The wives of many leaders tend to be important politically and have a hand in the nation's affairs, but its a large leap to claim that means they ran it.
She was important absolutely, but the article was just using too much hyperbole.
also the army stat was complete bs, we know they were not in need of resorting to female soldiers due to their large enough population.
In older societies it was common to view women as playing a central role in bringing great ruin or great fortune to men, and by extension "their" empires, for this very reason.
Honestly, even if we don't talk about it, it still is this way. If you want to achieve success, the single most important decision you make is who you marry.
I don't think it is, not just women in particular but also bureaucrats and diplomats in general is what actually ran and does still run empires and nations. Today you'd call it the administrative state. Both historically as well as today people vastly overstate the importance of visible leaders and vastly underestimate the role that administrators, managers, and so on play.
The reasons are obviously: precious, precious clicks.
A title like "The Women Who Kept Genghis Khan's Empire Running" would have been better.
The annoying thing is that it makes no sense to do this because there are plenty of non-male or non-white leaders to pick from anyway.
My favorite empire is the Ajuuran sultanate that was a very powerful african sultanate in modern day somalia. It traded as far as china and it had many victories over great powers like portugal.
A great female leader that actually existed was queen boudica, one of the greatest celtic anti-roman rebels. She led her people and dealt a lot of damage to the roman invaders before she inevitably lost to the chads that are the roman legions.
Rather than blackwash or add in random women we can just look to the parts of history that already contain that.
Despite this her actions were greatly inflated by the title and main claim.
This contrasts with, say, the ancient Sarmatians, where we see female burials with actual weapons of war, and have contemporary accounts that women did fight extensively in battles. There, a figure of 20% would be roughly accurate.
That's a strawman.
> If you read the article you find she later ran the whole shop.
May I suggest that before looking down on others like this, it is wise to make sure you've been careful when reading the thing?
The article contains no such claim. Most likely, you are mixing up Töregene and Börte.
> Chinggis Khan’s senior wife, Börte, is responsible for a camp. She’s responsible for their home, the yurt or ger that they live in. She’s responsible for the kids. If merchants come through, she’s going to talk to them about economic activity. She is going to oversee or perform the typical daily herding activities. There’s food preparation. There’s clothing preparation. There are religious rituals. There’s entertainment. It’s often a woman’s job to be the hospitable partner, to bring in food and welcome guests.