Women At War

Antonia Fraser`s History Of Queens Who Rode In Battle

April 02, 1989|By Reviewed by Carolly Erickson, an historian and biographer whose most recent book is ``Bonnie Prince Charlie``.

The Warrior Queens

By Antonia Fraser

Knopf, 383 pages, $22.95 The notion of a woman leading her troops into bloody battle evokes a frisson of horror. We shudder at the image of atrocities instigated by a woman leader, Antonia Fraser writes in ``The Warrior Queens,`` because women have been seen as ``a pacifying influence throughout history.`` Yet as Fraser herself admits, women are not strangers to the battlefield. They have

``fought, literally fought, as a normal part of the army in far more epochs and far more civilizations than is generally appreciated.``

So why should the warrior queens of history have aroused such apprehension? Perhaps the best explanation is one Fraser borrows from Gloria Steinem, who commented that ``we fear women having power in the world because we associate that with childhood.``

If militant female rulers arouse fears of regression, that is only one component in what Fraser calls their ``protean quality.`` Queen Elizabeth I, who avoided marriage (if not love or scandal) throughout her reign, attracted an exaggerated reverence because of her putative virginity, and exploited that reverence for all it was worth.

Catherine the Great of Russia, on the other hand, was an example of what Fraser calls the Voracity Syndrome, in which a warrior queen is perceived as a monster of lust. Dressed in her red and green officer`s uniform, Catherine inspired her soldiers to win some 78 battles. In the intervals between battles, she took the strongest of her guardsmen as lovers. She won admiration but lost respect. The British ambassador pronounced her guilty of ``excesses which would dishonor any woman whatever her station in life.``

Neither a comprehensive survey nor a scholarly inquiry, ``The Warrior Queens`` is a meditation on the nature of the embattled female ruler, informed by history and, to a lesser extent, by feminism.

Fraser is clearly bemused by the heroic figure of Boadicea, the Celtic queen of the Iceni who led her people against the Roman invaders of Britain in the 1st Century A. D. The Boadicea of legend is distilled in Thornycroft`s statue on the Thames embankment, an image of a powerful woman riding in a chariot with knives sprouting from its wheels. (Of the real Celtic queen, whose name was probably Boudica, almost nothing is known.)

Nearly a third of the book is devoted to Boadicea; the remainder analyzes a dozen other warrior queens, including Zenobia, Isabella of Castile, Maria Theresa of Austria and Louise of Prussia. By including Jinga of Angola, Tamara of Georgia and the Rani of Jhansi, Fraser attempts to broaden the geographical scope of her work, but it is essentially confined to Western Europe.

Fraser`s own stance vis-a-vis her warrior queens is ambivalent. She avoids advocacy, but does not avoid ridicule. Queen Anne appears here as ``a gouty old woman with a red spotted face, some nasty bandages and a poultice.`` And Maria Theresa, one of the most spectacularly successful of warrior queens, is reduced to ``an enormous benevolent muffin.`` Too many playful turns of phrase (as when Boadicea ``awakens to the kiss of humanist scholarship``) or chatty asides (as when we are told that 16th-Century queens, like late 20th Century career women, ``experienced regrettable difficulty in `having it all` ``) detract from the seriousness of the inquiry.

There are also gratuitous, or at the very least, incongruous, juxtapositions. Gerard de Nerval`s ``dark gates opening out to nothingness``

are invoked to adumbrate Druidic religion. Boadicea`s battlefield tactics are compared to those of Mao Tse-tung.

Here and there errors mar the generally reliable narrative. More disturbing are references to long discredited works, such as those of Briffault and Bachofen, which Fraser cites as if they were authoritative.

However, popularizers cannot always be exacting historians, and it is a sad truth that popularizers such as Fraser often do a better job of uncovering and conveying worthwhile information to the general reader than do professional historians.

But ``The Warrior Queens`` is worthwhile. With feminism on the wane and women`s issues in retreat politically, we need to be reminded of such heroines as Boudica of the Iceni and the Empress Maud, Queen Urraca of Aragon and Matilda of Tuscany, exemplars of courage all.