The cold equations of “realism,” some claim, suggest there is little scope for women taking an active and interesting role in epic stories set in fantasy worlds based in a pre-modern era. Women’s lives in the past were limited, constrained, and passive, they say. To include multiple female characters in dynamic roles is to be in thrall to quotas, anachronisms, Political Correctness, and the sad spectacle and dread hyenas of wish-fulfillment.
Is this true?
Let’s leave aside the argument that, in fantasy, if you’re going to include dragons you can also plausibly include women in a range of roles. That’s absolutely correct, although it veers uncomfortably close to equating women’s presence in epic narrative to that of mythical creatures. As an argument to include women it’s not even necessary.
Of course there are already many fascinating and memorable female characters in epic fantasy, with more being added every year. So, yes, write women—write people—however you want, with no limits and constraints.
More importantly, any cursory reading of scholarship published in the last fifty years uncovers a plethora of evidence revealing the complexity and diversity of women’s lives in past eras and across geographical and cultural regions.
I’m not suggesting the legal and political situation of women has been universally equal to that of men across world history, much less equivalent in every culture. And this essay is not meant to represent a comprehensive examination of women’s lives (or what it means to be called a woman) in the past, present, or cross-culturally. Far from it: This represents the merest fractional fragment of a starting point.
My goal is to crack open a few windows onto the incredible variety of lives lived in the past. How can women characters fit in epic fantasy settings based on a quasi-historical past? How can their stories believably and interestingly intersect with and/or be part of a large canvas? You can model actual lives women lived, not tired clichés.
Here, mostly pulled at random out of books I have on my shelves, are examples that can inspire any writer to think about how women can be realistically portrayed in fantasy novels. One needn’t imitate these particular examples in lockstep but rather see them as stepping stones into many different roles, large and small, that any character (of whatever gender) can play in a story.
Hierarchy, Gender, and Stereotype
No other society now or in the past holds to the exact same gender roles as modern middle class Anglo-American culture. Gender roles and gender divisions of labor can vary wildly between and within cultures. For example, textile work like weaving and sewing may be seen as a domestic and thus womanly occupation, or it may be work men do professionally.
In addition, many societies hold space for and recognize people who do not fit into a strict gender binary. Genderqueer and transgender aren’t modern Western ideas; they are indigenous, include third gender and two-spirit, and can be found all around the world and throughout the past. Sexuality and gender may be seen as fluid rather than fixed, as variable and complex rather than monolithic and singular.
Don’t assume gender trumps every other form of status in the division of social power and authority.
Among the Taíno, “Name and status were inherited from one’s mother, and social standing was reckoned such that women might outrank men, even if men usually held political power.” [Fatima Bercht, Estrellita Brodsky, John Alan Farmer, and Dicey Taylor, editors, Taíno: Pre-Columbian Art and Culture from the Caribbean, The Monacelli Press, 1997, p. 46]
Sarah B. Pomeroy writes “In the earliest Greek societies, as known through epic, the principal distinction was between aristocrats and commoners. Thus, the hero Odysseus rebukes a common soldier, Thersites, for daring to speak up to his social superiors, whereas he treats his wife Penelope as his equal.” She contrasts this with the Classical democratic polis in which “all male citizens were equal, but […] the husband ruled the wife and children.” [Sarah B. Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt, Wayne State University Press, 1990, p 41]
Furthermore, while the culture of Athens is often taken as the standard among Greeks of the classical era, the situation of women in Sparta at the same time was quite different, notoriously so to the Athenians: Spartan women owned property and managed businesses; daughters inherited together with sons (possibly not a full share); women received education and physical training.
Views of the distinction between public and private spheres play out differently in every society. Modern Western cultural notions aren’t universal.
“(I)n the Ottoman case, conventional notions of public and private are not congruent with gender. […] The degree of seclusion from the common gaze served as an index of the status of the man as well as the woman of means. No Ottoman male of rank appeared on the streets without a retinue, just as a woman of standing could maintain her reputation for virtue only if she appeared in public with a cordon of attendants.” [Anne Walthall, editor, Servants of the Dynasty: Palace Women in World History, University of California Press, 2008, p 85]
Out-group interactions become even more complicated if people have differing expectations for appropriate or presumed behaviors. For example, if women traditionally own houses and household goods but outsiders see ownership and exchange only in terms of men interacting with men, they may refuse to negotiate with women or be unable to see women as having authority, a situation that happened more than once when Europeans interacted with various Native Americans nations or when outsiders attempted to understand the status of royal women in Genghis Khan’s and other steppe empires.
Remember that across generations a culture can and often does change. Cultures in contact or collision influence each other in ways that may benefit or disadvantage women. People (women as well as men) travel, sometimes of their own volition and sometimes because they have no choice. Cultures, languages, religions, foods, and technologies move with individuals as well as with merchants or armies. Exchange and transmission of ideas can happen in many different and often subtle ways.
Class
Women of lower status rarely appear in the sources that have come down to us (this is true for lower status men as well, of course). A lack of evidence does not mean such women never had interesting or dramatic lives. Many, of course, died young from any number of causes. Many worked brutally hard and were abused throughout often brief lives. But that is never all they were. Rebellion, innovation, success, and ambition can be part of life at every level, and occasionally we find precious glimpses of these usually neglected and forgotten women in the historical record.
American readers are, I hope, familiar with the stories of Harriet Tubman and Ida B. Wells. Both of these remarkable and change-enacting women were born into slavery.
Born in 1811, Fujinami was the daughter of a trooper, and she entered service in the women’s quarters of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1837 as a messenger: “Although messengers ranked so low that they did not have the right of audience with the shogun’s wife, they performed a variety of tasks, some of which could be quite lucrative. They accompanied the elders who acted as the wife’s proxy in making pilgrimages within the city and performed low-level chores for the transaction agents. On an everyday level, they served in the guard office, took charge of opening and shutting the locked door between the women’s quarters and the male administrative offices, negotiated with male officials, and guided visitors to various reception rooms.” [Walthall, p 178]
In 14th century Norwich, Hawisia Mone became part of the Lollard movement, declared heretical by the church for (among other things) its insistence on the equality of men and women. Her existence is known to us because, after her arrest, the church recorded her adjuration of her beliefs, which, even as she is forced to recant, suggest a questing, inquiring, and radical mind: “every man and every woman being in good lyf out of synne is a good prest and hath [as] much poar of God in all thynges as ony prest ordered, be he pope or bisshop.” [Georgi Vasilev, Heresy and the English Reformation, McFarland, 2007, p 50]
“In March 1294, Marie the daughter of Adalasia, with her mother consenting and cooperating, rented herself to Durante the tailor (corduraruis) for three years. Marie was fourteen years old and needed her mother to make this contract legal. […] [She] placed herself in scolarem seu discipulam, as a student, so the emphasis was clearly on education. Marie wanted to acquire the necessary skills to be a seamstress, or her mother wanted this for her. Durante and his wife [although nameless, the wife is treated in the contract as an active partner in the craft] agreed to teach her the craft, feed and clothe her, and keep her in sickness or in health, and in return for all of this teaching and food, they expected one livre for at least the first year.” [Steven A. Epstein, Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe, The University of North Carolina Press, 1991, p 77]
Epstein goes on to add: “Most guilds seem not to have prevented their members from taking on female apprentices, despite the potential problems of mature women exercising their skills without being a member of the guild.”
