Quote from: Daztur;790413In my mind (as I've said in previous threads) it's what a massive time sink child bearing is. With modern birth rates we don't think about it much but if you have, say, six kids that takes an ENORMOUS bite out of your productive life and leaves you with little time for everything else when you're of military age.

This isn't exactly right, as I've said. Looking at Europe, for most of European history large numbers of women never married, never had sex (almost everyone having sex is a 20th century thing), never had children. The same for men. Overpopulation was a much bigger threat than lack of children - this is generally true of all agricultural societies. Looking at medieval Europe, most women married, if at all, in their mid twenties, then had their six-eight children. From what we can tell, the majority of children in the medieval European rural environment typically survived to adulthood - urban centres were different and certainly by the sixteenth century the growing towns & cities were massive population sinks. But several of those children would never marry and have children themselves.

So, women could have fought - for ten years of adulthood before marriage, or for longer if they never married at all. Women are physically weaker, and this makes a big difference in effectiveness with certain kinds of weapons. Lack of upper body strength has a disproportionate impact on what equipment and supplies can be carried.

But the main reason for the lack of female fighters in history is psychology:

1. Most women don't want to fight - and this is related to the fact that women bear children and are less evolutionarily expendable than men - basically your genes don't want you to fight if on balance it harms their chances of propagating.
2. Most men who are warriors don't want women to fight. Again, there seem to be evo-psych reasons for this. Men in combat form tightly-knit single-sex 'Bruderbond' groups, rather like some other great apes do, and the presence of women as fellow combatants seems to disrupt this.

Quote from: Haffrung;790420The hilarious thing about this thread is the people who know something about history are pointing out how oppressively patriarchal most pre-modern societies were, and the Womyn Warriors crowd are trying to deny it.

Agreed. The physically more powerful thing, while true, is a red herring. Women weren't warriors for the simple reason that their role in society didn't afford them the freedom to be warriors. They pretty much became baby machines as soon as their bodies were capable of bearing children. And the amount of toil involved in raising children, preparing food, etc. was staggering. After their child-bearing years, they were too worn out to do much besides more drudgery. And it's not as though they had any choice in whether they would marry or have children in the first place.

I assume that the handful of women were were warriors in those primitive or unsettled peoples where they have been cited were infertile.

It is not the case that women always and everywhere were forced into marriage and childbearing as soon as they were capable of it. That is perhaps more or less true of some societies such as the Classical Mediterranean world, the Arab Middle East, China and Japan, and possibly India (but India is too diverse to allow for much generalisation). It does not seem generally true of northern Europe and we have no reason to think it was true among the Scythians and other Indo-European/Aryan horse nomads (from whom the Northern European milk-drinking cultures of the Germans & many Celts are primarily* descended). A woman warrior - say a Scythian archer - doesn't need to be infertile, if she's not having sex.

*Lots of fascinating genetics data coming out recently, showing a threefold origin of modern Europeans - the original post-Ice Age hunter gatherers were largely replaced by Levantine/Anatolian farmers, who in turn were largely replaced in most of Europe by horse & cart nomads from north of the Caucasus. This final group seem to correspond to the northern branch of the Indo-European language speakers, the southern branch being the 'Aryans' after whom modern Iran is named - who invaded India and were the ancestors of the Persians.

Quote from: jibbajibba;790441Maybe there is after all some truth in the idea that men solve problems through violence and women solve problems through discussion, maybe men are after all from Mars and women from Venus ?

The evo-psych argument is that violent men on average improve their mating opportunities and thus their genes' chance to reproduce, while violent women on average lower their genes' chance to reproduce, so evolution selects for violent men and non-violent women.

Quote from: jibbajibba;790408We should also face the uncomfortable truth that until the predominance of firearms women are less effective warriors than men.
Exceptional women are just that, exceptional.

Except that crowd hates the concept of exceptionalism, because it means not everybody (them) is fucking special.

Quote from: S'mon;790440Well, the physical differences between physically fit men and women are greater than nerds tend to realise, and greater than Liberal nerds want to realise. The upper body strength of men who've gone through physical training is apparently around twice that of women who've done the same, a very big difference.

*I've met a few 'butt-kicking babe' types IRL, in the army & police - I'd have to confess to sharing this interest.

I'd agree with this. I've been a PT, I work as a Phys Ed teacher and I see the difference between sex abilities daily.

