The word warrior once held a dense meaning for me. Unlike viridian and iridescent and saffron which decorate the language like twinkling lights in pine branches on a dark night, warrior came with an entire mythology. Warrior was a portal through which I entered a different world, a magic term that released a cornucopia of vision and emotion. This was in the Eighties and Nineties when the concept of a woman warrior was still a novelty. Much of the women’s movement was rooted in the left and the left still took a large measure of its self regard from having opposed the Vietnam War and many leftists had done so by donning a pacifist mantle. A woman warrior was certainly a contradiction for an anti-war pacifist.
Yet how could I give up the Amazons, woodland Artemis or armored Athena? In the conversation that sparked this essay, I was reminded that I was not the only one who was attracted and inspired by these archetypal figures. They inspired Monique Wittig, Sally Gearhart and Mary Daly to name lesbian women’s movement writers, and speculative fiction writers like Suzy McKee Charnas, Marge Piercy, CJ Cherryh and Marian Zimmer Bradley. The concept of the woman warrior gained traction until she leapt fully leather-armored into the cultural zeitgeist in the form of Xena: Warrior Princess.
I was still struggling at that time on two fronts with how to make a realistic fiction of a time and place where both women and men chose the roles they wanted. First, there was the fact that, other than Amazons, I knew of no historical or semi-historical recorded culture to use for reference. So I made one up and far enough in the past for such a place to be plausible. I don’t for an instant regret how much reading I did for this, pushing my knowledge of prehistory farther and farther back. Still, after a few seasons of Xena, I realized that my imagination hadn’t lacked knowledge as much as it had images of women capable of defending their own survival.
As an aside, I’d like to suggest the Boudica series by Manda Scott as what I would have liked to write if I had been a much better writer than I am. The four books are an extraordinary evocation of a Celtic resistance to Imperial Rome. Scott’s story is only one example of the fine fiction that has flourished in the ground prepared by the women’s movement.
Despite learning that a woman warrior was quite plausible, I still had to consider the problem of violence. It was wrong, wasn’t it? For a time I thought of the warrior as answering a call, accepting a vocation. I imagined the shaggy musk oxen creating a circle around the calves to protect them from the wolf pack. I imagined ancestral women donning horned skulls so as to no longer appear easy prey when they stood guard at the edge of the nightfire light. I read of women who took up weapons to resist fascism, colonialism and imperialism. I hoped that etymology might help me resolve the problem of violence by allowing me to merge warrior and guardian. At the root of guardian in Indo-European you will find *wer- which gave rise to watch out for, to ward, to be a steward, all having the meaning of protect and defend. At the root of war is *wers- meaning to confuse, to mix up. The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories notes that “Curiously, no Germanic nation in early historic times had any word properly meaning ‘war’…. The Romanic-speaking peoples took Germanic werra ‘confusion, discord’ as the closest term.” (p.545)
Perhaps etymology could not absolve the warrior’s vocation, but this would not be the only instance of a need to embody competing purposes, in this case to protect and to harm. Indeed, perhaps that’s why a number of cultures surround the warrior with ritual. In Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko tells of a young Laguna Pueblo man returning from WWII whose experiences must be mitigated by sacred traditions before he can regain his wholeness. In Daughters of Copper Woman by Anne Cameron it is said that several generations of peace are needed to cleanse and heal the damage done by war.
Just as images of women warriors proliferated through the Nineties and then exploded in the Oughts, so did the use of the word warrior slip into wider usage to refer to soldiers. Perhaps one of the most poignant meditations I’ve come across is a collection of anguished poems by Frances Richey, The Warrior, centering around her son who became a Green Beret. She remembers her boy, I perceive an arrogant and callous man, not substantially different from others who now call themselves warriors.
I accept that I am not a pacifist, may never truly have been, and that I am not so much anti-war as anti- specific wars. History does not sustain for me a belief that societies and cultures can survive without defenders. Not in the real world. However I can no longer find in “warrior” much of the meaning that once inspired me. My warrior was no soldier and fought for no state.
