Who's afraid of Penthesilea?

In 2022, a photograph of Annalena Baerbock, then Germany’s foreign minister, made the rounds in the media. It shows her in eastern Ukraine, wearing a military helmet, a black bulletproof vest, and a grave expression. Christoph von Marschall, a journalist at “Der Tagesspiegel” newspaper commented on the image in a television interview, with evident concern: “This image is rather revealing. You can clearly see that this young lady, who is our foreign minister, does not feel particularly comfortable in this situation.” A woman on the front line is an anomaly. Unnatural. An image that sparks pity. The implication here is unmistakable: the first woman to head Germany’s Foreign Office is not up to the job because she's a “young lady.” Too delicate, therefore, not suited—and, truth be told, not especially welcome on a battlefield. Men are unsettled when those who can give life are present where it is being extinguished.

Oddly enough, at the same time Western war iconography is riddled with images of the woman bearing arms—at least as allegory. And this didn't start with Wonder Woman or with Marianne, the French national symbol, who in Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting—bare-breasted, of course—leads the people into revolution with the tricolour in one hand and a bayonet in the other. Neither the ancient Greeks nor the Romans allowed women into their armies. Yet their goddess of war and wisdom was Athena, or Minerva—a virginal figure who was armed.

There are also the myths around the Amazons: wild warrior women who are said to have cut off a breast to draw the bow more easily. Their queen, Penthesilea, was slain by Achilles. When her helmet slipped from her head, he fell in love with her—posthumously. The armed woman is unsettling, yet, so long as she can be defeated by a man, somehow also alluring. Consider the German counterpart to Penthesilea: the warrior Brunhilde, overcome twice by Siegfried through trickery and ultimately raped by Gunther.

“It unsettles men when those who can give life are present when it is being destroyed” 

A woman who fights, as the journalist Andrea Böhm argues in her book “Fighting Like a Woman”, challenges not only the fantasy of male omnipotence, but also “the very foundation of one of the central power relations of recent human history: the physical monopoly on violence claimed by men.” In truth, this monopoly—still justified today by the supposed physical inferiority of women and their presumed fragility—is a fiction, as I argue in my German-language book “Vielfalt - Eine andere Geschichte der Menschheit” (Diversity - another history of humanity).

While historically documented female fighters such as Jeanne d’Arc are often cast as sexually unavailable exceptions, women were already going out to hunt at the very dawn of human history, in the Stone Age. Evidence for this was found in a grave in the Peruvian Andes that was excavated in 2018 by the American archaeologist Randall Haas. Because both the skeletons they found were buried with hunting weapons and tools, Haas and his team initially assumed they were men. Only when laboratory analysis revealed that one of the individuals was female did researchers revisit similar finds in a broader study—one in which Haas also took part. The team concluded that between 30 and 50 percent of big-game hunters in Stone Age Americas may well have been women.

In the antiquity, female warriors were far from a fictional phenomenon. Roman elites, when confronted with armed women at the front, found the sight just as improper and unsettling as Christoph von Marschall did. Yet among both Germanic and Celtic peoples, women fighters were by no means unusual; among the latter, the military leader Queen Boudicca made her name by leading her troops against Roman occupiers in Britain in AD 60. Even in Rome’s arenas—long a favourite stage for machismo—women fought as gladiators. Cassius Dio reports that Nero had enslaved Ethiopian women sent into the arena. The British Museum holds a second-century relief from Halicarnassus, in what is now Turkey, depicting two gladiatrices in combat. Anyone inclined to dismiss all this as ancient history should cast a glance at the modern era, where women were frequently armed too. During the French Revolution, for instance, some 6,000 market women marched on Versailles with sabres and axes to force the king to address widespread famine.

