ity of Chinese patrilineage over Vietnamese matrilineage. On the other
hand, they could have been individual acts, as the Chinese did not consider
rape a public crime until 1983. Either way, the outrage causes the two
women, named Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, to incite a Vietnamese rebel-
lion. This rebellion in turn introduces the Chinese to the giant bronze
drums that the Vietnamese mountaineers used to transmit military infor-
mation and provides a favorite subject for Vietnamese stage and puppet
plays.
About 55 The Roman Caesar Nero introduces his notorious Youth
Games, which feature, to the disgust of the historian Tacitus, sword fights
between women.
About 60 When a British queen named Boudicca (Boadicea) refuses to
pay taxes to the Romans, a Roman official has the woman flogged and her
daughters raped. The outraged Celts retaliate by killing tens of thousands
of Romanized Britons living in what is today Norfolk and Suffolk, and
burning the Roman capital at Londinium. When this rebellion was redis-
covered through translation in the sixteenth century, it caused Boadicea’s
chariot, as the translators called it, to become an integral part of Eliza-
bethan English nationalism. As for the unfortunate first-century queen, she
and her daughters committed suicide near Epping Upland after the Romans
slaughtered the British men in battle.
About 200 A Christian philosopher named Clement of Alexandria
writes that women should be athletes for God. That is, they should wrestle
with the Devil and devote themselves to celibacy instead of bowing meekly
to their destiny of mothers and wives. However, this was not a universally
held view, and wealthy Roman men continued amusing themselves with
gymnastic, gladiatorial, and swimming acts featuring scantily clad female
competitors.
271 A group of Gothic women captured while armed and dressed as
men are paraded through Rome wearing signs that read “Amazons.”
About 535 Korean aristocrats replace female sword dancers with
male sword dancers, apparently as a method of limiting the power of fe-
male shamans.
585 French churchmen debate whether women have souls. At least
that is the postmodern feminist view of the debate, which was actually
about whether the Old French word virmeant the same thing as the Vul-
gate Latin word homo.(The decision was that it did not.)
590 The Christian Synod of Druim Ceat orders British women to quit
going into battle alongside their men. The ban must not have been espe-
cially effective, since the daughter of Alfred the Great is remembered as the
conqueror of Wales, and the people who taught sword dancing to the Ul-
ster hero Cû Chulainn were female.666 Women in the Martial Arts