Amazon Brigade / Literature

Amazon Brigade in Literature.

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• in the cultivation world of Ave Xia Rem Y One of the greatest sects of the Crimson cloud Empire of the vermilion continent is an all female group called the "divine Frozen Palace". As the name suggests they mainly use ice.
• The Amazon Legion focuses on one of these, with particular attention given to how to maximize the effectiveness of the women in it given the general physical limitations compared to men.
• The protagonist of The Assassins of Tamurin is recruited for a secret organization of this type.
• In the Aubrey-Maturin novel The Far Side of the World, Jack and Stephen are rescued/taken prisoner by the all-female crew of a Polynesian twin-hulled craft. They also have an extreme case of Does Not Like Men, apparently castrating their male captives as a matter of course.
• In Géza Gárdonyi's novel Attila's Slave , when Atila the Hun gathers all his allies, the Sarmatians arrive with a large number of warrior women, described as "Amazons with cat eyes and panther muscles"
• The eponymous Bunch in The Bad Bunch by J.T. Edson; an all-female gang of outlaws as dangerous and ruthless as any men.
• Bazil Broketail:
  • The Argonath legions have a women's brigade. Also, the witches have many warriors who fight the Enemy with both magic and normal weapons.
  • Lessis leads around a hundred captive women used for bearing imps in a revolt against Tummuz Orgmeen.
• In the first book of The Black Company, the protagonists fight against battalions composed only of women. Those warrior women end up being defeated, but the narrator acknowledges that they fought with more courage and efficiency than many men.
• Much like in Ursula Vernon's webcomic Digger, her Black Dogs series contains a race of matriarchal hyena people. Their appearance is more brief and their role much less pivotal, but from what is seen of them, their warriors and hunters are all female. It is also observed by the protagonist that the females are larger and more physically intimidating than the males.
• Implicitly, all armies in A Brother's Price, as men would certainly be considered too valuable to waste them in battles. Jerin's grandmothers are said to have been an Amazon Brigade of soldier-spies.
• The Camp Half-Blood Series:
  • Percy Jackson and the Olympians has the hunters of Artemis, a group of girls that travel with the goddess Artemis and are allowed to live without aging as long as they remain maidens for ever. They happen to be extremely handy with a bow, and are strong fighters all around.
  • The Heroes of Olympus reveals that the Amazons themselves are still in business, running Amazon.com.
• An Amazon Brigade is mentioned in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and appears as fire support in the climax of the direct sequel To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
• Catwoman: Soulstealer: The Leopards, a girl gang which Selina joined, who are well known for being skilled in armed or unarmed combat. Selina later is recruited by the League of Shadows to become one of their Assassins, who are mostly women in the book, and even more renowned for their deadly prowess.
• The Chicks in Chainmail comedy-fantasy anthology series has numerous stories of all-female military units and warrior societies; along with stories of Sweet Polly Oliver, the lone Action Girl, Little Miss Badass, or Mama Bear.
• In Chronicles of Chaos by John C. Wright, the Maenads and later the Amazons themselves show up. The Amazons, by the way, are Spy Catsuit-wearing ninja femmebots. On Cool Horses.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: The Order of Targhan are an all female group, witches who serve as assassins too.
• Though almost all Giants in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are badass, as a whole they tend to view physical violence as an extremely distasteful last resort (albeit one they're very good at), and as a result have few professional warriors. That said, those professional warriors (the Swordmainnir) are almost entirely women (it's not unheard of for a male Giant to become a Swordmain, but it's extremely uncommon), and they're very good at what they do. This is especially clear in the Last Chronicles when an entire, all female, detachment of Swordmainnir show up and get to show off exactly what they can do.
• Ciaphas Cain:
  • While the 597th regiment is mixed gender, such things are a rarity since women are said to make up 10% of the Imperial Guard and regiments are usually in single-gender (the 597th was created from the remains of an all-male and an all-female regiment after some initial Boys Vs Girls issues).
