Using only women for economy

[Deicide4u]

How viable are the "women only" economic strategies?  

I'm thinking about using women to gathet food, wood, stone and metal and treat all other units as your army. With tech upgrades, they should gather stone and metal at an acceptable rate. 

This ties into one of my previous topics about Citizen soldiers having more of a military role.

Also, I'm asking from a more casual perspective, so mostly vs AI. This strategy WILL fall apart in the current economic model where your pure gatherers (women, lol) are severely handicapped when gathering stone and metal.

EDIT:
As to inevitable "what will your CS do, just sit around in base and do nothing?"....they will stay in towers/walls or train in barracks/stables. Like soldiers in real life would.

EDIT2: I have a game playing as Romans going on now, will try this and let you know how it ends. Romans and Spartans should have some advantages here. 

Edited 8 hours ago by Deicide4u

[TheCJ]

For a casual game, this will work just fine I think. Even "competitively", I think @Atrik sometimes only has women working in the lategame? He's a fairly skilled player, so you can get pretty far with an economy like this.
Obviously, you should not keep any units in a tower that isnt currently shooting at enemies, you can rather attack and keep raiding the opponents economy, that way the advantage he gets from using more effective gatherers can be minimized.

This strategy can work because women are so much cheaper than soldiers (and produced faster, especially with Romans). 

[Deicide4u]

It was a challenge, but it is viable. Was it efficient? No. The only good part of it is that my elite troops destroyed his first attack without breaking a sweat.

I had APM taxing with re-shuffling of Barracks and Stable garrisons whenever my CS finished training in them. Easier to just rally them on some trees or mines and forget about them until an attack comes.

You really feel that opportunity cost of not using your CS to work. Half of your population in the early to mid game feels useless. Oh, well. Experiment failed successfully.
I'll just stick to making some females to gather food.