You make allowance for it and program differently in both cases. There are definitely outliers in both cases (girls who will beat 80% of the boys but the female outliers are still nowwhere near the male outliers limits). And most boys would crush most girls in most physical contests. It's really not even close in practice across any wide range of strength, agility or stamina based contests. But I suppose large scale combat is less about individual contests and more about numbers, equipment, circumstance and tactics perhaps.

It still baffles me that people get so offended over 1e's gender maxes (not that I play such rules because of aforesaid outliers and.. GAME).

Having said that I still buy the "1 sex has to carry and produce the babies; the other doesn't" argument strongest. Your society can survive losing % of it's men, the rest can take up the male side of the reproductive side just fine. But if you regularly lose a significant % of women then your society and pool of potential warriors will shrink. That's a losing long term scenario.

Quote from: S'mon;790367However, it seems there is a notable exception re guerilla armies, from the French Resistance to FARC. It seems that when fighting much more powerful enemies, male psychology operates differently. Normally, having female combat soldiers threatens the male warrior's self-conception of heroic manliness. But when the threat is sufficiently overwhelming this self-conception becomes unshakable. Likewise in existential war, it may work to put women in combat (eg the Soviets using women in WW2, or again the early Israeli experience), but when the war is over the demand is to kick the women out again. The implication is that if the FARC were ever to defeat the Columbian government and become the new Columbian State, its female fighters would be disarmed/relegated.

That makes sense to me, and it also fits with the example of ANC from the link in the OP. However, a few thoughts on this:  
(1) Male psychology isn't the same for all cultures. Different historical cultures have given different roles and rights to women and men.
(2) This is roughly the same argument used against having gays in the military - that it threatens manliness. However, there have been historical societies where homosexuality in the military is accepted and successful.
(3) Facing an overwhelming enemy with a guerilla resistance isn't a uniquely modern circumstance. There are many conflicts in pre-modern eras that have been similar.

Quote from: Nexus;790060That's a modern organization. You took something different from the article than I did. I read it as claiming the woman fighters were so historically common that, without the manipulation of the facts and their "erasure" from history it would be considered a common place and not noteworthy. . What do you consider a significant minority?

That sounds like how I interpreted the article, but that doesn't imply that the author thinks women were in equal numbers in combat - just that they existed and took part - and in particular that 20% of ANC fighters being female wasn't unprecedented. I don't have any particular percentage in mind, but from the article, I pictured numbers ranging from 0.5% to 5% being significant. Often this would be less (especially formal armies on the march), but there would be many cases resistance forces, informal fighters, and defending of homes.

Quote from: Haffrung;790420Women weren't warriors for the simple reason that their role in society didn't afford them the freedom to be warriors. They pretty much became baby machines as soon as their bodies were capable of bearing children. And the amount of toil involved in raising children, preparing food, etc. was staggering. After their child-bearing years, they were too worn out to do much besides more drudgery. And it's not as though they had any choice in whether they would marry or have children in the first place.

I assume that the handful of women were were warriors in those primitive or unsettled peoples where they have been cited were infertile.

While I agree that this is the overall logic that favors male fighters, this seems ridiculously absolute. Many societies have sanctioned women not bearing children - nuns being one example, or forbidding widows from re-marrying.  Societies have tendencies, but there are always lots of exceptions as well as people who find ways around the trends.

People are ignoring the effect of social class in the equation. An aristocratic woman has childcare options that a poor one doesn't - ie she can pass off any children she has to someone else (slaves, servants, older women in the tribe/group, etc) to raise. So while there's the disruption of pregnancy and birth, she might otherwise be free to train and fight. But once again, this is a minority of women.

As mentioned, there's also the assumption people are having sex, or at least sex that can result in conception. One of the concerns of the ancients was overpopulation and starvation. The Doric Greek practise of pederasty (inherited by the Spartans and Kretans, amongst others) was designed, insofar as it was designed, to allow sexual outlet without the possibility of children. There were male warrior societies which encouraged sex between soldiers as a way to bond, I don't see any reason to assume this would be different in any female warrior societies.

Quote from: zarathustra;790456Having said that I still buy the "1 sex has to carry and produce the babies; the other doesn't" argument strongest. Your society can survive losing % of it's men, the rest can take up the male side of the reproductive side just fine. But if you regularly lose a significant % of women then your society and pool of potential warriors will shrink. That's a losing long term scenario.