  • Cain also runs into an all-female tank crew which gives him some lip, noted by Inquisitor Vail to be because they aren't used to taking orders from some mere man (her words).
• The Courtship of Princess Leia:
  • The Hapan Army, Navy and Royal Guard are entirely made up of women.
  • The Dathomiri Witches also have women warriors (the Nightsisters have male stormtroopers who work for them, but clearly are not the elite).
• The titular Damsels of Distress definitely qualify. They are a six-woman mercenary gang who will take any job so long as they pay is good.
• Bradley's Darkover has the Sisterhood of the Sword; their successors, the Free Amazons, are less of an example, as while they are all trained to fight they don't exclusively work as soldiers.
• Neal Stephenson's Science Fiction novel The Diamond Age has Nell's "sisters", or "Mouse Army", a group of soldiers/engineers/political leaders that finally becomes a new sovereign.
• In The Dinosaur Lords, most of jinete (light cavalry) units are made up of women, as it's generally agreed in-universe that women are smaller and nimbler and thus better-suited to the job than men. They're still treated with Condescending Compasion by dinosaur knights, but this is based on their perceived weakness in combat rather than their gender (plenty of dinosaur knights are women).
• The Queens' Wing can be a pretty effective Thread-fighting force in the Dragonriders of Pern novels, particularly once they caught on to how easily a queen dragon can boss around any other color.
• Dragonvarld:
  • The Sisterhood is protected by an all-female guard, since it's deemed inappropriate for the Sisters to be surrounded by men when they're supposed to refrain from relations with them. (Relations between the Sisters and their female guards, however, are quite acceptable.) The idea is startling to people who come from other kingdoms.
  • The Sisterhood themselves are nun-like women who cast spells to fight dragons when called on with the aforementioned warrior women.
• A common occurrence in the Dune series.
  • In Dune the Bene Gesserit can fight with nearly superhuman capability if necessary.
  • Leto II justifies this trope when he forms the Fish-Speakers in God-Emperor of Dune: he believes their maternal instinct will prevent them from succumbing to bloodlust or quests for power, and they're a temporary army since they're all about him, so they'll lack a unifying force once he dies. It's all part of his Golden Path for humanity.
  • Heretics of Dune introduces the Honored Matres which serve as the main antagonist from that book through Chapterhouse: Dune.
• Dungeon Crawler Carl has a group of not-so-elite women, but with a leader whose magical crossbow gets faster and stronger for every woman in the party. With several dozen of them, it's practically a machine gun. Then Hekla gets killed and the crossbow looted, leaving the group to break apart.
• The shrykes from The Edge Chronicles. Not quite a One-Gender Race, but the ladies hold the upper hand in... well, everything. Female shrykes are warriors and their leadership class are all females, while the smaller, weaker males are led around on collars and generally treated like pets, despite being fully sapient.
• In Encryption Straffe, the early model Power Armor used by New Illyrica and other factions requires more training for men than women to fully utilize, because of skeletal structure differences. So, New Illyrica had an all-female power armor squad.
• In The Firebrand, Marion Zimmer Bradley's retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of Kassandra, we have... the original Amazons. By the end of the book, they more or less die out, logical with the feminist bent of the novel and the way that the cult of patriarchy was sweeping the nation.
• A rare non-Fantasy or Sci-fi example: thriller writer Brad Thor created a "detachment" of all-female Delta Force members for his most recent Scot Harvath novel Foreign Influence, which spawned the sequel/spinoff The Athena Project.
• In the Garrett, P.I. novels, the Sisters of Doom are TunFaire's only all-human, all-female street gang. Consisting almost entirely of teen or pre-teen girls who ran away from molestation and child prostitution, the Doom have as bloody a reputation as any other urban gang, being particularly infamous for gelding their enemies and beating pimps into a pulp.
• The Girl Who Drank the Moon features the Sisters of the Star, who are combat-trained law enforcement and exclusively recruit young women.
