Woman Warriors ✦ A Home PhD

For the girl who grew up on Mulan.

History files warrior women under "exception." This course asks whether she was the exception, or the pattern the record erased. Twelve weeks, from the Scythian graves behind the Amazon myth to the 800,000 women who fought for the Soviets in WW2.

Inside the PhD:

• 12 weeks, 3,000 years: the Amazons → the ancient queens of war → Boudica → Mulan → the warrior women of Asia → Joan of Arc (twice) → the Viking shieldmaidens → Njinga and the Agojie → the snipers and Night Witches of modern war

• The primary sources: Herodotus, Tacitus, the Ballad of Mulan, Joan's own trial transcript, all linked free online

• The real scholarship plus recorded lectures (Penn Museum, TED-Ed, Columbia and more), so you get the actual debates, not the Pinterest version

• eminar questions every week to make you actually think

• A weekly essay prompt and a creative response: write Boudica's speech without a Roman editor, write your own Joan song, write Mulan for 2026

• The Warrior Ledger: one page per woman, building into your own record of every warrior you meet

• The Wider Roster: 20 more warrior women (Grace O'Malley, Qin Liangyu, Harriet Tubman...) to go deeper

• A Capstone thesis and creative project, so you finish like an actual candidate

This is for you if you want to:

• Know the real women behind Mulan, The Woman King and Vikings

• Be a student again, minus the tuition

• Have a better answer than "she was so brave"

• Steal from 3,000 years of fierce women for your own writing, songs or videos

What it asks of you:

A notebook, a library card and six to eight hours a week. Every reading links free: public-domain texts, open-access papers, and in-copyright books through Open Library. What you're paying for is the thread that ties it all together, so you don't spend months building it yourself. It costs less than one new hardback.

How you'll get it:

• A 14-page PDF syllabus, delivered to your inbox the second you check out

• Every link is clickable, straight to the free text or lecture

• Week one starts whenever you do