I was listening to a podcast about the history of China and she was mentioned as an exception to the role the women of her time played but when I checked Wikipedia, apparently, some of the other wives of Wu Ding also led military campaigns. So my question is, if and how Fu Has exceeded these other women. Thank you.
Fu Hao is the Shang military woman we know the most about, but she was far from unique. Oracle bones of the time name more than 100 Shang women who fought in battles.
For those not familiar with Fu Hao, she is the earliest recorded-by-name Chinese (Shang Dynasty) female. In her youth, she had trained as a soldier, and had also studied military operations and strategy. She was the wife of the 4th Shang king to rule from Anyang, and volunteered for the role of general. She had the skills, and was given the job, and did it well. She was buried with much wealth, weapons, and 16 human sacrifices (and 6 dog sacrifices). Her story is tersely recorded on oracle bones.
The historically-recorded female warriors from China are mostly commanders, with some of them inheriting their command positions from the husbands or fathers or brothers. Some were made commanders due to their ability. Some of these women were respected for their martial arts skills (archery, horsemanship, and/or swordsmanship), while other are only known as commanders. That most women warriors from China who we know were commanders isn't surprising. Most of the ancient Chinese male warriors we know were also commanders - people wrote more about commanders than they did about individual common soldiers.
A much smaller number are known as martial artists rather than as commanders (but contrary to a common female warrior role in fiction, none appear to have been "kung fu nuns").
To give some idea about both common features of Chinese women warriors, and also the variety, some women warriors are described in the far-from-complete lists below.
Chinese female generals and other military leaders include:
Huang Guigu, who was a general for Zheng, the king of Qin, who unified China and ruled as Qin Shi Huang ("First Emperor of Qin").
Mother Lü: In 9AD, the minister Wang Mang overthrew the Han Dynasty and proclaimed himself Emperor of the Xin dynasty. Five years later, a local official executed Lü Yu, who had worked in the Han government, for a minor offence. His mother, Mother Lü, was rather displeased and used her wealth to raise a rebel army, and led them as their general. She captured the guilty official, and sacrificed his head on her son's tomb. Her success inspired others to rebel against the Xin; the general rebellion gained momentum and overthrew Wang Mang and restored the Han Dynasty.
Li Xiu became the military commander of Ningzhou in Yunnan in 303AD when her father, the previous commander, died. She defended Ningzhou against rebels. She fought the ongoing rebellion, finally defeating them 7 years later. Her fortress was afterwards call "Citadel of the Heavenly Lady".
Lady Luo, later titled Empress Dowager Luo, was the wife of a nobleman who was killed in a local war in western China in 303AD. With her two sons, she continued the war. One sons was killed, she lost one eye in a battle, and her other son declared himself king of Cheng, and in 306, Emperor of Cheng Han (China was quite divided at the time - this was the Sixteen Kingdoms period).
Empress Mao was the daughter of provincial governor and general Mao Xing, who was killed by his own soldiers in 386. The new commander was Fu Deng, a relative of the emperor. The emperor died in battle in 386 (fighting the same people who had killed his father, the previous emperor, in battle the previous year). Fu Deng became the new emperor. The next year, he made Mao Xing's daughter empress. She was skilled in archery and horsemanship. She was captured fighting a rearguard defence against a surprise attack, supposedly after killing 700 enemy soldiers. The enemy leader, Emperor Yao Chang, wanted to make her his concubine, but she refused, so he executed her instead.
... and there were many others, including into modern times.
Other women were famous as soldiers, or martial artists, or for fighting:
The Lady of Yue was a famous martial artist, a swordswoman (and archer), of the 5th century BC. She impressed the king of Yue with her skill, and was appointed a martial arts instructor by him, training the officers who would instruct his army.
Pang E was a noblewoman in the late 2nd century AD. He father was killed, and took her sword and went to get revenge. She found his killer, stabbed his horse, bringing him down. She fought his soldiers, and killed and decapitated him. She turned herself in to the authorities and asked to be executed (but was, after a while, pardoned).