• Gor: There are two types, both consisting of outlaw free women and runaway female slaves that live free from the otherwise highly patriarchal Gorean society. The first are the Panther Girls, who live in the Northern Forests. The second are the Taluna, who are white women living in the equatorial jungle. Both groups hunt and gather while capturing and enslaving any men unlucky enough to encounter them.
• The soldiers of the Hames in Jane Yolen's Great Alta Saga. Before the invasion, they were among the most honored warriors in the Dales, and not a male in sight.
• Andrea puts one of these together in Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen. Turns out nomad pastoralists are really easy to train for war.
• Harry Potter has the Holyhead Harpies, an all female Quidditch team.
• His Dark Materials has the witches. Since only females born of the witches are also witches, this is justified. In these exclusively female clans, they're deadly shots with bow and arrow, are good with knives, are quick to swear vengeance; and they attach themselves as a bodyguard to the protagonists.
• Hive Mind (2016): Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement's Valkyrie forces are composed entirely of women. They are feared opponents, both for their own skills and equipment, and because if they are activated, they have the full weight of the rest of the Hives behind them.
• Thandi Palane's self-styled Amazons (descendants of genetically engineered Ukranian supersoldiers) in the Honor Harrington universe.
• In the Larry Niven novel The Integral Trees, the Triune Squads are made up of women who refuse to marry, women who love women, or those who are "women" by courtesy only. They are sent to patrol the Trunk, a hazardous and seemingly pointless duty, to make up for not doing their "real" duty to the tribe by providing children.
• Subverted in the Ken Follett novel Jackdaws. The eponymous Strategic Operations Executive saboteur team was originally planned to be all female, so that they could disguise themselves as cleaning women so as to infiltrate a critical German telephone exchange building in occupied France. The problem is that the team leader, Flick Clairet, had only a couple of days to recruit the team, and could not find a female telephone engineer in Britain who also spoke fluent French, so she ended up recruiting "Greta," a male transvestite instead.
• Legacy of the Dragokin: The Kthonian Knights are supposed to be this because they hate men and wanted to kill all of them but Jihadain let Ravage join because he's Fury's protective big brother and she wants him to join.
• Isobelle Carmody's The Legendsong Saga has the myrmidons; a community of female fighters based on the island of Myrdmoor, whose primary duty is to protect the soulweavers while away from their home on Darkfall. Their preferred fighting method is a form of martial arts, sometimes accompanied by a short javelin.
• In Loyal Enemies dryads are One-Gender Race, female only, so their army, logically, has no men. In the army itself, the quality varies, but dryads are faster and more agile than most other races, giving them an edge over the enemy.
• The Marvelous Land of Oz features Jinjur's army. A revolutionary army composed entirely of young girls dressed in World War 1 era uniforms. This being one of the Oz books, they're about as deadly of a fighting force as a kindle of kittens. They find early success against the Emerald City's army, an old man who Wouldn't Hit a Girl, but are in for a nasty surprise when Glinda brings in her own all-female army who actually know what they're doing.
• In MARZENA we have the C-Section, a Private Intelligence Company made solely of women who recruits other women into spying or killing for them, if not taking care of the dirty business themselves.
• One of the many superhumans vying for power in Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars is Chen Tiejun and her small army of genetically enhanced superwomen.
• A Master of Djinn: The Forty Leopards are an all-female thieves' gang in Cairo renowned for the prowess which they show for stealing, and they're also good at fighting.
• The Discworld novel Monstrous Regiment features a squad consisting entirely of Sweet Polly Olivers. The first clue is right there in the title: John Knox once wrote a pamphlet called "The First Blast Of The Trumpet Against The Monstrous Regiment Of Women" - a polemic against the then-current situation of there being more than one reigning Queen in Britain.
• My Dark and Fearsome Queen: The president of the high school drama club turns out to be an evil queen exiled from an alternate dimension, and all the girls in the club turn out to be her guards.
