It is not difficult to see why this philosophy should be widely held. ‘The act of giving birth itself has been considered throughout history to be ‘profoundly incompatible with the act of dealing death’; thus wrote Nancy Huston in a 1986 symposium of ‘contemporary perspectives’ entitled The Female Body in Western Culture.8 Biology alone – or by extension let us call it chivalry – provides an obvious explanation: if women, as the mothers of the race, need physical protection which they in turn extend to their young, then surely it is unreasonable, even unkind, to expect them to take part in war as well. From women’s weaker physical strength, a more or less universal estimate, springs the concept of their tenderness, again an almost if not entirely universally held opinion; an extension of this is their timidity. (Why not be timid if physically so much weaker than a potential aggressor? It is a reasonable reaction.) And from their tenderness in one sense is derived another sense of their tenderness: woman the nurse, the nurturer, the succourer …
The epitaph to Pocahontas in St George’s churchyard, Gravesend, on the outskirts of London, where she lies buried, is a perfect case in point: ‘Gentle and humane, she was the friend of the earliest struggling English colonists whom she boldly rescued, protected and helped.’ It was an early American feminist writer, Margaret Fuller, who commented on the universal appeal of the American Indian Princess: ‘All men love Pocahontas for the angelic impulse of tenderness and pity that impelled her to the rescue of Smith’, she wrote in The Great Lawsuit: Man v. Woman, first published in The Dial, Boston, in 1843; while women pity her for ‘being thus made a main agent in the destruction of her own people’.9 Compared to Boadicea, with those threatening knives on the wheels of her chariot, Pocahontas is a heroine who fulfils the highest expectations concerning her sex in general.
The problems of ‘masculinity’ in a woman – inevitable in some sense in a woman who leads in war – were argued by Helene Deutsch, one of the first four women to be analysed by Freud. The Psychology of Women was a comprehensive study of the female life-cycle and emotional life, which extended and modified Freud’s own postulates. In it, Helene Deutsch devoted considerable discussion to what she called ‘The “Active” Woman’ and her ‘Masculinity Complex’ which ‘originates in a surplus of aggressive forces that were not subjected to inhibition and that lack the possibility of an outlet such as is open to man. For this reason the masculine woman is also the aggressive woman.’ This view stretches back at least as far as the wild, untamed and basically anarchic conception of the female in Athenian drama, at a time when woman’s physical nature was itself thought to be unstable (based on the demands of her reproductive system).10
Although The Psychology of Women was published in 1944 (in the United States whither Helene Deutsch had fled in 1933), time and political events have not diminished the strong perceived connection between ‘masculinity’ – activity – in a woman and an ‘aggression’ felt by many to be unsuitable in one of her sex.
It is the leading role upon the stage which is felt to be unnatural in a woman, as opposed to any role. Many men all through history have after all been content to accept and even approve the ambitions of Fulvia, wife to Antony, as described by Plutarch: ‘her desire was to govern those who governed or to command a commander-in-chief’. Cleopatra the dominatrix (and the seducer) is another matter. Boadicea herself may have acted the Fulvia before the death of her husband Prasutagus: we cannot know, pace Judy Grahn’s free-wheeling lesbian Celt. When women have been compelled by circumstances to take a dominating role, they are expected to surrender it gracefully afterwards; the ‘natural’ behaviour is that of Spenser’s Britomart, the chaste warrior–maid who finally dropped her shield when her purpose was fulfilled and became ‘a gentle courteous Dame’. As for the unnatural Amazons whom Britomart subdued, ‘that liberty’ being removed from them, which they as women had wrongfully usurped, they were returned to ‘men’s subjection’.11
The strong contention of many theorists of the Women’s Movement that war itself is the product of aggressive masculine values, and might even be eliminated if ‘the whole wide world’ were under ‘a woman’s hand’ (one of the Sibylline prophecies linked to Cleopatra), meshes of course with these more primitive feelings.12 Spare Rib’s denunciation of Mrs Thatcher following the Falklands War for promoting such values will be recalled, but the point is inclined to emerge whenever women, outraged by the depredations of war, manage to find a voice.
