We're covering seven real female warriors and soldiers across four continents and almost 1,900 years of history — women who disguised themselves as men to fight, and women who didn't have to. Featuring Hannah Snell (the British soldier who enlisted to hunt down her husband), Sarah Rosetta Wakeman (a Civil War soldier who kept her secret to the grave), Nadezhda Durova (the Russian cavalry officer awarded the St. George Cross), the Trung sisters (who led an army of 80,000 to overthrow Han China), Mai Bhago (the Sikh warrior who turned back an army of deserters), and Yaa Asantewaa (the Ashanti queen mother who led her people to war). Plus: what Deborah Sampson's story has in common with all of them.
A history podcast episode on women warriors, female soldiers, and women in war — from the American Revolution and the Civil War to the Napoleonic Wars, the Mughal-Sikh Wars, and the Ashanti Empire.
Sources:
Hannah Snell:
Hannah Snell — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Snell
Forces News: “Hannah Snell, A Female Soldier In Disguise”
Royal Marines History: “Hannah Snell Joins the Marines, 1747”
British Tars, 1740–1790: “Hannah Snell, A Woman and a Marine”
The Hunterian Blog: “Hannah Snell — Cross Dressing in the 1700s”
Academic: “Body and Gender Expressed by the Cross-Dressing of Hannah Snell…” (Academia.edu)
Primary: Robert Walker (attrib.), The Female Soldier; or, The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750)
Deborah Sampson:
American Battlefield Trust: Deborah Sampson
National Women's History Museum: Deborah Sampson
Massachusetts Historical Society: “Deborah Sampson, Soldier in Disguise”
Paul Revere House: “Quitting the Male Habit” (Revere's 1804 pension letter, digitized at MHS)
Historic New England: “Deborah Sampson, Fighting for Recognition”
Just Teach One: The Female Review (1797) — annotated teaching edition
Hanna Lauren Kawamoto, The Female Soldier: Gender Performance and National Identity (UC Irvine MA thesis, 2025) — open access, escholarship.org/uc/item/5wr4x7h5. Covers Sampson plus Margaret Cochran Corbin & Anna Maria Lane.
Georgina K. Lock, “Honouring the Wound…” Linguaculture, Issue 2 (2011) — open access, covers Snell & Sampson plus Pauline Cushman.
Sarah Rosetta Wakeman:
American Battlefield Trust: Sarah Rosetta Wakeman
Sarah Rosetta Wakeman — Wikipedia
Emerging Civil War: “From History's Shadows — Sarah Rosetta Wakeman”
Lauren Cook Burgess, ed., An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman… (Oxford University Press, 1994)
DeAnne Blanton & Lauren M. Cook, They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2002)
Nadezhda Durova:
Reddit r/badhistory writeup on Durova scholarship [non-historian source — use with caution]
Ruth Averbach, “The Unmaking of a Man: Aleksandr Aleksandrov/Nadezhda Durova,” Slavic Review (Cambridge Core)
UBC lecture on Soviet-era erasure of the gender identity question (open.library.ubc.ca)
Primary: Nadezhda Durova, The Cavalry Maiden (memoir, various translated editions)
Trung Sisters:
Primary: Book of the Later Han (Fan Ye, 5th c.); Dai Viet Su ky toan thu (Ngo Si Lien, 15th c.)
Keith Weller Taylor (Cornell) — commentary on women's status and the disputed Thi Sach execution narrative [locate specific published piece before recording]
Mai Bhago:
General Sikh history sources — record is thin and contested; flag on air. Recommend a targeted search for Sikh studies journal articles on Mai Bhago / Chali Mukte before recording if a stronger citation is needed.
Synthesis / Institutional Context:
“Monstrous Regiment” — History Today (1793 French decree)
“Women and Military Institutions in Early Modern Europe: A Reconnaissance,” Signs journal
Rudolf Dekker & Lotte van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (Macmillan, 1989) — open access copy at Erasmus University repository (repub.eur.nl/pub/16934)