Like I keep saying, it does seem to be about childbearing/non-childbearing and the differential natural selection this creates. But it's operative at the individual level - 'whose individual genes get passed down, ie not female fighters' - not at the group level - 'this group does better by not letting women fight'. Somewhat counter-intuitively, a shortage of reproducing women just isn't normally a significant factor in group survival. Human fertility rates can easily compensate for losing 75% of women in each generation, which is higher than any male loss rates to violence that I've seen. Male loss rates to violence tend to top out at around 60%* in the most violent hunter-gatherer societies, if a particular group takes a higher loss rate than that it's because it's being successfully genocided by rivals. Male loss rates to violence in agricultural societies are normally far, far lower than that.

*That's a lifetime rate - % of men who met a violent end - not the pre-reproduction rate. Many men killed by violence will perish after having reproduced.

Quote from: jhkim;790459That makes sense to me, and it also fits with the example of ANC from the link in the OP. However, a few thoughts on this:  
(1) Male psychology isn't the same for all cultures. Different historical cultures have given different roles and rights to women and men.
(2) This is roughly the same argument used against having gays in the military - that it threatens manliness. However, there have been historical societies where homosexuality in the military is accepted and successful.
(3) Facing an overwhelming enemy with a guerilla resistance isn't a uniquely modern circumstance. There are many conflicts in pre-modern eras that have been similar.

I'd agree with your point #3, and there seems plenty of evidence that historically women have fought to defend hearth, home and children, at least where such defence had reasonable prospect of success - as a rule women aren't particularly inclined to 'doomed last stand' behaviour (again for evo-psych reasons).
On #1, there seem to be some universal constants, that we may share with other related species, but yes there is a lot of variation, and IME it's not that uncommon for women to be classed as 'honorary men' and their sex ignored. That sort of thing varies by culture; some can quite easily accept women as 'one of the boys', others can't (FWIW, my impression is that Australian & British cultures are traditionally much more likely to accept women as 'one of the boys' than American culture is, but that this may be changing under American influence. US culture seems to have far stronger sex distinctions than other Anglo nations).
On #2, well, 'it depends' - Theban or Spartan or Papua New Guinea Highlander 'homosexuality' seems quite different from the modern northern-European-culture conceptualisation. The general view (putting it delicately) seems to be that taking the subordinate or 'womanly' role in homosexual relations is always seen as 'unmanly*', but taking the 'top' role is socially acceptable or approved-of in some cultures. In the Anglosphere you see the latter in American prison culture, but not generally. But the Anglo/NW-European conception of male homosexuality does not distinguish between the two roles the way that Mediterranean or most other cultures do.

*It may be a socially mandated role for boys/male youths though, as in ancient Greece and some PNG Highlander tribes. But this is a role the youth is expected to leave behind as he gets older and becomes a man.

Quote from: Kiero;790467People are ignoring the effect of social class in the equation. An aristocratic woman has childcare options that a poor one doesn't - ie she can pass off any children she has to someone else (slaves, servants, older women in the tribe/group, etc) to raise. So while there's the disruption of pregnancy and birth, she might otherwise be free to train and fight. But once again, this is a minority of women.

As mentioned, there's also the assumption people are having sex, or at least sex that can result in conception. One of the concerns of the ancients was overpopulation and starvation. The Doric Greek practise of pederasty (inherited by the Spartans and Kretans, amongst others) was designed, insofar as it was designed, to allow sexual outlet without the possibility of children. There were male warrior societies which encouraged sex between soldiers as a way to bond, I don't see any reason to assume this would be different in any female warrior societies.

I'd agree with all that. My suspicion re the Scythians, Kurgans etc - the Indo-European horse archer nomads with the warrior-women graves - is that high status women could elect to be warriors, but that that would generally mean not marrying & having children. It's possible they might have had children (with a lower ranking husband?) and passed them off to nursemaids, but the effect of maternity on most psyches is such that I doubt that was common.

Your latter point is very very important for modern people to get their head around. In most of Africa the disease load was such that natural selection and cultural selection encouraged having lots of children. But for most  agricultural cultures, overpopulation and famine have always been the main threat, and cultures developed lots of ways around this. For instance, historically female infanticide has been very common across most of the planet. It's just not the case that females were 'too precious to risk'.

Quote from: zarathustra;790456Having said that I still buy the "1 sex has to carry and produce the babies; the other doesn't" argument strongest. Your society can survive losing % of it's men, the rest can take up the male side of the reproductive side just fine. But if you regularly lose a significant % of women then your society and pool of potential warriors will shrink. That's a losing long term scenario.

but does that actually happen?
After a war does society suddenly become polygamous?

