Women Warriors and So-Called Armor
I am slowly tiptoeing my way into the edits on Women Warriors: responding to my editor's concerns about structure,* fixing sentences that cause me pain as I read them a month or ten after writing them, tracking down incomplete references,** tightening up some sections, and expanding others. I find it to be a satisfying process, but there is no doubt that it does lead me down side paths that don't directly affect the work at hand. Over the course of nine days, I've dug deeply into the Tailhook scandal, the relationship between the combat exclusion policy and requiring women to sign up for the draft,*** and the troubling question of "boob armor". You can guess which one caught my imagination. (And may make it into the footnotes as part of a brief discussion of the contrast between our response to highly sexualized female warriors in media**** and our historical discomfort with real life women warriors. Not a trivial subject after all.)
For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, "boob armor" refers to the form-fitting breastplates worn by many women warriors in comics, on the cover of pulp-ish fantasy novels, and in video games, television, and movies--and consequently by their cosplaying real life imitators. (Not to mention various Wagnerian sopranos. Opera and space opera have more in common than you might think.) Some versions of boob armor are more overt than others--Xena's armor not only has bra cups but swirls designed to call attention to the same.
Boob armor is at first glance one step better than the pervasive "armor bikini"--which is made of some material generally associated with armor but does not cover any of the body parts you would want armor to protect in case of a fight. But as the video below makes clear, the illusion of greater protection is just that: an illusion. It is intended to suggest that the character is a badass of the baddest variety while still leaving her *ahem* assets as unprotected as those your average damsel in distress.
What does all of this have to do with historical women warriors, you ask? Perhaps nothing. But then again, the image is an old one. It appears in Renaissance paintings of warrior-goddesses and in eighteenth century political cartoons of Britannia at arms. The unspoken message seems to be goddesses and female super-heroes can fight, but regular women? Not so much.
And yet, we know that Joan of Arc Joan transformed herself from a peasant girl in a homespun red dress into a knight, complete with the expensive accoutrements of horse, retinue, standard, and armor. I bet it wasn't boob armor.
Joan of Arc
*Evidently it's weird to have three separate introductions to a book. Who knew?
**In some cases, I didn't have the complete reference and did not want to stop forward motion. But occasionally I didn't write the whole thing down while I had the book in my hand. Why, past self? Why? *Headthunk"
***Evidently eliminating one would trigger constitutional problems with the other. A sample of the twisty thinking and odd arrangements that have been part of discussions about women in the military since World War I, when Western countries first accepted women in the military to different degrees and with different amounts of doublespeak.
****Not a new issue. Read Herodotus's reports about the Amazons. Or eighteenth century ballads about women disguising themselves as men and joining the army, or the navy, or a pirate crew.
NOTE: If you're reading this post as an email, you may need to click through to your browser to see the video. It's worth it.
The Question of the Queen Mother
Speaking of the linguistic booby traps that await the unwary in the pursuit of global history, as I believe we were, I offer you the example of the Queen Mother.
In English, the term "Queen Mother" generally refers to the widow of a king* who is the mother of a reigning monarch. The term has been in use since the sixteenth century, but for most of us, the courtesy title is inextricably linked with one woman: Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (1900-2002), the widow of King George VI of Great Britain and the mother of Elizabeth II.
Portrait of the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, by Richard Stone. Stone placed this portrait in the public domain on his website: "Since The Queen Mother had been such a support to me in my career, it seemed appropriate to place the portrait in the public domain, as a token of my appreciation."
That's all clear enough in theory, though occasionally convoluted in practice.
Things change dramatically when we move our attention to the Asante and Swazi nations of West Africa, where the position that is translated into English as Queen Mother was something entirely different. In these states, the Queen Mother was very seldom the king's mother. The women who held this role were from a generation senior to the reigning king and not always related to him. Holding joint sovereignty with the king, the Queen Mother had her own royal court, council, and army. She served as the king’s chief advisor, was equal to the king in the ruling hierarchy, and played a critical role in choosing the next king.
The best known of these was the Asante Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa of Edweso, who ruled from 1887 to 1900 and led her soldiers in rebellion against the British in the War of the Golden Stool in 1900-1901. A different vision of Queen Mother indeed.
*Also known as a dowager queen. The title distinguishes dowager queens from current queen consorts. It is not used to describe the mother of a ruling monarch who was not previously a queen consort: the most obvious example of this was Queen Victoria's mother, who was the Queen's mother, but not the Queen Mother. Got it?
The Umbrella vs the Crown
In the course of writing Women Warriors, I wrote a lot of variations on the sentence "inherited the throne/crown" . (Or in several instances, "seized the throne/crown". Because transfer of power is often not a bloodless event.) Eventually it dawned on me that while throne and crown can be actual objects, they are also metaphors for rule. Literally snatching a crown from someone's hand is not the same as snatching a kingdom. We all know this. But knowing it in our heads is different from knowing it: the metaphor is deeply coded into our brains and our language.
Once I actively thought about throne and crown as metaphors for rule, I realized that they are inherently western metaphors at that. Not all polities* invest the authority of their rulers in crown or throne. The most important piece of royal regalia in the Ashante kingdom (in modern Ghana) was the Golden Stool--a throne-like symbol so revered that it sat on a stool of its own beside the Ashante king. An umbrella was the symbol of royal authority in a huge portion of the world that includes the Middle East, Egypt and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Persia, South and Southeast Asia, China, Japan and Korea. It appeared as a royal emblem as early as ancient Egypt and as late as nineteenth century West Africa. In some steppe and desert based cultures, the royal symbol was a horsehair whisk. I am sure there are other examples.
Conflating these symbols with thrones and crowns is a problem. If we describe an Ashante stool as a throne, we disguise essential differences between the cultures of say, nineteenth century England and nineteenth century Ashante. At the same time, the words we use in English to describe such symbols reduce their royal and sometimes mystical authority by giving them the names of common, even lowly, household objects. The Incident of the Flyswatter, which set off France's decades-long attempt to conquer North Africa and hence the complex and difficult relationship between modern France and its Muslim citizens, is rendered trivial, even comic, by the way French newspapers described the Algerian royal regalia.
I have no answers. Only a growing awareness that writing global history is laden with booby traps.
*To use a more general term than kingdom, which is laden with linguistic assumptions of its own.