Law
It’s easy to talk about the legal disabilities women often labored under (and still labor under), and these are very real and very debilitating. But it is also important to understand that people find ways to get around the law. Additionally, not all legal traditions pertaining to women match those of Classical Athens or early Victorian England. “Modern innovations” are not necessarily modern. Napoleon’s civil code restricted married women’s property rights, for example; so much for his sweeping reforms.
In pharaonic Egypt “married women retained full rights to their own property and could engage in business transactions like money-lending without the need of the husband’s approval. This freedom extended to the ability of either party to terminate a marriage unilaterally, without being required to specify any grounds.” [Jane Rowlandson, editor, Women in Society in Greek and Roman Egypt, Cambridge University Press, 1998. p 156]
In tenth century Saxony there is “plenty of evidence that women accumulated, transmitted and alienated predial estate […] as a matter of course.” [K.J. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society, Blackwell, 1979, p 60]
In medieval Valldigna, Spain, Aixa Glavieta “went to court six times until she forced the Negral family return to her the terrace with two mulberry trees” which the head of the Negral family “had unfairly taken from her for one arrova of linen which she had owed him, although the leaves produced by these two mulberry trees alone (and which he had sold immediately) were more than enough to settle the debt.” [Ferran Garcia-Oliver, The Valley of the Six Mosques: Work and Life in Medieval Valldigna, Brepols, 2011, p 166]
In the medieval Islamic world, “Women appear as both claimants and defendants in cases requiring record and recourse […] Although women were often represented in court or in a business transaction by a proxy or agent, often a male relative of immediate family, they just as often actively participated in these transactions. They appeared in court in person irrespective of the gender of the other participants, in cases which they initiated or in which they themselves appeared as defendants.” [Gavin R. G. Hambly, editor, Women in the Medieval Islamic World, St. Martin’s Press, 1999, p 248-249]
Economy, Trade, and Business
Documents discovered at the ancient site of Niya (in Xinjiang, along the southern rim of the Taklamakan Desert) and dating from circa the 3rd-4th centuries CE give a glimpse into the daily life of that time. Most concern themselves with legal and business transactions.
“Women participated fully in this economy. They initiated transactions, served as witnesses, brought disputes to the attention of officials, and owned land. They could adopt children and give them away, too. One woman put her son up for adoption and received a camel as milk payment. When she discovered that her birth son’s master was treating him as a slave, she took her son back and sued his adoptive father, stipulating that the father henceforth had to treat the boy as his son and not a slave.” [Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road, Oxford University Press, 2012, p 48]
Royal Persian women in the Achaemenid era were well known in ancient times as property holders and estate owners. They maintained and managed workforces, provided rations (including special rations for mothers), and leveraged their wealth to support their own status as well as that of relatives. [Maria Brosius, Women in Ancient Persia, Clarendon, 1996]
In the late 13th century, Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan visited Angkor in Cambodia, at that time the center of the powerful Khmer Empire. He wrote an account of his travels, including a discussion of trade.
“The local people who know how to trade are all women. So when a Chinese goes to this country, the first thing he must do is take in a woman, partly with a view to profiting from her trading abilities.” [Zhou Daguan (translated by Peter Harris), A Record of Cambodia: The Land and Its People, Silkworm Books, 2007. p 70]
Politics and Diplomacy
If you can’t find numerous examples of women who have ruled nations, principalities, and local polities, you’re not looking hard enough. So instead let’s move on to roles women might play in politics and diplomacy:
“From trade it was not a great step to diplomacy, especially for those who had been both commercial and sexual partners of foreign traders. Such women frequently became fluent in the languages needed in commerce. Thus the first Dutch mission to Cochin-China found that the king dealt with them through a Vietnamese woman who spoke excellent Portuguese and Malay and has long resided in Macao. […] Later the Sultan of Deli, in Sumatra, ordered ‘a most extraordinary and eccentric old woman’ named Che Laut to accompany John Anderson on his embassy to various Sumatran states. She was ‘a prodigy of learning,’ spoke Chinese, Thai, Chuliah, Bengali, and Acehnese and knew the politics of all the Sumatran coastal states intimately.” [Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450 – 1680, Silkworm Books, 1988. pp 165-166]
“When the monastery was hallowed, king Wulfhere was there, his brother Aethelred, and his sisters Cyneberg and Cyneswith. […] These are the witnesses who were there, who signed upon Christ’s cross with their fingers and agreed with their tongues. First was king Wulfhere, who first sealed it with his word […] ‘I, king Wulfhere […]’”
There follows a list of the people who witnessed, including, “And we, the king’s sisters, Cyneburg and Cyneswith, we approve and honour it.” [Anne Savage, translator, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, Dorset Press, 1983, pp 48, 50]
“A second misunderstanding of the nature of Ottoman society is the erroneous assumption that the seclusion of women precluded their exercising any influence beyond the walls of the harem or that women were meant to play only a narrow role within the family, subordinate to its male members. […] In a polity such as that of the Ottomans, in which the empire was considered the personal domain of the dynastic family and the empire’s subjects the servants or slaves of the dynasty, it was natural that important women within the dynastic household–particularly the mother of the reigning sultan–would assume legitimate roles of authority in the public sphere.” [Walthall, p. 84]
Marriage
Women who make dynastic marriages can be written as passive pawns, or they can be portrayed as canny political players who function as ambassadors from their birth dynasties to the dynasties they marry into. Genghis Khan’s daughters were married into neighboring tribes and kingdoms but remained at the seat of power as their husbands were sent to war. Authority was left in the daughters’ hands while the men fought and died in the Great Khan’s service—and were replaced by new husbands.
Nor were women isolated once they made diplomatic marriages. It is vanishingly rare for a woman of high birth who is sent to the court of her husband to bide alone in the fashion of a stereotypical ’50s housewife, vacuuming and popping Valium in isolation as a barrage of advertisements remind her that her social capital is measured by the spotlessness of her man’s shirt collars. A woman of high birth in any stratified society will have companions and servants commensurate with her position. They are usually strongly loyal to her because their status rises and falls with hers.
She will also usually retain important ties to her birth family, and will be expected to look after their interests. Stratonice, a daughter of Demetrios Poliorcetes (son of Antigonus the One-Eyed), married first Seleucus and then his son Antiochus (the first and second of the Seleucid emperors). Yet in public inscriptions she emphasizes her role as a royal daughter rather than as a royal wife or mother. She later married one of her daughters to her brother, Antigonus Gonatus, an act that benefited Antigonid authority and power.