• In Remember To Always Be Brave, the Roman Republic has a full corps of these known as the "Amazons", based off the ancient Greek pseudo-legendary female warriors. They deal with either heavy weaponry, close heavy combat, or both.
• The Reynard Cycle: The militaristic Calvarians regularly field companies of these. They appear to be treated as equals of the men. By Defender of the Crown, a significant portion of Reynard's army is made up of women, with Rukenaw in command.
• Schooled in Magic: A group of warrior women in chainmail bikinis outside Whitehall protect their virginal sisters, whom Emily sees and mentally muses about.
• In Sewer, Gas & Electric, a female Royal Navy officer averted an assassination attempt and, in return, asked Queen Elizabeth II for command of a submarine. When the navy brass told Her Majesty that having a woman take charge of a sub was unthinkable due to conditions on board, Her Majesty got peeved; four years later, the H.M.S. City of Women was launched with an all-female crew.
• The Shadow Campaigns:
  • The Girl's Own is an all-female regiment, recruited in the midst of the Vordanai revolution and reinforced steadily over the course of books 3 and 4. Led by Winter Ihernglass and then Abby Giforte, the Girl's Own achieves a reputation as one of the best and most dedicated line regiments in the Army of the East, and the subsequent Grand Army of Vordan, and forms the core of Winter's Fourth Division.
  • The "bone people" of Trans-Bataria in Murnsk are a tribal confederation who send their men out to act as cavalry and archers, while their women function as spear-wielding infantry. The "bone women" are among the best close combatants in the series with their spears and hide shields, and several thousand of them prove a deadly threat to the isolated First Division, forcing Marcus d'Ivoire to resort to increasingly desperate tactics to fend them off.
• Isaac Asimov's short story "Shah Guido G." features an all-female police force known as the Waves. However this really had nothing to do with the plot, being part of a clumsy and long-drawn-out build up to a punning punchline.
• Shatter the Sky: Though they're not primarily warriors, the Aurati are an all-female group who have warriors among them.
• Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: The Sisters, Sisterhood, or Vigilantes (whatever you like to call them) can be considered this - as long as you don't include Charles Martin and the Big Five or the Five Musketeers. The last book Home Free subverts this trope by having the Vigilantes recruit male members into their ranks at the end.
• In Erin Bow's novel Sorrow's Knot, the Rangers are an all-female squad of hunters/guards who provide for and guard the Free Women of the Forest. (Men are also among the Free People, but do not serve as Rangers.)
• The Southern Reach Trilogy: The 12th expedition into Area X is deliberately all female in order throw a new variable to it. Barring the anthropologist (and the linguist who drops out before the expedition begins), they're a very tough group and have had additional survival and weapons training prior to the expedition.
• In The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge Special Corps agent James Bolivar "Slippery Jim" DiGriz lands on a planet once run by women (until they were usurped by a male revolutionary party working in cahoots with galactic invaders). He teams up with La Résistance— former members of the military who are of course fit, shapely young amazons—much to the annoyance of Jim's ever-jealous and lethally-dangerous wife.
• The qawHaq'hoch, in the Star Trek Voyager Relaunch, a Klingon cult consisting of female warriors only. Interestingly, it's never explained why they only accept females. Possibly it's "just tradition" - but it's one they're quite serious about. They draw attention to their status as an Amazon Brigade by using a symbol for birth (Ie., an aspect of life exclusive to women) as the glyph signifying the correct tunnel to their headquarters.
• In the old Star Wars Expanded Universe we have the Mistryl Shadow Guard, a group of fierce whip-wielding mercenaries from a doomed civilization, and the Hapes Consortium, an interstellar cluster of Amazons whose (formidable) army and navy was solely composed of women, as was the Royal Guard.