Militarism versus Feminism was written in 1915, the anguished product of feminist pacifism in response to the first terrible months of carnage in the First World War.13 It was in effect a plea for internationalism – the Hague Women’s Peace Conference of that year – in the cause of peace. The three authors, Mary Sargent Florence, Catherine E. Marshall and C. K. Ogden, argued not only that war was man’s creation (as opposed to woman’s) but also that man used war as a weapon in order to keep the other sex in perpetual subjection, since in time of war he was the manifest ruler. Catherine Marshall in particular, a prime mover behind the setting up of the conference, referred to the ‘deep horror of war’ which had entered into the soul of the organized Women’s Movement, adding her belief that ‘women’s experience as mothers and heads of households’ had given them ‘just the outlook on human affairs’ which was needed in such a process of international and creative reconstruction. (This is the argument which Mrs Thatcher, following the Falklands War, stood on its head by announcing that it was just her practical feminine abilities as a homemaker which had enabled her to keep going in the direction of military affairs.)
‘But if woman climbed up to the clearer air above the battlefield’, wrote Catherine Marshall in 1915, ‘and cried aloud in her anguish to her sisters afar off: “These things must not be, they shall never be again!”, would man indeed say, “Down with her!” Would he not allow her prerogative? Would he not even wish to climb up, too?’ Once again, the experience of women sixty or seventy years later protesting at Greenham Common against nuclear weapons in the cause of peace does not suggest that man necessarily allows woman her prerogative in this respect. Nor does it propose that all men (any more than all women) wish to climb up to the clearer air above the battlefield.
Nevertheless the sheer appalling magnitude of the disaster to humankind inherent in any actual use of nuclear weapons suggests an interesting possibility. John Keegan, at the end of The Mask of Command (1987), a study in heroic leadership, calls for a new ‘Post-heroic leadership’; he points out that the old inspiring ‘heroic’ leader, at the forefront of the battle itself, has been rendered obsolete and even dangerous by the advent of nuclear weapons. ‘Today the best must find convictions to play the hero no more’; leaders should now be chosen for ‘intellectuality’ and the capacity for making decisions.14 Women might now make more suitable political leaders than men (being strong enough not to press the button), provided of course that the conventional view of woman the peacemaker is accepted.
Certainly for many feminists the connection between women and peace remains ‘some sort of “given” ’ – the phrase is that of the more sceptical Lynne Segal. As Petra Kelly for example wrote in 1984 in Fighting for Hope: ‘Woman must lead the efforts in education for peace awareness, because only she can … go back to her womb, her roots, her natural rhythms, her inner search for harmony and peace …’. Woman’s pacific nature can however only be taken as some sort of given so long as any outstanding woman who does not seem to suffer from conspicuously peaceful inclinations is treated as an honorary male. According to this argument, which has a circular quality, Tomyris, issuing her plea to Cyrus of Persia, ‘Rule your own people, and try to bear the sight of me ruling mine’, is acting in accordance with her true feminist nature, whereas the same Queen Tomyris who had Cyrus put bloodily to death was acting as a man.15 In the absence of an all-female-ruled state (with all-female-ruled neighbours) the thesis must remain unproved. But the importance of the argument from the point of view of a study of Warrior Queens is that it
represents the meeting point of visionary feminism and its direct opposite: war is an unnatural occupation for a woman.