If a woman is severed from contact with her family then there can be little benefit in making a marriage alliance. Women forced into an untenable marriage may seek redress or escape. Princess Radegund was one of the last survivors of the Thuringian royal family, which was systemically destroyed by the Merovingian king Clothar in the 6th century. He married her, but after he had her sole surviving brother killed she managed to leave him by fleeing to a convent (and eventually becoming a saint).
The marriage customs and living arrangements of women in lower social strata are not as well known, but one may safely state that they varied widely across time and region. Nuclear families composed of a bride and groom in their own solitary household are rare. Extended families living together have been the norm in many places and eras, and young couples may live with either the groom’s or the bride’s family. Some marriages were arranged while others were made by the participants themselves. Age at marriage varies. The Leave it to Beaver isolate nuclear family often pops up in fiction set in societies where such an arrangement wouldn’t be viable or common.
A note about mothers and sons (and the relationship of young men and old women) and how it can relate to power and trust. In many cases the one person a lord, prince, king, or emperor could absolutely trust was his mother: only she, besides himself, had full investment in his success. If a woman and her son got along and trusted each other, his elevation and his access to power benefited her, and he in turn could benefit from her wholehearted support and from her experience and connections, including to her natal family, whose power and influence were affected by her son’s success.
For example, already in close alliance with his mother, Olympias, Alexander the Great clearly was able and willing to frame political relationships with older women in a similar fashion.
“He appointed [Ada] to the governership of Caria as a whole. This woman was the wife of Hidrieus—and also his sister, a relationship in accordance with Carian custom; Hidrieus on his death-bed had bequeathed her his power, government by women having been a familiar thing in Asia from the time of Semiramis onward. She was subsequently deposed by Pixodarus [and] remained in control of Alinda only, one of the most strongly defended places in Caria, and when Alexander invaded Caria she presented herself before him, surrendered the town, and offered to adopt him as her son. Alexander did not refuse the offer.” [Arrian (translation by Aubrey de Sélincourt), The Campaigns of Alexander, Penguin, 1971, p 90] Recall that Arrian was writing in the second century C.E.
Alexander also captured the household of Persian king Darius III and, besides treating them with respect, folded them into his own household as a way of marking his right to assume the title of Great King in Persia. He famously did not immediately marry or rape Darius’s widow or daughters as a form of “conquest,” but there was one relationship he did care about replicating at once: “Darius’s mother, Sisygambis, was, much more than Ada, treated like a second Olympias.” [Carney, p 93-94]
Such considerations are also true of mothers and daughters. Relationships might be close, or estranged, and certainly high status women and their daughters understood how authority and influence could be enhanced through advantageous political marriages.
“It is surely no coincidence that the most powerful queen mothers [in the Ottoman court] were those with several daughters […] Kösem (1623-52) had at least three […] The queen mother arranged the marriages not only of her own daughters but also of the daughters of her son and his concubines. […] Kösem’s long carer gave her considerable opportunity to forge such alliances. In 1626 or thereabouts she wrote to the grand vizier proposing that he marry one of her daughters: ‘Whenever you’re ready, let me know and I’ll act accordingly. We’ll take care of you right away. I have a princess ready. I’ll do just as I did when I sent out my Fatma.’” [Walthall p 93]
Women could and would defend their daughters when needed:
In 1224 Erard II, “a baron of some importance in southern Champagne […] sold his wife [Emeline]’s dowry for a substantial sum of money, effectively dispossessing his stepdaughter who was in her early twenties and ready for marriage.” Soon afterward Erard seals a legal document in which conditions are clearly laid out requiring him to repay Emeline and to provide a dowry for his stepdaughter, a document which includes contingencies for divorce (presumably if he does not meet his obligations). Emeline herself is supported by her own powerful mother and a brother. [Theodore Evergates, Feudal Society in Medieval France: Documents from the County of Champagne, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, p 45]
Divorce
The mechanisms and ease of dissolving a marriage vary across eras and regions, and in some situations women had as much (or as little) freedom to divorce as men did, as in the Egyptian example mentioned earlier. Here’s another fascinating example:
“Karaeng Balla-Jawaya […] was born in 1634 to one of the highest Makassar lineages. At the age of thirteen she married Karaeng Bonto-marannu, later to be one of the great Makassar war leaders. At twenty-five she separated from him and soon after married his rival, Karaeng Karunrung, the effective prime minister. At thirty-one she separated from him, perhaps because he was in exile, and two years later married Arung Palakka, who was in the process of conquering her country with Dutch help. At thirty-six she separated from him, and eventually died at eighty-six.” [Reid, pp 152-153]
Note how Reid states that “she separated from him” rather than “he divorced or discarded her,” and note how much that changes how the story is read.
War and Physicality
All too often the sole determiner of whether women “belong” in epic fantasy is whether they took up arms, despite the presence of many menfolk who aren’t warriors or soldiers in historical epics. Kameron Hurley’s essay “We Have Always Fought” comprehensively explodes the idea of women as universal non-combatants. My spouse, an archaeologist with a specialty in militarism and empire, often points out that on frontiers and in revolutions where every body is necessary to success, women step up in diverse ways because that’s what is needed. If women can take on traditionally ‘male’ roles in times of duress then they are, in fact, capable of doing those things at any time. It is cultural pressures that restrict them.
Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire, was famously killed in battle against forces led by Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae.
“The widow of Polypherchon’s son Alexandros—a woman named Kratesipolis—maintained and controlled her late husband’s army, and made successful use of it in the Peloponnese. Her very name, which means “city-conqueror,” may have been adopted by her to commemorate her capture of the city of Sikyon in 314 BC. […] Kratesipolis’s ability to maintain and direct the actions of an army, as well as govern two important Greek cities, demonstrates that she possessed both the resources necessary to employ the soldiers and the authority and respect required to keep under her own control both army and wealth.” [Kyra L. Nourse, Women and the Early Development of Royal Power in the Hellenistic East, dissertation, 2002. pp 214 – 215]
“Cynnane was the daughter of Philip II and his Illyrian wife, Audata. […] [her] mother taught her to be a warrior, and she fought in Philip’s campaigns against the Illyrians. In one of those battles, she not only defeated the enemy but also confronted and killed their queen. [She] would later pass the military training and tradition she had received from her mother on to her own daughter, Adea Eurydice.” [Elizabeth Donnelly Carney, Women and Monarchy in Macedonia, University of Oklahoma Press, 2000, p. 69]
In Vietnam, the famous Trưng sisters led a (briefly) successful rebellion against the Han Chinese. At that time “women in Vietnam could serve as judges, soldiers, and even rulers. They also had equal rights to inherit land and other property.”
