When did the women soldiers of Dahomey first take the field, and why? Alpern works through claims that run from Wegbaja in the seventeenth century to Glele in the nineteenth and finds most of them unsupported. The corps of elephant huntresses may be very old, and palace women plainly attended the king, yet evidence of women serving as troops is a separate matter. He rehabilitates Ahangbe, the twin sister said to have shared the throne with Akaba, arguing that her long absence from the record reflects deliberate dynastic erasure of the kind demonstrably applied to Adandozan. European accounts from the 1770s onward describe armed female units of roughly eight hundred, a figure recurring often enough to suggest a standing corps of fixed size well before the expansion of the 1840s. On the why, Alpern points to demography, since generations of war against far more numerous Yoruba neighbours left Dahomey short of men.