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Gender Bias: Women Warriors, by Clancy Sigal

ASelective And Unfair List Of Powerful Women Who Waged Bloody Military Campaigns


MARGARET THATCHER, UK prime minister, who despised “losers”, the poor and children – except for her own. 
In the Falklands war vs. Argentina she gave an illegal order to sink the Belgrano battleship causing 321 sailors to drown.

INDIRA GANDHI, India’s only female prime minister.  Went to wars against Pakistan, pushed India’s atom bomb 
program, dictatorially censored media, postponed elections and allowed police to detain citizens indefinitely.

CATHERINE THE GREAT, long-ruling emperor, made wars against the Poles, Ottomans and practically everybody 
who resisted Russian expansion.  Made life miserable for the semi enslaved serfs. 

QUEEN BLOODY MARY, the only child of Henry 8th, notorious for executing and burning Protestants at the stake.

ELIZABETH THE FIRST, Mary’s Protestant half sister,  hanged, disemboweled and burned alive Catholic priests 
and “recusants” who refused to give up their Old Faith.  The Virgin Queen led wars against the Dutch, Irish, Spanish 
and Catholics in France.

BOUDICA, Celtic warrior queen, led a blood-drenched uprising against the Roman occupation, 
killing up to 80,000 Romans and Britons. 

CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI, powerful queen of France masterminded the St. Bartholomew massacre 
of Protestant Huguenots.  “Kill them all!” she screamed.   70,000 were murdered, igniting a religious civil war.

SIRIMAVO BANDARANAIKE, the 20th century’s first female prime minister, who carried out Sri Lanka’s 
ethnic war between her majority Sinhalese and minority “Tiger” Tamis.  She stripped Tamils of citizenship, 
deported many and imposed Sinhalese as the country’s only official language.

QUEEN ISABELLA of Spain ordered the “Reconquista” forcibly converting or exiling Muslims and Jews.  She financed Christopher Columbus’s expeditions to the Americas that wiped out or enslaved the indigenous peoples. 

CLEOPATRA, the Greek queen of Egypt and the world’s richest woman, always needed a man like Caesar
 to keep her in power.  Finally she bet wrong on Mark Antony in the Roman civil wars she helped provoke.

GOLDA MEIR forged a hard line about Arabs.  Refused to stop expansion of settlements in Occupied Territories. 
"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to….There is no such thing as 
a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist…”

HILLARY CLINTON, in speeches, interviews and debating Bernie Sanders, is hawkishly “tough” on national security, Iran, declares herself “hepped up” about ISIS and advocates a new “cold war” in the Middle East.   She opposes Obama’s famous military mantra, “Don’t do stupid shit.”  

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