Burials of some Sarmatian women (first millennium B.C.E.) include weapons. Although we cannot be sure what the presence of weapons in such graves symbolizes it is common for women in nomadic cultures to ride as well as men and to be able to defend their herds and grazing territories. [See the work of Jeannine Davis-Kimball.]
A Dutch traveler to Southeast Asia remarked on the presence of palace guards who were women: “When the [Mataram] king presided at an official audience he was surrounded by the 150-strong female corps, all carefully selected for their beauty and all skilled in the use of pikes, lances, blowpipes, and muskets.” Later, the Thai kingdom included “a battalion divided into four companies, comprising four hundred women in all. Recruited at the age of thirteen, they served as guards until they reached twenty-five or so, after which time they continued as royal attendants and supervisors. Their leaders were women of proven courage and loyalty handpicked by the king, and the corps itself was a model of organization and military prowess.” [Walthall, pp. 23 & 31]
It was deemed unexceptional in these societies for women to be given weapons-training and employed as palace guards. All-women military companies also appear, for example, in the West African kingdom of Dahomey in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Female athletes are not a creation of the Soviet bloc and Title IX. Among the Taíno there are documented reports of teams of women engaged in a ballgame that was played across the entire region of Mesoamerica. Women from the Santee Sioux, Crow, Hidatsa, Assiniboine, and Omaha nations (as well as others) played a game called shinny, similar to field hockey. Spartan women exercised and engaged in physical contests in a similar manner to Spartan men, to the outrage of the conservative Athenians.
Read the life story of 17th century Frenchwoman Julie D’Abigney, here retold with enthusiasm.
Women’s Work
The most basic division of labor in human society is based on age. Most societies exempt children from work expected of adults, and many skills and professions need years of training (and physical maturity) to attain competence.
Many societies see the tasks necessary to creating community as gendered:
“[In the world of the Hodenosaunee] each person, man and woman, had an important function. Men were hunters and warriors, providers and protectors of the community. Women owned the houses, gathered wild foods, cooked, made baskets and clothing, and cared for the children. Spiritual life […] included a priesthood of men and women Keepers of the Faith who supervised religious rites and various secret organizations that performed curing and other ceremonies.” [Alvin M. Josephy, 500 Nations, Knopf, 1994, p 47]
“Generally, several male smiths in a town will work iron and wood, while at least one female member of the family will work clay.” [Patrick R. McNaughton, The Mande Blacksmiths, Indiana University Press, 1993, p 22]
But gender division may not correspond to modern American stereotypes nor to quaint Victorian notions of feminine daintiness and frailty (however patriarchal the society may be).
“Until the mid- to late-nineteenth century, almost everywhere in France, at least half the people working in the open air were women. […] women ploughed, sowed, reaped, winnowed, threshed, gleaned and gathered firewood, tended the animals, fed it to the men and children, kept house […] and gave birth. Housekeeping was the least of their labours. […] All along the Atlantic coast, women were seen ploughing the fields, slaughtering animals and sawing wood while men stretched out on piles of heather in the sun. In the Auvergne, in order to clear the snow, milk the cows, feed the pig, fetch the water, make the cheese, peel and boil the chestnuts and spin the cloth, women rose earlier and went to bed later than men […] At Granville on the Cotentin peninsula, women fished, repaired boats and worked as stevedores and carpenters. In the Alps they were yoked to asses and hitched to ploughs, and sometimes lent to other farmers.” [Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Norton, 2007, pp 103-104]
Acting as merchants as well as selling and buying in the market is typical women’s work in many cultures while in some cultures women engage in business through male intermediaries. Women in agricultural communities often barter or trade on the side. Who controlled these earnings varies from culture to culture.
Hebrew financial ledgers from medieval Spain include ledgers belonging to women, “and include lists of loans and properties […] [Two of the women who have ledgers] appear as widows engaged in managing the extensive business dealings of their deceased husbands, but the very fact that they managed substantial financial estates indicates that this was an accepted phenomenon, and speaks of their own status.” [Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, Brandeis University Press, 2004, p 111]
“By the Ur III period [21st century B.C.E.], large numbers of women and girls were working in temple and palace workshops as weavers, producing a great variety of different textiles which were traded widely as well as supplying the needs of the temple itself.” [Harriett Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p 160]
Cooking is a classic example of women’s work often treated as too mundane to be worthy of epic (unless it is performed by a male chef). Dismissing the seemingly ordinary daily chore of cooking ignores its foundational role as a means by which life and strength is perpetuated as well as a skill that may be respected and celebrated.
Now five score wives had Susu Mountain Sumamuru,
One hundred wives had he.
His nephew, Fa-Koli, had but one,
And Sumamuru, five score!When a hundred bowls they would cook
To make the warriors’ meal,
Fa-Koli’s wife alone would one hundred cook
To make the warriors’ meal.
In the annotation to these lines, the translator notes what is implied in the text and would be understood to the audience: “Fa-Koli’s wife [Keleya Konkon] is a powerful sorceress.”
The ability to feed people is not trivial but powerful.
[Fa-Digi Sisòkò, translated and notes by John William Johnson, The Epic of Son-Jara, Indiana University Press, 1992, p 93 & 138]
Health, Life Expectancy, and the Role of Women in Medicine
In 1999 I attended an exhibit on “the Viking Age” at the Danish National Museum. As you entered the exhibit room you immediately faced a row of skeletons placed one next to the other to compare height and robustness. Demographers had measured average height by examining burials from the Neolithic through the 20th century. The height of the skeleton representing the early Middle Ages (10th century) almost matched the height of the skeleton representing the 20th century. Height declined after the 12th century, and the shortest, least robust skeletons came from the 17th and 18th centuries. It turns out that, in this region, health and nutrition were better in the so-called Dark Ages than at any other time up until the present.
Demographics can turn up other unexpected localized features:
“There is however one demographic feature to be observed in early Saxon aristocratic society which can be traced more clearly—the respective expectations of life for adult men and women. In collecting materials for the history of the leading kins in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, it would be difficult and rather purblind not to notice the surprising number of matrons who outlive their husbands, sometimes by several decades and sometimes more than one, their brothers and even their sons.” [Leyser, p 52]
Although she lived slightly later, imagine the iron-willed Eleanor of Aquitaine who in her late 70s twice crossed the Pyrenees first to collect a granddaughter and then to escort young Blanche to her affianced husband-to-be, the heir to the throne of France. Women weren’t “old at 30,” and despite high rates of mortality in childbirth (and all the other sources of mortality that plagued the world then and in all too many areas still do now) some lived to a reasonable age even by modern standards.
Of course health and hygiene vary tremendously worldwide.
