Have there been any societies where females occupied major social roles that men usually have (leadership, head of dynasties/families, warfare)? My understanding is that the division of labor among genders was just too hard to overcome in premodern economies, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
I don't think we have any records of female-dominated cultures, but there are certainly cultures were women are dominant in certain parts of life. Among the Iroquois, for example- wait, Traitorfish talking about the Iroquois? Yes, my friends, it
can happen!- men had dominant roles in diplomacy, trade and warfare, while women had dominant roles in the day-to-day organisation of village life. The breakdown of general roles was essentially internal/external, with women having authority over relationships within the community, and men over relationships between communities- between villages in the Confederacy, with other tribes and with Europeans, or with animals and spirits. It's clearly visible with the Iroquois because they practiced a highly communal lifestyle- Iroquois households were comprised of dozens of members, and most resources were shared between the whole village, and administered by semi-formal councils of older women- but you see elements of this even in some more differentiated societies, with women controlling the domestic sphere and men controlling the public sphere, and indeed this continues even in patriarchal societies, with at least some women continuing to wield substantial authority over household affairs, and many men being content to let them do so.
The classical view, going back to Engels, was that there was sort of primeval revolution that imposed patriarchy upon a previously egalitarian society, but these days its understood as more of a gradual process, the very external/internal division which was the basis for older egalitarianism mutating into a relationship of superiority and inferiority. As societies become more complex and family units become smaller, relationships with the outside world become more frequent and more crucial, men become more able to leverage their power over women, become able to transform a distinct sphere of authority into a generalised authority over social life, of which a woman's domestic authority becomes a specific set of delegated powers. We can actually see this among the Iroquois: early after European contact, the "separate but equal" structure of male and female authority appears quite strong, but as they become more dependent on commerce with Europeans into the eighteenth century, as hunting and war become more central to their economic life than agriculture and handicrafts, and indeed as women spend less time carrying out traditional female farming and manufacturing activities to take up subsidiary roles in hunting and war, men began to take on a more dominant role and women a more subordinate role; not quite to the degree seen in neighbouring European communities, but certainly more so than seems to have been the case a century previously.
The short answer is, there probably aren't any pre-modern societies were women have routinely occupied positions of military, political or diplomatic leadership, but the assumption that these positions indicate male superiority or female superiority assumes a certain social structure that doesn't always exist.
A related question: were there any pantheons where female deities were in the central position, like Zeus or Odin?
The centrality of chief gods tends to be exaggerated in popular culture, which, following Medieval and early Modern scholarship, tends to take pre-Christian cosmologies are more primitive and colourful mirrors of Christianity, so Zeus and Odin become rough anticipations of the Judeo-Christian God. In practice, the structure of pre-Christian pantheons were usually expected to mirror the structure of human society, and because Greek and Norse societies were patriarchal, it followed that they were presided over by a patriarchal figure. They were heads of the family rather than centers of the universe. In addition, pre-Christian religious activity tended to be quite functional, in that deities were invoked or celebrated in accordance with the needs or aspirations of the worshipers, rather than because the deities, simply through the fact of their existence, prompted worship. Chief gods like Zeus and Odin were popular in royal courts, who tended to produce a disproportionate amount of the physical and especially literary evidence we've inherited, and again that has to be more with the social rather than metaphysical role attribute to these deities.
