms about women under arms, or more likely when you were a small group on the move, everyone had to be able to defend the group. Scythians were noted for a significant minority (around 20% in what is now Ukraine) of grave-finds being women. That means female lords and warleaders, not merely warriors. There are recurring accounts of Illyrian noblewomen who hunted and fought like men.

Quote from: Nexus;789956What is the deal on this? Have I been mislead/mistaken? I'm not a major history buff.

I recall reading about some ancient king whose harem was also his standing army. But the general rule is that the vast (vast vast) majority of fighters in history are men.

Women making up a significant proportion of any army was unusual enough that it was remarked upon by observers as bizarre, titillating, or monstrous. There certainly weren't any female soldiers in the armies of antiquity that we know a lot about - the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and Persians. Nor in China, that I know of. In more primitive or informal warrior cultures, they seem to have cropped up now and then. But there's no reason to believe even there they were anything but a small minority.

As soon as humans had property, and thus an incentive to make sure their property was handed down to children who they fathered, women were regarded as assets that had to be guarded. They had children as soon as they were biologically fertile, and typically the more kids the better from the point of view of husbands, chiefs, and kings. So why would men let their daughters or wives go off to war, where they not only risked being impregnated by unknown men, but getting killed and lost to the tribe or nation as a breeder and mother?

The past is a foreign country. They operated in a fundamentally environment than we do, and had fundamentally different beliefs. And I find the desire on the parts of some to revise the past in order to suit modern sensibilities abhorrent.

Yeah, the recent academic brouhaha about women in historical militaries is just so much noise making by postmodernist ideologues. The vast majority of soldiers throughout history, whether professional or levy, were men. Which isn't to say women were never found on the battlefield, nor that those who were never accomplished anything noteworthy, but they were very much the exceptions that proved the rule.

Here's a pretty good video done on the subject not too long ago with a corresponding pile of source links in the info bar.

As I read it, the article linked from the OP isn't claiming that women were generally as common in fighting as men. It's saying that women fighters have often been a significant minority, like the example of 20% of the ANC resistance fighters.

Men have almost always been the strong majority of the fighters overall. I don't think this has to do with sexual dimorphism of size so much as reproduction.  A community can lose 50% of its men, and still recover within a generation as long as the women survive and can bear children.  So even if women were bigger and stronger, I think there would be cultural pressure for them to stay out of the front lines.

Quote from: Kiero;789965Moving on to particular cultures, in most settled, agrarian peoples, men did the fighting. Many practised some form of closeting of women (Greeks, Romans, etc), though again that was more relevant to the higher echelons of society, poor women had to work.

The phrasing "men did the fighting" seems oddly phrased as an absolute. The question should be more about how uncommon and/or in what circumstances women fight - not about if men did the fighting or women did as a binary. I would agree that women fighters are less common in settled, agrarian people compared to nomads - but there are still many examples of women fighting in agrarian societies, such as the Persians.

Quote from: Haffrung;789980Women making up a significant proportion of any army was unusual enough that it was remarked upon by observers as bizarre, titillating, or monstrous. There certainly weren't any female soldiers in the armies of antiquity that we know a lot about - the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and Persians. Nor in China, that I know of. In more primitive or informal warrior cultures, they seem to have cropped up now and then. But there's no reason to believe even there they were anything but a small minority.

I've seen numerous references to significant women in the Persian armies. Here's one example reference (found by spontaneous web search - I don't have a primary source handy):

http://www.throneworld.com/oathofempire/en/sassanids.htm

QuoteA final remarkable aspect of Sassanian expeditions involved women. Lieu notes that at least in the earliest periods "the presence of substantial numbers of women" is noted by Roman authors. The writer Zonaras (260) said that among the fallen Iranians there were "found women also, dressed and armed like men," some taken alive. At Singara (343) there were noted women "conscripted"as "sutlers in the army." These are not noted after the middle of the 4th century.

Written evidence of female warriors does exist, pretty much from Tukydides onwards, throughout the middle ages with varying degrees of credibility. Some of those reports are likely to be exaggerated, others are more reliable. It is, for example unlikely that Viking raiders in France were accompanied by locusts with scorpion tails  (as written in at least two chronicles of those events). Medieval writers often refered to biblical themes or tropes introduced by classical writers such as Pliny's Natural History that included mythical beings such as Cynocephali (dog-headed people), Satyrs (well, you know) Blemmyes (hedless beings with thir faces on their chests) - as well as Amazons. This is most often a literary trope indicating the reader that the writer has the necessary education to know these tropes and pastiches.

However, what the more reliable sources seem to have in common is that contemporaries saw female warriors as extraordinary enough to explicitly mention their gender in these sources if they occured.

As far as I know, the excavated mass graves created after battles (Visby, Towton, Alacros) does not not include the remains of any combattant identified as female. That doesn't mean that all of the bodies have been identified correctly or that there were no female soldiers present, but it would indicate a certain rarity.

All in all, it is unlikely that there never were any female soldiers. But, they probably weren't particularly common. And we know pretty certainly that in the non-fighting force part of pre-modern armies (the classic supply train), camp followers, suppliers and traders of both gender worked to supply the troops. For late medieval or early modern mercenary units it is also common knowledge that the soldiers were accompanied by their families who traveled with the tross. So, women (and children - anti child labor notions are a more modern idea) were a part of the infrastructure to maintain a fighting force, but probably usually not a part of the fighting force itself.

How relevant the historical indicators are for a fictional setting that only uses medieval motifs and pastiches however, is a completely subjective matter. I personally think that from a roleplaying perspective, even in a strictly historical game, when it comes to player characters, female warriors of all kinds shouldn't be an issue. PCs are supposed to be extraordinary anyway.

Quote from: jhkim;789993As I read it, the article linked from the OP isn't claiming that women were generally as common in fighting as men. It's saying that women fighters have often been a significant minority, like the example of 20% of the ANC resistance fighters.

The ANC is a 20th century organization.

Quote from: jhkim;789993The phrasing "men did the fighting" seems oddly phrased as an absolute.

No more absolute than 'adults did the fighting*.' I don't see the point in qualifying every statement that doesn't cover 100 per cent of the cases.

* Actually, I'd be willing to wager a lot more boys younger than 14 have fought in battle than women.

A lot depends on where the battle is, at a walled town, women would fight along side the men; in the field, 90% male.

Regardless of historical fact, a RPG means you can have whomever and whatever the fuck you want take up arms for any reason.

I don't put any special requirements on female characters in my games.* But neither are people that do strive for some thing like verisimilitude by having them be rare and exceptional in their setting aren't being evil sexist bastards. Or at least that not damning evidence.

*I do have cultures, organizations, people and social elements that aren't 100 percent gender equal though. I confess.

Edit: Its also nice to see that "don't respond to banned posters" rule allows you to continue to hammer their point and posts along you don't quote them directly.

Quote from: Warboss Squee;790016Regardless of historical fact, a RPG means you can have whomever and whatever the fuck you want take up arms for any reason.

In a fantasy game maybe, but if you're playing an actual historical one, then not without justifications.

In my own game, I made clear to the female player in the group that she wouldn't have a free choice of origin (essentially, she couldn't be a Greek without some contortions of logic), if she wanted to play a combatant*. Fortunately "warrior princess" was a perfectly valid initial concept, so there wasn't really an issue beyond deciding exactly where she was from.

*Though in fairness, there were certain limitations on the other PCs anyway, none of them are from the lowest stratum of the social order and two of them are aristocrats, one genuine royalty.