• The Supervillainy Saga: Specifically, Tales Of Supervillainy: Cindy's Seven has Cindy's initial plan is to assemble an all-female heist team of these with Mandy, Amanda, Selena, and Clarissa all being seasoned superheroes or supervillains. Her daughters, Leia and Mimi, also join up. She also picks up Dana AKA Damselfly, just because she fits the theme. It is Subverted when Case AKA Agent G becomes part of the team just because he's conveinant. Gary joins as well and Cindy doesn't have the heart to send him away.
• The Mord-Sith from the Sword of Truth, who are the sworn protectors of Lord Rahl, as well as his expert torturers. They perform... other services for him, they act as his bodyguard, are capable of beating up squads of elite soldiers without breaking a sweat, have a magical torture device / weapon / awkward phallus thing called an Agiel, they're made via a truly horrifying Break the Cutie indoctrination process, are probably the second most feared thing in all of D'Hara, only behind the Lord Rahl himself... oh and they can capture your magic and use it to torture you. They've driven one member of the main cast insane.
• Tales From The Pack: The Pack is a group of women who turn out to be vigilantes as they hunt down the werewolves who attack women in the area.
• The Longwing dragon captains in the Temeraire series could be a sort of Amazon Brigade — Longwings almost exclusively select female captains (it is implied that on occasion one will accept a male grudgingly, but none have been shown yet). In China several centuries before the events in the books, women were permitted to serve as combat dragon riders by Imperial Decree after a Sweet Polly Oliver enlisted to spare her father and stopped an invasion after bonding with a dragon. Between conscription and the willingness of families to get rid of daughters, by the time Cpt. Laurence and Temeraire arrive, the Chinese government had long since thrown up their hands and made their Dragon Corps an exclusive female preserve.
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Warrior Women, naturally. In fact they're far more overtly masculine than even most male soldiers, cursing, boasting and carousing outrageously. Some are very big, hairy women, but most are slim and beautiful. They're all quite strong and definitely not to be insulted. Even so, they're possible to befriend. Though the rumor is they're all lesbians, often the women end up having sex with Tourists, whether male or female (it's apparently quite good).
• Robert A. Heinlein
  • In Tunnel in the Sky, Rod Walker's older sister Helen is a captain in an Amazon Brigade. There are more women being born on an overpopulated Earth than men, so there's a shortage of available husbands, so women are taking on a lot of traditionally male roles. This is played for Deliberate Values Dissonance (the novel was written in 1955). Helen makes it clear that she intends to leave the military and raise a large family should she find a husband.
  • Friday. The Private Military Contractors in the Divided States of America. It's not quite clear if they're a literal Amazon Brigade (only one actual mercenary is seen) but the title character mentions that most of the others are "untrained farm girls".
• In the Vorkosigan Saga, Commodore Koudelka's four daughters are referred to his "All-Blonde Commando Team". They got the nickname as kids, so it's mostly a joke.
  • Mostly. Olivia Koudelka, the shyest of the bunch, instantly steps up to thwart a politically-motivated assault by a group of armed thugs on her boyfriend Lord Dono. Unarmed, in an evening dress, she takes out two of them before tearing the hem off her dress to use as a bandage.
• War Girls: The eponymous War Girls are an all-female squad of soldiers.
• David Weber's The War Gods War series has a couple of different examples. The most detailed example are the Sothoii War Maids. Free towns administered by women in the very patriarchal Sothoii society they are required to supply levies in times of war under the Kingdom's feudal military structure and by tradition they field all female fighting forces. Considered outcasts by Sothoii society as a whole but supported strongly by the Wind Riders, the elite of the Sothoii military.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • In the Aiel Proud Warrior Race, the Maidens of the Spear are the one Warrior Society that's exclusive to women. Members are "wedded to the spear" and must leave the Society if they marry. They collectively adopt The Chosen One Rand when they discover that his birth mother was a Maiden.
  • Elayne forms a squad of these as her bodyguards when she claims the Throne of Andor, led by the Eternal Hero Birgitte. Their uniforms are designed to trick people into mistaking them for ceremonial guards, but they're actually elite fighters to a woman.