Jein. Women have always fought, even during particularly misogynistic eras (Robert Guiscard's wife, in the 12th century, was practically a real life Valkyrie, it seems), but they've also almost always been in the minority for social as well as biological reasons.
And it cuts both ways. The media still refer with horror to the deaths of women and children. Children, fair enough, but is a woman dying worse than a man?
The soldiers and female soldiers point seems valid but you could just as easily make it about male nurses and primary school teachers.
I agree there's a common and widespread underestimation of what women did in various eras (even in medieval times they could run their own business and, perversely, a woman battering her husband was less likely to get taken to court over it than vice versa).
Got to admit the article's so enormous I only read some of the earliest bit.