In reality the number of male casualties in an actual war as a % of the male population is actually pretty small.
Even in WW1 the most devastating war in human history, France lost about 4% of it's population predominantly young males and yet the remaining men didn't end up marrying 3 or 4 women to make up for it.

This seems to be a case of us applying "game logic" about how we would make use of our resources in some game of super diplomacy but the real world just doesn't work that way.

Quote from: jibbajibba;790474but does that actually happen?
After a war does society suddenly become polygamous?

In reality the number of male casualties in an actual war as a % of the male population is actually pretty small.
Even in WW1 the most devastating war in human history, France lost about 4% of it's population predominantly young males and yet the remaining men didn't end up marrying 3 or 4 women to make up for it.

This seems to be a case of us applying "game logic" about how we would make use of our resources in some game of super diplomacy but the real world just doesn't work that way.

You are correct. France lost (AFAICR) 1.2 million men in WW1, and few women. The result was (almost) 1.2 million spinsters, not polygamy. Germany lost 2 million, Britain 800,000. In all cases the result was lots of unmarried women.

As I've said, for most of human history lots of women (and men) didn't marry, but they were normally mostly the ones from the poorest social classes; upper class women nearly always married. However WW1 devastated the higher social classes too - and the warrior aristocracies disproportionately so - so the social effects were different, for instance lots of unmarried upper middle class women gave a huge boost to female emancipation.

Quote from: S'mon;790473I'd agree with all that. My suspicion re the Scythians, Kurgans etc - the Indo-European horse archer nomads with the warrior-women graves - is that high status women could elect to be warriors, but that that would generally mean not marrying & having children. It's possible they might have had children (with a lower ranking husband?) and passed them off to nursemaids, but the effect of maternity on most psyches is such that I doubt that was common.

Just on this point, I'm not so sure the choice would have been to not marry and not have children if they wanted to fight. Don't forget, high status people are usually the sorts needed for cementing alliances and such; your "princess" could be a warrior and still need to be marriage-able. Especially if her value as a prospective bride is enhanced by any warrior reputation she might have (for scalps taken/horses stolen/whatever).

Quote from: Kiero;790477Just on this point, I'm not so sure the choice would have been to not marry and not have children if they wanted to fight. Don't forget, high status people are usually the sorts needed for cementing alliances and such; your "princess" could be a warrior and still need to be marriage-able. Especially if her value as a prospective bride is enhanced by any warrior reputation she might have (for scalps taken/horses stolen/whatever).

Maybe; we know almost nothing about these cultures other than their graves, and that the Scythians were the source of the Greek myths of the Amazon warriors, women who supposedly removed a breast to better shoot their bows (not necessary IRL!).

I think we can say that if you want to build a plausible-seeming fantasy society with a recognised role for warrior women, then egalitarian horse nomad archers look like a pretty good prospect. They could also presumably form part of a knightly class in a more settled medievalesque society.  Later compound bows of the Mongols started getting too heavy for most women to use to full effectiveness, but a missile weapon not very dependent on strength looks like a good prospect for a female-friendly armament. With a horse for mobility and reach, it should be an effective combat package.

Quote from: S'mon;790478Maybe; we know almost nothing about these cultures other than their graves, and that the Scythians were the source of the Greek myths of the Amazon warriors, women who supposedly removed a breast to better shoot their bows (not necessary IRL!).

True. I wasn't saying you were wrong, mind, if someone was a second or even third daughter of an august line, their marriage prospects might not be all that important anyway. Or if they were from a distaff or otherwise minor branch of an important family, they might have the freedom to choose not to have a family and focus on being a warrior.

Quote from: S'mon;790478I think we can say that if you want to build a plausible-seeming fantasy society with a recognised role for warrior women, then egalitarian horse nomad archers look like a pretty good prospect. They could also presumably form part of a knightly class in a more settled medievalesque society.  Later compound bows of the Mongols started getting too heavy for most women to use to full effectiveness, but a missile weapon not very dependent on strength looks like a good prospect for a female-friendly armament. With a horse for mobility and reach, it should be an effective combat package.

Agreed, this is a historically tried-and-tested model that would fit easily into most settings. Without having to bring in fantastical justifications. The fact that women are generally smaller and lighter makes them perfect light cavalry soldiers.