âBut it turned out that Joan was really, uncannily good at leading an army. She had skills that no female person whoâd spent her life tending house â the thing she was best at, she later told a room full of men, was sewing â had any reason to possess. âShe was quite innocent, unless it be in warfare,â says the former roommate. âShe rode on horseback and handled the lance like the best of the knights, and the soldiers marveled.â Uh, yeah: Iâll bet they did. So it turned out she was good, and you all know this part of the story. She was very good at it, despite the fact that she was initially excluded from the important meetings, and despite the fact that she had no training, and despite the fact that she was a woman and people werenât supposed to listen to those â âharlot,â was a common theory among the English at the time, because what would a woman be doing in the army unless was sleeping with all of the soldiers; one English soldier straight-up laughed at the idea of âsurrendering to a womanâ â and despite the fact that her whole authority was based on telling people that she had magic powers. She took an arrow in the neck, in the middle of a battle, and kept fighting. If you want to get a sense of what actually made it possible for her to get from a kitchen in the middle of nowhere, to standing in front of the King and making her case, to a leadership position in the military, to leading this one particular hopeless lost cause of a battle, the Siege of Orleans, and winning it, this is instructive. If you want to get a sense of the sheer willpower driving this woman, think about being just a little female teenager from nowhere with no military training, whose biggest talent was sewing, shoved into chaotic, close-range, hugely violent battle, and about what it would take for you not to freak the fuck out at this point, what it would take to keep fighting with an arrow in your neck.â
