What about Scythia? Scythian women often did fight. Perhaps with Scythian influence Greek norms might change.
AHC/PC: Women equal in Athenian democracy
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Could anything move the Greeks away from heavy infantry as their main force, and what options are viable?
What about something religious, recognize that mortal women can have some of Athena's wisdom and skills.
Hmm a religious reason might be an interesting starting point for this, as the Dionysian mystery cult was targeted by authorities in part because of how female centric it was/could be, along with worries about them potentially formenting servile revolt and the liberal use of intoxicants
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What were women's rights like under Xerxes? Could the situation have improved if Persia beat the league back during the Persian Wars?
The Persian empire was very diverse. The answer would be "it depends".
Women, on average, have much less physical strength than men. This puts them at a disadvantage in combat even today, much less in the pre-gunpowder world when the main way of killing consisted of thrusting your spear into an enemy's gut.
So yes, it probably would be impossible.
As a loophole in the property qualification. Adding rights for women qua women in a proto-suffragette way would probably be unrealistic, though.
No city is going to send literally all its menfolk, or even all its property owners, away on war. Even when Greek states marched out "in full force", they'd leave behind a quarter to a third of their manpower to guard against sudden threats.
I'm not sure how much evidence there is for Scythian women actually fighting? There are female burials with bows and arrows and other weapons, but AIUI it's not really certain whether the women in question would be expected to fight or whether this was just a status symbol.
Some good points. I think I agree about the property qualification, maybe going back to what piratedude said. Wouldn't "loophole in the property qualification" just be dismissed by whoever? They'd just say "haha, okay, seriously no women"
Is there any reason they would drop or overlook the requirement to be male?
Thought of an option - allowing war widows to vote. This may or may not be limited by having a non-adult son living with them.
Maybe they could equate childbirth with fighting in war, back then it was just as dangerous. If I remember a mythology book I had once read correctly there was a Mesoamerican civilization who had believed that the best afterlife was reserved for warriors who died in war and women who died in childbirth (though I might be misremembering as it was a while since I last read it).
However, I do not know how likely such a view would be to develop in Ancient Greece.
Maybe Egypt could conquer some Greek polis in Libya or Creta? Though whether it could lead to the desired effects I do not know.
There are instances of property qualification loopholes giving women the right to vote, e.g. in colonial North America. Granted, the position of women in ancient Greece was generally lower than the position of women in 17th-century English North America, so such loopholes would be less likely to fly, but there are precedents.
I believe it was the Aztecs who thought that.
A bunch of scarred female skeletons.
This feels like another "Were there female Norse fighters?" dispute.
How likely would it be for a Greek colony on the outskirts of Scythia to adopt some women's rights?
Or would it be more believable for
Edit: yeah I don't expect Greeks to voluntarily "blend into" a culture lol
Vice magazine isn't a reputable historical source, particularly not when they make false statements like "Archery eliminates the advantages of height, reach, and strength that the majority of men hold over women in hand to hand or bladed combat".
There weren't, or at least not in any appreciable numbers.
Is there any reason to not believe it? I dug a little and most articles on the topic are referencing work by the same author (Adrienne Mayor), but there doesn't seem to be any reason for me to discount it (the graves were indeed found, after all).
On general principles, female warriors (a) were very rare cross-culturally, and (b) would be at a disadvantage against male warriors in combat, so I think our first reaction to claims that such-and-such a culture had a widespread tradition of women fighting alongside men should generally be scepticism.
There are several problems with using the archaeological evidence to infer that the Scythians had a big tradition of female warriors, from what I can see:
(1) Even when a skeleton shows signs of blunt trauma, it's hard to rule out attacks on non-combatants.
(2) We don't know the exact significance of being buried with weapons in Scythian culture -- we can't say for certain that it's a sign that the tomb's occupant was a warrior.
(3) The graves Mayor cites are scattered over the whole of the Eurasian steppe and come from a period of over a thousand years, making the evidence vulnerable to the Chinese robber fallacy -- that is, there are so many graves from the time and place in question, that you can list lots of female graves with weapons and blunt trauma wounds and forget that they're still only a very small proportion of the total set.
Some good points, but it still seems a bit strange to dismiss it outright.
Oh well, I guess.
I agree that it's a huge stretch to say it was widespread. I agree that Mayor has some obvious biases and already has an idea of what she wants to prove. That being said, I think it's plausible that there were some tribes could have had female warriors.
Yeah again I don't think it was "a big tradition". Also I agree that we don't know a whole lot about this (IE some woman might have been killed in a raid = this is seen as a "warriors death" = buried with weapons, maybe?)
Oh well, I guess.
The assumption that they're very rare cross-culturally exists in the context of evidence of female warriors being ignored or downplayed by sexist archaeologists.
Prove it. This sounds like one of those things people say is "just biotruths" but isn't actually true. Modern militaries have determined that what physical differences exist aren't insurmountable barriers, that females perform better on some physical measures (endurance, tolerance of heat and humidity, flexibility), and that there is substantial overlap between the capabilities of males and females.
That reaction has led to accurate claims of female fighting alongside males being viewed as false, though. Again, the Norse example comes to mind. The balance of evidence is that that was a female grave. Yet for over a century it was assumed the bones were male because no one questioned their assumptions that hard. Now we know the bones were female. Similar problems around sex and gender have riddled archaeology for some time. Consider the Andes for another example (not about female warriors, but about female hunters). That doesn't prove how prevalent female warriors were, but maybe we should exercise more skepticism in assuming that all ancient societies had as strict gender roles as typically thought.
There are specific signs of bone stress that can let you tell the difference. There are also patterns in bone trauma. These patterns are present on female Scythian skeletons. To quote:
The evidence that Scythian females fought is really quite clear.
While true, how often does this objection get brought up when using the presence of weapons as evidence for a male skeleton being that of a warrior?
From Jordan (2009):
I don't think twenty percent of warrior graves in the United States from the past ten years are female (16% of American soldiers are women; I don't know how trans people impact this number but I don't think it will be by a significant amount). So based off this, they may actually have been better integrated than contemporary society.
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Cimmerian Bosporus was basically that, but it wasn't especially gender-equal AFAIK.
National-level women's sports teams regularly lose to teenage boys (example, and another). Sounds like quite a bit of a disadvantage to me.
Most of them in support roles; only 2.7% of front-line soldiers are women.
Some anecdotes of women losing sports competitions is a genuinely inane thing to assess female combat capabilities from.
Right, so the statistics we have suggest that the Scythians were substantially more integrated than modern Americans.
(Also, that figure is from when women were barred from infantry and is a decade old.)