Among pre-Hispanic Nahuas, men were expected to be warriors. Women were not. As such, when historians and anthropologists have dealt with women and warfare in the pre-Hispanic Nahua world, it has largely been in the realm of metaphor and religion, apparently believing there was little to say about women’s involvement in literal warfare. This scholarship has shown that Nahuas understood women’s experiences of childbirth and domestic labor to be analogous and complementary to men’s work fighting on the battlefield. Yet this focus on symbolism gives us a distorted image of gender and warfare among pre-Hispanic Nahuas. Although women were not expected to be warriors, this did not mean that women were not exposed to war, as wars of conquest often involved attacking towns and cities populated by civilians.

Using alphabetic Nahuatl annals, I show that Nahuas in the early colonial period fully understood war as something that women experienced directly, not just indirectly through the realm of ceremony and metaphor. Women were frequently taken as war captives. Like their male counterparts, they too faced either death as human sacrifices or a life of slavery. However, unlike their male counterparts, captivity for women also entailed the threat of sexual violence and exploitation. In the best-case scenario, some captive noblewomen might end up as the wives of their captors’ leaders. The writers of the annals seem to have realized that even these cases, women could still suffer greatly. The fates awaiting female captives help us to understand why it is that women were apparently willing to defy gender roles and take up arms when their altepetl was on the verge of being conquered. When the Spaniards arrived, although much was different, Nahuas were not shocked by their willingness to kill or enslave women, as those were both expected features of pre-Hispanic war. 

Clio Isaacson is a graduate student in the History Department at Rutgers University.

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