“If Southeast Asians [in the 14th-17th centuries] also lived longer than Renaissance Europeans, as seems likely, one important reason may have been a lower child mortality. […] The relatively good health of Southeast Asians in the age of commerce should not surprise us if we compare their diet, medicine, and hygiene with those of contemporary Europeans. For the great majority of Southeast Asians serious hunger or malnutrition was never a danger. The basic daily adult requirement of one kati [625 grams] of rice a day was not difficult to produce in the country or to buy in the city. […] The care of the body, the washing and perfuming of the hair, a pleasant odour of the breath and the body, and neatness and elegance in dress were all matters of great importance […]” [Reid. p. 50]
“The Japanese lifestyle was also healthful because it was hygienic, certainly compared to either Europe or the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century. Bathing was a regular part of life by this time, people customarily drank their water boiled in the form of tea, and they carefully collected their bodily wastes to be used as fertilizer.” [Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan, University of California Press, 1997, p 22]
Women were not universally passive recipients of male medical knowledge nor were they always dependent on male expertise and institutions. In the medieval Islamic world women appear in the historical record as doctors, surgeons, midwives, and healers, and well-to-do women in the Islamic world appear as patrons of hospitals and charities, especially those that benefit poor women. In the 12th century in the Holy Roman Empire, abbess Hildegard of Bingen wrote copiously about spiritual visions and about music, and her writing included the scientific and medical works Physica and Causae et curae. She also corresponded with magnates and lesser people from all over Europe, made three preaching tours, and defied the abbot who ruled over her convent by absconding with some of the nuns to set up a new convent in a place of her choosing.
Education and Literacy
We’re all familiar with stories where the son gets thorough schooling while his sister is not even taught to read because it’s not a skill that’s valued in a bride. But many women throughout history were educated, and not every culture has seen literacy as a “male” virtue.
Enheduanna, the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, was a high priestess (an important political position) and a composer and writer of religious hymns that remained known and in use for centuries after her death (23rd century B.C.E.)
In the second century B.C.E. a certain Polythroos son of Onesimos made a gift to the city of Teos to use for educating its children, including “three grammar-masters to teach the boys and the girls.” [Roger S Bagnall and Peter Derow, editors, The Hellenistic Period: Historical Sources in Translation, Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p 132]
“Since the beginning of the Safavid period, the art of reading and writing, calligraphy, and composing letters was common among the women of the court, who used it for personal correspondence as well as for diplomatic activities.” [Hambly, p 329]
16th century Nuremburg midwives seem to have commonly been given printed copies of their oath and of baptism regulations, suggesting it was expected for them to be literate. A manual called “The rosegarden for midwives and pregnant women” was in popular use, and the knowledge midwives had in these circumstances would have been similar to that of physicians of the time, within their specialty. [Barbara A. Hanawalt, editor, Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, Indiana University Press, 1986, chapter 6]
Sex and Modesty
Sexual mores vary over cultures. The puritanical, post-Victorian mindset prominent in 20th century USA is unique to a specific era, and is in fact unusual.
Here’s a folk proverb from the territory of Savoy: “No house was ever shamed by a girl who let her skirts be lifted.”
Zhou Daguan, the 13th century Chinese envoy whom we’ve met before, was startled by many things Khmer; for example, the unapologetic sexual feelings expressed by women.
“If a husband doesn’t meet his wife’s wishes he will be abandoned right away […] If the husband happens to have work to do far away, if it is only for a few nights that is all right, but if it is for more than ten nights or so the wife will say, ‘I’m not a ghost—why am I sleeping alone?’”
Bathing customs also come in for scrutiny. Modesty doesn’t mean the same thing across cultures, and nudity is not always linked to sexuality.
“Everyone, male and female, goes naked into the pool. […] For people from the same generation there are no constraints.” And, even better (from his perspective): “women […] get together in groups of three to five and go out of the city to bathe in the river. […] You get to see everything, from head to toe.” [Zhou Daguan, pp 56, 81].
Seen across time, premarital and extramarital sex are not rarities; they’re common and, in some cases, expected. Some cultures have no restriction on premarital sex because marriage is not, in those cultures, about sexual access, nor is a woman’s virginity a universally prized commodity.
There can be policy reasons for extramarital sexual relations as well.
“Plutarch preserves an anecdote that implies that Alexander encouraged Cleopatra [his sister] to take lovers rather than remarry, much as Charlemagne later did with his daughters.” [Carney, p 90]
Sex work, too, must be considered with nuance rather than the Playboy-bunny-style courtesan and willing-or-thieving whore who turn up with odd regularity in science fiction and fantasy novels.
“Among people who believed that simple fornication or adultery by married men with unmarried women was not all that bad, prostitutes might be just another sort of service worker. They could be part of networks of women within towns, associating with other servant women if not with their mistresses. One London case involved a prostitute who gave other women information about the sexual prowess (or rather lack of it) of potential marriage partners, reporting ‘that certain young men which were in contemplation of marriage with them had not what men should have to please them.’ One man sued her for the damages he sustained in losing the opportunity to marry a rich widow.” [Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 2005. p 107]
Don’t despair, however. You can totes have your sexy spy women who use lust to destroy the enemy.
Kautilya’s The Arthashastra (written no later than 150 CE) is an extensive handbook for the art of government, and a pretty ruthless one at that (Machiavelli, eat your heart out). Besides wandering nuns (ascetic women) acting as roving spies, the section “Against Oligarchy” suggests using lust to weaken the bonds between a council of chiefs whose solidarity the king wishes to disrupt:
“Brothel keepers, acrobats, actors/actresses, dancers and conjurors shall make the chiefs of the oligarchy infatuated with young women of great beauty. When they are duly smitten with passion, the agents shall provoke quarrels among them. […]” [Kautilya (translated by L.N. Rangarajan), The Arthashastra, Penguin, 1987, p. 522]
Lesbians exist throughout history (and thus certainly before history began to be recorded), although their presence isn’t as well documented as sexual relationships between men. Writer Heather Rose Jones’s “The Lesbian Historic Motif Project” does so much so well that I am just going to link you to it.
Also, please remember there is no one universal standard of beauty. The current Hollywood obsession with thinness is a result of modern food abundance. In societies with high food insecurity, heavier women may be perceived as healthier and more attractive than their thin counterparts. It’s not that slender women could not be considered beautiful in the past, but if every girl and woman described as beautiful in a book is thin or slender according to modern Hollywood standards (which have changed a great deal even compared to the actresses of the 1920s), or if weight-loss by itself is described as making a character beautiful, then this is merely a modern USA-centric stereotype being projected into scenarios where different beauty standards would more realistically apply. This should be equally obvious in terms of other aspects of perceived beauty, like complexion, hair, features, body shape, and ornamentation.
Any cursory read of world literature reveals an emphasis on male beauty and splendidness as well. In Genesis, Joseph is described as “well built and handsome,” which gives Potiphar’s wife at least one reason to make unwanted advances toward him. In his book The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals 939-1210 (University of Pennsylvania, 1985), C. Stephen Jaeger notes that “An impressive appearance was all but a requirement for a bishop.” He goes on to note the example of Gunther of Bamberg (died 1065) who, it was said, “so far surpassed other mortals in ‘formae elegentia ac tocius corporis integritate’ that in Jerusalem great crowds gathered around him wherever he went in order to marvel at his beauty.” I don’t make this stuff up, people.