Nor were women any less bloodthirsty than their male revolutionary counterparts. The so-called “tricoteuses” became notorious for attending executions and knitting at the foot of the guillotine. The revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, as is well known, was stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday. Yet in the Western cultural imagination, women in war are still cast primarily as victims. Centuries ago, particularly in the context of colonialism, conquered lands were likened to women being raped. Vladimir Putin has drawn on this tradition, notably at a press conference in 2022 shortly before launching his war against Ukraine, when he quoted lines from a misogynistic Russian folk song: “Whether you like it or not—you’ll have to put up with it, my beauty.” And yet recent history offers countless examples of women fighting in large numbers on the front line. In the Spanish Civil War, 20,000 women from the anarchist organisation Mujeres Libres took up positions in the trenches to defend freedom against the dictator Francisco Franco. During World War II, women served not only in medical units and espionage but also in combat. An estimated 800,000 to one million women served in the Red Army alone, as tank drivers, combat pilots and snipers.

“Despite all these examples, the woman at war remains, in the West, an enigma—somewhere between fetish, unnatural hybrid, and poor young lady”

Armed women in the Global South have received particularly scant attention. In the Vietnam War, more than 1.5 million women are estimated to have fought in the army or in guerrilla units. The Mariana Grajales Platoon—founded and trained personally by Fidel Castro and named after an Afro-Cuban heroine of the struggle against Spanish rule—formed part of the revolutionary forces. When some of his men complained and asked why scarce rifles were being given to women, Castro is said to have replied: “Because they are better soldiers than you—they are more disciplined.”

Despite all this, the figure of the woman at war remains an enigma in the West, hovering somewhere between fetish, unnatural hybrid and pitiable young lady. Yet attempts to challenge this image and render often invisible female fighters visible bring their own contradictions. On the one hand, it is important to highlight the achievements of women combatants—not least to dismantle the spurious claim that a male monopoly on violence is in any way justified or “natural.” On the other, one cannot ignore that the architects of today’s wars are, without exception, men. Women have amply demonstrated that they can be soldiers; they are, however, most often compelled to fight because they are subjected to violence created by men.

This tension helps explain why feminists struggle with the current debate over compulsory military service for women. On one side lies the argument that gender equality should extend to duties such as military service. On the other is the question of fairness: how can it be just to send women—who, even in Germany, face discrimination across almost every sphere of life—into battle as well? In Germany, even in peacetime, a woman is killed almost every day, most often by a partner or former partner. Within the military itself, women face severe discrimination. In January this year, investigations were launched against 55 soldiers in an elite Bundeswehr unit, the Fallschirmjägerregiment 26, including allegations of sexism and rape threats against female soldiers. Should more not first be done to ensure that men respect women and protect them from themselves, before pushing them into the line of fire against other men? And yet there are also arguments that it is neither feminist, nor in women’s interests, to expect only men to fight wars.

As of December 2025, more than 70,000 women serve in Ukraine’s armed forces, nearly 20,000 of them in combat roles—voluntarily. Could the front have held as long if only men were defending the country? Very likely not. Even in countries often seen as particularly feminist, such as Sweden or Israel, women are not treated fundamentally differently from men when it comes to military service. And in Kurdish Rojava, female soldiers have for more than a decade been standing their ground against Islamist militias, defending one of the last places in the Middle East where women can live autonomously and as equals.

“How can we ensure that women—historically and today—are recognised as soldiers?”

So are women exposing themselves to an additional layer of patriarchal violence when they fight in wars begun by men? Or, by refusing to fight, do they risk being cast as damsels in distress, waiting to be rescued? These contradictions can only be resolved if we ensure that women can serve in the armed forces without suffering violence within their own ranks. How can we secure recognition for women as soldiers, past and present, without their being sexualised or demeaned? How do we prevent the armed woman from being instrumentalised as an icon to justify, glorify or fetishise violence itself? How can non-binary people and their needs be meaningfully included in the debate? And how do we ensure—most crucially—that diplomacy, rather than imperialism, once again takes centre stage in global politics, protecting people of all genders from violence alike? The woman bearing arms is nothing unnatural. She has always existed, and has been involved in both heroic resistance and brutal bloodshed. Only by acknowledging her in all her power, vulnerability and complexity can this enigma be viewed in feminist terms.