Wang Yi was the wife of Zhao Ang, governor and commander, in the 3rd century AD. This was a time of rebellion and civil war, and she was a political advisor to her husband. She also fought alongside him in battle, as an armoured archer. She appears as a character, Lady Wang. in the famous Ming novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Xun Guan, was the daughter of the governor of Xiangyang. In the early 4th century, the city was under attack by rebels, and surrounded. Thirteen years old, she volunteered for a special forces mission to break through the enemy lines and get help. Accompanied by a small force of soldiers, she got through, and got that help, and saved the city.
Xie Daoyun was a poet and scholar in the late 4th century. Her husband was a regional inspector, and was killed by rebels, along with his sons. Xie Daoyun went to meet the rebels, armed, and accompanied by her maids. She was captured after killing several rebels. The rebel leader freed her grandson and her, rather than executing him.
Shi Yang, AKA Zheng Yi Sao ("Wife of Zheng Yi") AKA Ching Shih ("Wife of Ching"; Ching = Zheng), was the wife of pirate leader Zheng Yi in the early 19th century. When he fell overboard in a storm and died in 1807, she, 32 years old, took over his pirate operation, commanding over 1,500 ships and about 80,000 pirates. Alas, the Qing government (and the British and the Portuguese) were working hard to suppress major piracy, and she and her forces surrendered in 1810. She retired from piracy to run a gambling house, and lived into her late 60s.
I didn't include the most famous Chinese warrior woman, Hua Mulan, above. We don't know whether she was real, or just existed in fiction. She differs from the above generals/warriors in that she hid that she was a woman, and served in the army as a soldier thought to be a man. Of course, other women might have done the same thing in China, and if they were successful at hiding their gender, we won't know that they were a woman. Something that often features in modern versions of the Mulan story, and not in the original, is that she had to hide her gender, and could have faced serious consequences when discovered. The examples above suggest that this might not have been the case. Historically, she was highly respected, and multiple shrines were built to her. Far from being a "naughty girl" for breaking gender conventions, she was seen as the perfect Confucian woman - she served in the army out of loyalty to her father and her country, and was modest and chaste. She embodied the most important universal Confucian ideals and also the most important Confucian ideals for women.
Female commanders/generals appear to have been less common later, probably due to changing attitudes to the roles of women, but they were still there. While my list above stops in the 4th century (with the exception of Shi Yang of the 19th century, who, as a pirate, was not expected to conform to the usual social norms), we can add from the late first millennium the famous Princess Pingyang, daughter of the first Tang emperor, who fought as a general for her father in the fighting to establish the dynasty. In the second millennium: One women fought against both the Jin and the Mongols during the Song-Jin-Mongol wars; she inherited her command from her husband. Liang Hongyu, of the Song Dynasty served as a military drummer and advisor to her general husband. One Ming bandit leader was a women, who disguised herself as a man (when she got pregnant, and it started to show, her men approved, thinking she was starting to look more like a classic Chinese hero (i.e., stout)). The most famous is probably Qin Liangyu from the late Ming, who had a 40+ year military career, mostly fighting rebels, but also the Manchus - she was promoted to the highest Ming military rank, appointed Guardian to the Crown Prince, and raise to the nobility with the rank of marquis.
The movie Legendary Amazons (2011)
features two Song Dynasty warrior women, Mu Guiying and She Saihua. They feature in old, but not contemporary, literature. We don't have any contemporary record of their feats, and it's possible that they are a later fictional addition to stories of the Yang family's military deeds.
The Qing Dynasty saw more women fighting as rebels, anti-rebels, and pirates. The largest numbers were probably in the Taiping Rebellion, where the Taiping forces included thousands of female soldiers, commanded by women (the Taipings were big on the segregation of men and women, so the commanders had to be women) - their main roles were not front line combat, but they did fight on occasion.
The Chinese communist forces c. 1930 included the 2,000 strong Women's Independence Brigade, primarily a logistics unit, but it also fought in battle, and all-women engineering units.