Throughout history, military might has led nations to territorial conquest. Military might is influenced by many factors. A highly advanced military may be able to field a small army and conquer. When two armies of similar technology meet, two factors remain important: leadership and numbers.
Good leaders follow military maxims as old as Sun Tzu, Napoleon, or Clausewitz. They know the terrain of battle, the ideal time for battle, the maneuvers, the logistics, delegation of authority, the strategic goals, the strategies, the tactics, and small-unit deployment. Good leadership can overcome numbers.
Equal leaders on equal footing are likely to find victory in numbers. A unit of 1,000 will always struggle to beat a unit of 1 million. Very few soldiers have an Enola Gay.
As a result of numbers, it is easy to guess what will happen to a mass of peasants attacking a city that lacks medieval walls. Death and destruction. For the peasants who lack property to defend, mayhem and destruction are the best way to overcome a more sophisticated city. Peasants can turn to marauders if they find a systematic method of attack. This fear and terror can enrich a marauder through coercive demands for tribute or Danegeld.
The city dweller or rural land owners make money wealth from property owned. Peasants and marauders make wealth from actions taken. The more aggressive the action, the more fear generated, the more wealth obtained.
The most dangerous marauders have been the swift by land and sea. The Mongol hords and the Vikings are the best examples of each, but are not unique in history. Each of these had little use for specific land. Mostly their lack of interest in land was because their homelands could be barren and desolate in long cycles. They needed to be able to move over large distances to provide food for their families. The ability to hunt translated easily into an ability to make war.
Chinese history and Western European history are filled with marauders conquering farmers then conquering cities then conquering empires. Why is that?
No small portion of this pattern is due to the influence of women.
Women prefer home and stability. For city dwellers, how this pattern plays out is obvious to the modern eye. A new bride wants a nice home for her two future children. She decorates the house nicely. She may push her husband to do some yard work. She wants her house to be in good repair, preferably by her husband's hand. Her goal is a life focused on the family, home, and local community.
Women who live on old fashioned farms had many of these same desires but had a heavier focus on tasks that kept a home functioning without as many city services or nearby groceries to provide basic food stuffs. They had to do many back-breaking chores routinely. They had a profound respect for their husbands and "'menfolk" who took on these and heavier chores with quiet fortitude. My family lost many of these women through old age in the 1980's and 1990's.
I can only imagine the wives and daughters of herdsmen, fishermen, or nomadic hunters. These women were often left with their children without their husbands for long periods of time. Their responsibility for fulfilling all functions of home and field were even more intense than a mid-twentieth century American farm wife. I can only imagine the respect that these women held for their husbands when they were successful bringing home a bounty. I can also imagine their anger if the men came home empty handed.
Now let's imagine a rough and tumble young teenage boy raised in each of these households with a mother annoyed with her son's antics. What is the city dweller, farm wife, or hunter's wife going to say to her son? Will the city dweller encourage the testosterone rush? I can imagine throughout history that first-generation city dwellers would be reluctant to minimize the male attitude. The mother might seek to channel the effort into aggressive sports that encourage traits that the mother respected in her father before moving to the city. What if other city dwelling women looked down on such encouragement of rough sports? Women reinforcing women would tend suggest a push against traditional male behavior.
Now place the same teenager in a farm wife's kitchen. Different result? If she were like my grandmother, she would only say, "Take it outside!" The problem was not behavior. It was "the proper time and place for everything." The boy could still be a boy. The farm wife knew that strength and competitiveness had a place on a farm. Who could till the most soil? Who could harvest the most corn? The competitive farmer was likely going to earn the most and be best positioned to buy out his neighbor's crop ground in bad times.
The same teenager in a hunter's household would actually be in training for the skills he would need to hunt. Need I say more?
What about birth rates? Cities are more expensive because land is more limited and more competing buyers. Land prices make all resources in the city more expensive because of rent and acquisition prices. This makes large families extremely expensive. Farms produce their own food and before mechanized farming required many persons. Rich farmers often had large families to provide the labor. Herders tended to have large families to provide work, too. Marauders created their own armies because more fighters meant more victories in acquiring land, food, or tribute.
Land acquisition costs and birth rates usually fight each other.
How do war and child raising fit together? Cities have traditionally fielded sophisticated armies with a tendency to grow soft and compliant, leading to conquest of the city. Farmers make loyal and sturdy soldiers and sailors who do their duty. Nomadic peoples make conquerors. They are hungry, strong, aggressive and prototypically penniless. Female ideals move toward cities and comfort. The men who follow that trend are ripe for conquest.
Modern society -- particularly of the post-baby-boomer variety -- has moved strongly toward a feminine world view where city life is the ideal. Farms today have easy access to markets. The drive to Walmart may take 30 minutes but the milk is cheaper and more plentiful than milking a cow. We are living the feminine ideal of history.
Is this a first in history? Rome did repeatedly. Constantinope did for a period. China did repeatedly. Each of these fell. Many explanations for these have been given. Yet they all tended to fall fastest and hardest when the feminine ideal was in full flower at the time of the fall. Essentially the feminine preference for hearth over battlefield left the cultures weaker in the eyes of the societies that preferred battlefield over hearth.
When a boy is disciplined harshly for being masculine and not given alternative masculine outlets, what should we expect? The boy running through the halls does need discipline, but he also needs to get outside with a ball and chance to compete aggressively at full speed for an hour.
When a military becomes a plaything of feminine goals of collegiality and equality of existence rather than equality of opportunity to compete, what should we expect? Tough women should be in the army. They should be held to tougher standards than men, not lower standards. Enemy soldiers will rape women, it is less likely that enemy soldiers will rape men, unless Roman slavery notions are in play.
Modern society needs to learn from history. The fall of civilization is often to the illiterate or poorly read hoards. Literacy provides protection only when Caesar, Napolean, MacArthur, Sun Tzu, and the Codes of Chivalry and of Bushido are core parts of the curriculum for purposes of learning martial principles and not just treating the writers as barbarians.