Rape
Oh, everyone knows how to write about rape. It’s a popular way to include women in an epic fantasy or historical narrative, whether written in explicit detail or merely implied (as in all those Conan comics of the 70s). Fantasy novels are littered with raped women, possibly more raped women than women serving any other plot function except sex work. (And wouldn’t that be an interesting statistical survey?)
If you must include rape (and there can be reasons to include rape), know that there’s nothing new, bold, or edgy in writing violent scenes from the point of view of the person who is inflicting harm, suffering, and fear; that’s the status quo. Flip the lens. Try writing from the point of view of those who survive, and not only as a revenge fantasy or “I became a warrior because I was raped.” Consider how people endure through terrible trauma and how some are broken by it while others are able to build a new life for themselves. Consider how ripples spread through an entire family or village or society.
Not all cultures offer the same treatment to women captives, either.
“‘Generally,’ as the eighteenth-century French traveller [in North America] J.C.B. put it, ‘savages have scruples about molesting a woman prisoner, and look upon it as a crime, even when she gives her consent.’” [James Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America, Grove Press, 1998, p. 141]
Gives one a different perspective on the word ‘savage,’ doesn’t it?
Children
It’s not remotely unrealistic (or anti-feminist, as I was once told) to include pregnant women, children and the care of children, and women wanting children in books as matters of interest and importance.
Stories about the stigma of being a barren woman also matter, because for many women having a child was a necessary and/or desperately desired part of life. At the same time, a childless wife might well have other valuable qualities or connections; her status wasn’t necessarily only contingent on her ability to bear a child.
In polygamous societies stories abound of the tighter bond between children of the same mother as opposed to children who had the same father but a different mother. Sunjata was close to his full sister, Kolonkan, who went into exile with him and used her magic (and her skill at cooking) to aid him. Alexander the Great was known to be close to his full sister, Cleopatra, who acted in his interest after he left Macedonia and who, after his death, was considered an important potential marriage partner for the generals vying for control of his empire because her children would be heirs to the Argead dynasty (the ruling dynasty of Macedonia at that time, which died out when all the remaining descendants of Alexander’s father, Philip II, were murdered).
Not all mothers are nurturing and selfless. Some women are willing to sacrifice a child to hold on to power for themselves. After the death of her husband (and brother) Ptolemy VI, Cleopatra II married another brother, Ptolemy VIII, even though on coronation day he murdered her young son by Ptolemy VI. When Ptolemy VIII then also married her daughter by Ptolemy VI, she and her daughter, now co-wives, competed ruthlessly for power in a contest that eventually resulted in the brutal death of yet another son. In contrast Cleopatra VII (the famous Cleopatra) nurtured and protected her children as well as she was able, raising her eldest son Caesarion (by Julius Caeser) to co-rule with her; after her untimely death he was murdered by Octavian’s agents even though she had arranged for him to escape to the east in the hope of putting him out of reach of the Romans.
Not all women in the past got pregnant and had an unending stream of pregnancies broken only by death in childbirth. Various forms of (more or less successful) birth control have been practiced for millennia. The plant silphium, grown in coastal Libya, is said to have been such an effective contraceptive that it was over-harvested until it became extinct.
Not all women pined for children. Some were perfectly happy without them, and/or dedicated themselves to work or religious matters that specifically prohibited them from childbearing.
Some women, for a variety of reasons, never married.
Single Women
The most clichéd and thus commonest ways to portray single women in fantasy are as women in religious orders or as sex workers. Ugly spinsters who can’t get a date also appear, although in actual fact looks are rarely as important in the marriage market as family connections and money. A common reason that a woman might not marry was that she simply could not afford to or, depending on marriage customs, could not attract an acceptable suitor because of a lack of aforesaid family money and connections.
Enslaved women have often lived in a state of enforced singleness, whether or not they are free from sexual demands (and in almost all cases they are not). Americans are most familiar with the horrific history of the trans-Atlantic chattel slave trade, but slavery has existed in many different forms for millennia. In Europe, for example, slavery continued throughout the Middle Ages, waxing and waning depending on the region and era, and many women were transported great distances from their original homes. Of course human trafficking still goes on today in appallingly high numbers.
Many single women in past eras were employed as domestic servants, but not all were. Some had their own work and households. Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe there were always single women who “had their own smoke,” to use a phrase from the late medieval period in Germany that referred to their ability to support themselves in a household of their own. In Paris, single women and/or widows “found practical, economic, and emotional support in their companionships with other unattached women. […] The Parisian tax records [of the 13th century] support this anecdotal evidence of female companionship by offering us glimpses of women who lived and worked together for years.” [Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, editors, Singlewomen in the European Past: 1250-1800, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, p 85 & 193]
Some women didn’t marry because they did not want to marry and had the means to refuse, even in cultures where marriage was the overwhelming outcome for most.
“Ai’isha (bint Ahmad al-Qurtubiyya d. 1010) was one of the noble ladies of Cordova and a fine calligrapher […] She attended the courts of the Andalusian kings and wrote poems in their honour. She died unmarried. When one of the poets asked for her hand she scorned him:
1 I am a lioness, and I will never be a man’s woman.
2 If I had to choose a mate, why should I say yes to a dog when I’m deaf to lions?”
[Abdullah al-Udhari (translator and author), Classical Poems by Arab Women, Saqi Books, 1999, p 160]
A Final Word
Women have always lived complex and multivariate lives. Women are everywhere, if only we go looking. Any of the lives or situations referenced above could easily become the launching point for a range of stories, from light adventure to grimmest dark to grand epic.
Our current discussions about the lives and roles of women are not the first round. In the late 14th century the newly widowed Christine de Pisan turned to writing as a means to support her family. She is most famous for two books defending “the ladies.” To quote from Wikipedia, she “argues that stereotypes of women can be sustained only if women are prevented from entering into the conversation. Overall, she hoped to establish truths about women that contradicted the negative stereotypes that she had identified in previous literature.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Pisan was writing in 1405 C.E.
Women have been written out of many histories, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t present. In the epilogue to his book The Secret History of the Mongol Queens (Crown, 2010), anthropologist Jack Weatherford writes “Only grudgingly and piecemeal did the story of the daughters of Genghis Khan and of Queen Manduhai the Wise arise from the dust around me, and only hesitantly and somewhat unwillingly did I acknowledge that the individuals whom I had never studied in school or read about in any book could, in fact, be figures of tremendous historic importance” (p 276).
If we don’t hear about them, it’s hard or even impossible to see them. It’s not only male writers who leave out women; female writers do it too. We all do it because we’ve been told women didn’t and don’t matter unless they were allowed to be like men and do like men, or to support men’s stories, or unless men found them sexually attractive or approved of them. We’re told women were passive and repressed and ignorant and therefore empty. But it isn’t true.
