You know, I don't think I'll ever get over how that one post I made about women as knights in history, made it all the way to Reddit only for a bunch of redditors to argue that women couldn't actually be knights because:
- "the term is gendered" (it's not, and feminine equivalents were sometimes created specifically for the purpose)
- "they didn't actually do things as knights" (who didn't? The Hatchet women fought the Moors. A few other Orders had women as masters of arms. Both martial and formal examples)
...and a few other reasons that come down to "I don't like imagining my manly men in steel had women in their ranks, girls have cooties".
And the reason I say this is because recently, Wikipedia updated their page on "Knight", specifically adding a section about women with the title of knighthood, and what function they performed. And I know: "Wikipedia is not an academic source"--but every academic institution will accept the sources and articles used to back up wikipages, which confirm what has been said.
Knights were sometimes women. 🤷
I saw this and needed to answer.
The gendered versions of 'knight' come from Romance languages, and literally just change the word to fit the gender of the subject (within a binary). So it isn't like English, where a female knight has always been a 'Dame', but, using Spain as an example, the word for Knight in Spanish is 'Cabellero'. This is the default masculine.
The feminine word for Knight? 'Cabellera'.
Similarly in French: "Chevalier" becomes "Chevaliére".
In Italian, "Cavaliere" becomes "Cavaliera".
Outside of Romance languages, "knight" is just a title for a social rank, so even the English Dame is by default a knight by rank, but may not have the title (although not impossible).
So it's not a silly infantilisation, than using a word for the knightly class and gendering it in a binary, which means we can actually tell that, yes, women as knights existed, enough that the feminine form of the word pops up now and then, so we know it existed.
ooh, where one could read that original post??
Just a note about translations and ... well, patriarchal bullshit.
When you say "Hatchet women fought the Moors" I was like "hey, that seems to be part of my local history, how have I never heard about it?", and when I googled it ... I actually have heard about it, it's the Orden del Hacha from Catalonia (Orde de l'Atxa in the original Catalan). But ... there's something odd going on. Why the fuck in English they have translated like "Order or the hatchet"? You know, in Spanish and Catalan there's no really a difference between "Axe" and "Hatchet": There's a single word for them, "Hacha/Atxa". But in English, there's a difference. A Hatchet is a hand axe, pretty much the smallest one you can think of:
So It's pretty remarkable that whoever translated the name of the order to english first decided to use "Hatchet" and not "Axe". I'm pretty sure if this was a order of men warriors the name would have been pretty different. Specially when THIS was their coat of arms:
So dear academic-who-translated-this-first: Does that look like a hatchet to you, motherfucker?!?!?
Important inclusion I was not aware of, thank you very much friend. :)
I’m going to be chuckling over ‘Does this look like a hatchet to you, motherfucker?!?!?” for the rest of the day.