We return to the question of motherhood, at the source of this unease. The idea of female dominion, that authority posed in childhood from which happy infants must one day escape for the sake of their own maturity, is surely also at the source of the implicit threat posed by the notion of the Warrior Queen. Many percipient women writers and activists have drawn attention to this phenomenon, from Margaret Fuller in 1843 who wrote, ‘Man is of Woman born and her face bends over him in infancy with an expression he can never quite forget’, to Gloria Steinem in 1987 who suggested that part of the antagonism towards Mrs Thatcher ‘may be because, in a deep sense, we fear women having power in the world because we associate that with childhood’.16
Dorothy Dinnerstein, in a classic of feminist psychological analysis first published in the United States in 1976, drew attention to woman’s primary role in infant care as being responsible for early memories of her domination. For while woman continues to be the parent who is the ‘first [remembered] boss’ in most societies in the world, her relationship to other adults will be unfavourably affected by these memories. ‘The right to be straightforwardly bossy – the right to exercise will head-on … – cannot reside as comfortably in a woman as a man’, wrote Dorothy Dinnerstein.17
That this is true at least in some measure is indicated most recently by the innumerable references to Mrs Thatcher as ‘Nanny’, one famed for her ‘bossiness’. (The equivalent words used for a male prime minister might be ‘autocrat’ and ‘authoritativeness’.) It is therefore fascinating to observe the ways in which the Warrior Queens in history have felt their way to a solution to the problem. At the same time, these solutions, universally adopted, also do suggest that there was (and is) such a universal problem.
Adopting the role of an honorary male has been only one among the expedients employed by the Warrior Queens with instinctive or calculated cunning, a quality which they have certainly needed in order to survive in what has always been realistically a man’s world. It has however been one of the most successful – to act the King of Kartli as Tamara did, the Catholic King of Spain like Isabella, a mighty prince like Elizabeth I, rex noster of Hungary like Maria Theresa. The frequency with which the Tomboy Syndrome is found in accounts of the childhood of a given Warrior Queen testifies to the same deliberate process. The type of Camilla of the Volsci (‘her girl’s hands had never been trained to Minerva’s distaff’) occurs again and again, be it in the young Catherine the Great who never cared to play with girlish dolls, or in Mrs Gandhi who employed her own dolls in creating Indian nationalist battles. The message put across is that an ‘honorary boy’ has been the father to the honorary man.
Fortunately adopting the role of the honorary male has not precluded the Warrior Queen from appealing at the same time to the chivalrous instincts of her compeers, the real males. Rather the reverse has been found to be the case, as the Warrior Queen, so clearly marked out by her femininity in a man’s world, has employed another successful series of expedients based on this evidently singular fact. The use of masculine uniform or military accoutrements which set off rather than conceal her sex is one of them. The concept of chivalry due towards the tender woman is also responsible for the Shame Syndrome whereby the Warrior Queen is able to contrast her own willed courage with that lassitude of the supposedly courageous-by-nature males around her. Thus Queen Isabella’s grandees were sufficiently ‘mortified’ at being outdone in zeal for the holy war by a woman to renew their energies.18
The Shame Syndrome can in turn lead on to the popular estimate of the Warrior Queen as being the ‘Better-Man’ (of the two: if a husband such as Frederick of Prussia and a wife such as Louise is involved). Or it can lead to the Warrior Queen’s own protestations of being ‘Only-a-Weak-Woman’: ‘just a lady and timid too’ as the beautiful, bold Caterina Sforza declared herself, in order to show up her superior strategic skill. This pose of being ‘Only-a-Weak-Woman’ is of course also convenient when trouble looms: for the Warrior Queen can hope to avoid responsibility at the same time. Hence wily Zenobia was able to live on in her Roman villa, swift female dromedary forgotten, on the grounds that ‘many persons’, i.e. her male advisers, ‘had seduced her as a simple woman’ into mounting her campaigns.19
Since none of these poses, attitudes or expedients would be possible without the existence of the masculine audience at which they are aimed, all of them merely serve to emphasize the Appendage Syndrome. Very few outstanding women in history have achieved or been granted their place without the benefit of some kind of male-derived privilege, generally that of descent, whatever glorious destiny has ensued. This is certainly true of the Warrior Queens, up to the second half of the twentieth century.