Women’s stories don’t trivialize or dull a narrative. They enrich it. They enlarge it.
It’s easy to place women into epic fantasy stories—and more than one woman, women who interact with each other in multifarious ways and whose stories are about them, not in support of men. In my Tor.com essay “Writing Women Characters,” I elaborate on my three main pieces of advice for those who wonder how to better write women characters:
- Have enough women in the story that they can talk to each other.
- Filling in tertiary characters with women, even if they have little dialogue or no major impact on plot, changes the background dynamic in unexpected ways.
- Set women characters into the plot as energetic participants in the plot, whether as primary or secondary or tertiary characters and whether in public or private roles within the setting. Have your female characters exist for themselves, not merely as passive adjuncts whose sole function is to serve as a mirror or a motivator or a victim in relationship to the male.
Where does that leave us?
David Conrad’s essay on female power in the epic tradition quotes from djeli Adama Diabaté’s telling of the Sunjata story, the Mande epic of the founder of the empire of Mali in the 13th century. [Ralph A. Austen, editor, In Search of Sunjata: the Mande Oral Epic as History, Literature, and Performance, 1999, p 198]
It is a foolish woman who degrades womanhood.
Even if she were a man,
If she could not do anything with a weaver’s spindle,
She could do it with an axe.
It was Maghan Sunjata who first put a woman in government in the Manden.
There were eleven women in Sunjata’s government,
[From among the] Nine suba women and nine nyagbaw.
It was these people who first said “unse” in the Manden:
“Whatever men can do, we can do.”
That is the meaning of unse.
Kate Elliott is the author of numerous fantasy & science fiction novels, including Black Wolves, Cold Magic, Jaran, and the YA fantasy Court of Fives. You can find out more about her work at her website. Many thanks to Ellen B. Wright, Liz Bourke, Aliette de Bodard, Cheri Nagashima, and Ann Marie Rasmussen for comments and encouragement on this piece.
I think this is really important; the understanding that women have always been active in history in various ways. Which is not to downplay the injustices then and now, but just to point out that a)not all women are passive victims and b)it’s not a given that all societies treat women a certain way or that they have specific place in society, and that women participating in culture is some novel/radical idea. Interestingly, in my own reading, a few years ago I came across the works of St. Edith Stein, who was writing generally around the time of the second world war. She herself was a Carmelite nun (although she also had a PhD in philosophy and taught/lectured) and was a big advocate of the idea that women – including mothers – had a place and a vocation in the professional world, and in fact mused at one point that this idea of the ‘housewife’ and a woman whose only place is in the home is a rather recent invention (by her time’s standards).
I have to quibble about this: From my understanding of the Lollards and their Twelve Conclusions, they were not deemed heretical because they believed in ‘the equality of men and women’. As for the ‘among other things’ you so blithely reference, those were the main reasons their views were considered heretical – they believed in a lay priesthood, challenged the views of the Eucharist (and denied pretty much all Sacraments) and generally were iconoclasts. They did not believe in focusing on the suffering of Christ. They had criticisms on the Church’s practice for prayers for the dead, veneration of saints/Mary, as well as ostentatious church artwork since that money should go to charity. They were against all celibacy vows (for men and women) because in their view it just encouraged sodomy (in clergy) and secret sex/abortions in women. They were against the idea that the Church should have any type of temporal power. The quote you bring up seems to me more a recantation of the idea that there is no such thing as an ordained, ministerial priesthood (especially when you read it in context of her entire statement) – but their objections to the priesthood were not because it was restricted to men, but because of what they believed about holy orders in general. I’m not saying that they may not have believed in the equality of men and women, but that’s not why they would have been considered heretics. And there were many Catholics who themselves believed in the equality of men and women even if they believed in a ministerial priesthood or whatever else. So frankly I think this was a bit of a cheap shot and doing basically the exact same thing your essay is against by portraying an entire group/culture/religion with the same brush in regards to the place of women in their society. This isn’t to say that everybody’s had a perfect track record on this topic but that was a fairly overly simplistic summary.
ETA: This is not to detract from the fact that I think this is overall an excellent piece.
Haven’t ever commented before, but I wanted to thank you for doing the research and posting this essay. Super, super interesting and informative. I’ll never understand people who limit their characters and their own stories in the name of “realism,” especially when their idea of what realism means is so far from the truth.
P.S. Loved the Crossroads Trilogy and Labyrinth Gate
Thanks for such a researched and thoughtful article. Lots of interesting and inspiring stuff there :)
Great read! Thank you.
It is amazing how much the skewed Victorian view of history has so much impact upon our modern view of history. Yet when Chaurcer wrote his Tales, fully half the party were women. That is life. Women were more than the bar maid at taverns.
The first captives ransomed after many medieval wars were the washer women. And contrary to so much fiction, these camp followers were not sex workers. There were customs that typically protected the women from random harassment by their own army.
Silk workers in Italy and London had their own guilds. Windows took over their husband’s business and became members of those guilds.
A fascinating book I read was The King’s Midwife. It is about Madame Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray, who traveled throughout France prior to the French Revolution teaching better medical practices. You learn much about her, the culture, and the fights she faced. I’m still not sure if the publishers who kept making copies of her book did it so much because she was woman, or just because copyright laws had no teeth. Either way, she kept taking them to court to get her fair share.
I will say that in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives, he is doing a great job of giving equal time to male and females in each level of the story. Several gender roles have been turned on their heads.
His Mistborn Era 1 – suffers from “too many dudes” syndrome.
His Mistborn Era 2 – much better of equal treatment.
Contemporary sources, yes!
I read many contemporary sources for my diss, but also some secondary info which helpfully summarized and described cultural changes, and discovered that it was the Industrial Revolution that gave rise, at least in England, to the separate spheres concept, at least for the middle class woman who was, to quote Richard D. Altick’s Victorian People and Ideas, “a priestess dedicated to preserving the home as a refuge from the abrasive outside world” (53). And, to quote a sentence in my diss, which paraphrases Altick, “Wives also supervised the household and did charity work, but nothing more, except the accomplishments learned in youth, in order to preserve the status that the family’s leisure time gave them (Altick 51-52).” (In her novels, Charlotte Brontë smashed to smithereens Victorian middle-class domestic ideology’s concept of women’s intellect, tho’ there were some contemporary sources that had some de-limiting positive things to say).
This was a good read. I can appreciate a wide variety of models for fantasy societies. Authors should create interesting and vivid cultures with original elements, but it’s also important for the structures of those societies to make sense in the context of the setting. Different pressures will force people to adapt in different ways.
I recently read Black Wolves and enjoyed it because it portrayed such a wide variety of characters and cultures so well. The way that culture and history informed the characters was woven skillfully into the story.