Understandably, most Warrior Queens have underlined their claims as honorary males by emphasizing such connections. ‘I am descended from mighty men!’: thus Boadicea boasted in her last speech, at least according to Tacitus.20 It is a pattern – that of Elizabeth I, ‘Great Harry’s daughter’ still, to the end of her long reign – which has been pursued. For such emphasis, like the pose of being an honorary male, once again enables the Warrior Queen to preserve her place within the natural order. She must never forget that the original importance of the Amazon tribe to the Greeks was as a tribe of unnatural as well as belligerent females, unnatural because they were outside the control of men, and nobody’s appendage.
It is however in the confrontation with the whole treacherous theme of motherhood and the unsuitability of the mother to do battle, that the wits of the Warrior Queen have had to be most subtly exercised. In this connection it is significant how many successful Warrior Queens – in the eyes of the world – have been seen to be acting on behalf of their children. Even Cleopatra drew about her the authority of co-rulership, according to Ptolemaic custom, with her infant son. This is one extension of the Appendage Syndrome which carries with it considerable allure. For there is nothing in the slightest bit unnatural about the mother’s defence of her young, which can even be quite blatantly aggressive without incurring the taint of ‘masculinity’. The rape of Boadicea’s daughters, the imagined agonies of the mother as a result, provide after all the most sympathetic explanation for the atrocities which followed her uprising.
Otherwise a protective and appealing maternity casts a pleasant gloss on what might be the harsh picture of a Warrior Queen, as Maria Theresa realized when she sent a picture of herself with her son to General Khevenmüller with the poignant question: ‘What do you think will become of this child?’ No wonder the troops the next day at Linz, shown the picture and read the letter, roared their enthusiasm! The persistent legends concerning the Rani of Jhansi riding into battle with her adopted son Damodar on the horse behind her, and similar depictions, even if not accurate, belong to the same tradition as does the legend of her dying words ‘Look after Damodar’, spoken in a temple (although, as has been seen, a variety of independent witnesses confirm that she died in the heat of battle). In the nineteenth century Agnes Strickland summed up a widespread feeling of approval for the Mother–Warrior when she described Stephen’s wife, ‘good Queen Matilda’, as avoiding ‘all Amazonian display’ by acting in the name of her son.21
There is another way of handling the whole matter of war and woman’s maternal role in terms of war and that is – triumphantly ignoring the ‘unnatural’ taint – to make of it something boldly transcendent. It is this which accounts for the palpitating thrill which the idea of the Warrior Queen arouses, threat as she may be. The most successful Warrior Queens have always been those who pre-empted the obvious disadvantage of their sex in this field by turning it into an apparent advantage; and biological motherhood is after all the one role which is totally closed to man. Thus the role of the fighting mother in wartime can be put across as primordially patriotic, instead of primitively distasteful, that of Catherine the Great for example, being hailed by her troops as
the ‘Little Mother’ of Russia. Soon the ‘Mother of her Country’ begins to be seen in a supernatural rather than an unnatural light: a goddess, a Mother – Goddess perhaps, and by extension a Goddess of War.
The supernatural aura of the Warrior Queen has the further effect of sanctifying the nation’s struggle in its own eyes: and all through history it is always good for morale to be fighting a holy war. When Judith struck off the head of Holofernes, according to the tenth-century poem, she ‘ascribed the glory of all that to the Lord of Hosts’. A kind of pious patriotism, like the stance of outraged motherhood, gives moral authority to many a Warrior Queen, enabling her to become a Holy Figurehead of her nation’s aspirations, as the Arab Lady of Victory with her long hair and her lute in the forefront of the battle embodied an appeal to valour, honour and passion.22 When the Warrior Queen is successful in her dominion, the way is paved for the idea of the golden age of the nation – especially golden since over it presides a goddess.
The type of goddess most usefully personified by a given Warrior Queen alters, of course, from country to country, age to age and civilization to civilization. If Boadicea represented some kind of Celtic war-goddess and Queen Jinga of Angola an ancient African mother-deity, then Isabella the Catholic was elevated as ‘the new Eve’, the madonna of her country. This is a conspiracy into which the male population enters willingly: given that circumstances have brought about some form of female rule in war, a supernatural woman leader is infinitely better than an unnatural one.