Love this, and it’s made me want to do further reading on a number of the characters mentioned. I kind of adore the idea of spying nuns, too…
Thank you for bringing this to the attention of fantasy and sci-fi fans. I’m often baffled by broad statements about women in society that don’t match with my studies of history.
John Gardner pointed out in an interview that any fictional world should be consistent and believable above all, without relying on history (think of Tolkien’s tomatoes and potatoes). So we can invent a culture with powerful women without resorting to history or the mythical dragon argument.
I’m also baffled by statements in your essay and some other works that suggest such a narrow role for female characters in published fiction. I don’t see women being portrayed so narrowly, so I wonder if (a) you’re referring to or responding to unpublished work; (b) I am seeking out works with different roles for women; or (c) if you’re responding to the voices of other critics or people at conventions that I don’t go to. I would really like people to cite the works that they are criticizing so that it doesn’t sound like a straw man.
Thank you. I can’t tell you how badly I needed to read this today.
A better argument than dragons is the inclusion of all of those male characters — those heroes and warriors and high kings (I shall leave out wizards as being, possibly, too fantastical). Not too many of them running around in history. Not too many jugglers or magicians, either. Mostly peasant farmers. It wasn’t only the women who were living lives of quiet desperation. As Hobbes said, their lives — male and female — were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
@Joel Adamson
I think articles like this reflect past works of epic fantasy much more than current ones and mediocre works much more than good ones. So, if you read relativly new relativly good books you eliminate the neglection of female characters more or less by default.
@8: one example is David Eddings’ Belgariad series, ©1982. The only two females that get real scene time are Polgara and Ce’Nedra, the Mother figure and love interest. The follow up, the Malloreon is better in a balance of the genders. Yet they are still “paired.” There is no single female. The women are there to be foils to the guys.
I’ll admit, I didn’t see the bias for awhile.
I believed Tracy Hickman (of the D&D books) was female. Many of his stories with Margaret Weis only have 1-3 females compared to 5-10 males. The males mostly being the more dangerous.
I read Mercedes Lackey and Robert Jordan. Lots of male / female balance there.
Then I started to see how Terry Goodkind, Raymond E. Fiest and other more famous writers used their female characters. The roles are highly limited.
I realize in movies they are even more limited, despite the Laura Crofts and Alices.
Thanks for this well-researched article. I’m definitely bookmarking it for future reference, and to share every time someone asks one of those “women in fantasy novels” questions on forums and in writing groups.
This is particularly relevant to my WIP – a very thorough and enlightened examination of women’s roles in historical context. Thanks for the writing and research – I tweeted it!
When I first read the teaser for this article, my initial through was of women warriors in epic fantasy. Certainly with historical examples like Queen Boudica and Tomoe Gozen (just to name to I’m familiar with) it certainly can’t be argued that its unrealistic to portray female warriors or war leaders in fantasy literature.
The rest of the article was an unexpected and very interesting examination of the other roles, socially prominent or not, in our own history that can be portrayed in fantasy just as well. Nicely done!
Great article. The idea that fantasy can’t include strong female characters is absurd. Not only have women always played important roles in history, but Fantasy just straight up has the ability to portray the past in any way we choose.
Want dragons? No problem.
Want giant spiders that birth armies of humanoid children out to overrun the world? We have those.
Want women that are competent, complex and occupy important roles in society?
That the most realistic request of the three.
Thanks for this article. It was to see how women have been active in so many spheres of every day life around the world.
Thanks for this, good to be among friends. I’ve had more than enough of those “in thrall to” comments. They pop up in the violent responses to innocent news stories that begin, “In an effort to encourage diversity in [x], the President today . . .”
And as a onetime neighbor of hers on the Jersey Shore, how could I forget Molly Pitcher at the Battle of Monmouth (1780)? For some reason–they “should’ve” been dying in childbirth–so many women of the 1700s survived to seize the falling reins, shovel, or cash ledger from their dying husband’s hands, and carried on. In Molly’s case, it was the cannon.
The […] cannon.
A very good article with lots of good information. I like the quotes and ways different ideas were presented. I think that’s really helpful in creating female characters with believable cultural context rather than trying to drop a modern women into a fantasy setting and then forcing the setting to conform to the author’s preconceptions and biases.
The elephant in the room that rarely gets talked about when this subject comes up is child care, especially the care and feeding of infants, and how that ties in to economic class and access to community support. In a nuclear family without social support or the means to hire outside care, care for infants and young children exclusively falls on the person who gave birth to them. Because that care requires a great deal of time and energy, there’s next to none of it left to do anything else save other domestic labor (and that’s assuming good health, something certainly not in abundance among the lower classes.) Large-scale stories involve large-scale things happening outside of a home. If a (cis) woman cannot leave that home because of the requirement of minding babies and small children, it’s a little hard to have the kinds of adventures or impact that (cis) men in such a culture might.
Moreover, it’s important to acknowledge that most women who manage to escape the requirements of childrearing and therefore go out to do other, more interesting things are supported by other women doing the same work. It shouldn’t be a surprise that most of the women who made a noticeable mark on history were either high born/wealthy or lived in group-childrearing cultures, and therefore were able to hand off their kids to someone else in order to go do those big things. The only other women who managed to do these things either hadn’t yet had children, were past childrearing age, or never had children at all (because they were infertile, unmarried, nuns, etc.) I’ve seen way too many stories featuring women going off and having adventures while not at all addressing who’s watching their kids while they’re doing this. Sure, it’s compelling to tell a story about a marchioness who’s secretly an assassin, but we’re not also telling the story of her children’s wet nurse, are we?
The unfortunate fact of life is that minding babies and young children is tedious, boring work that’s largely the same across cultures and throughout history. It doesn’t make for good, compelling stories. As it’s only been recently that men were capable of feeding an infant without the involvement of a woman, that work has fallen to women, either birthmothers or hired help. That takes a huge chunk of potential major characters out of a story, and ensures that most women in such stories are upper class, with all the marginalization of lower classes that necessarily includes. We cannot have a revolution in the inclusion of women in big stories without first solving that problem.
My advice, therefore, to writers wanting to be inclusive is to ask themselves these questions:
1. Is this woman sexually active with men and are they fertile? If so, how is she handling contraception?
2. Does this woman already have children? How old are they?
3. If this woman’s children are younger than about six or seven, who’s responsible for feeding and minding them while she’s out doing other things?
4. If someone else is minding this woman’s children: who are they? Can you include them in the story in a meaningful way instead of just as a nameless servant or family/community member?
Child care is something that can’t just be handwaved if one wants a story to be relatable to real-life humans. Unless your character is significantly past childrearing age or isn’t likely ever to get pregnant, that has to be a consideration in how you write her, and get her out of the house and having adventures.
This was a good post, and really extends not only to women, but to everyone; society has never been homogenous. Whenever we know a group of historical people as PEOPLE, they’re always full of weirdos, people with strange interests, people who play pranks on each other, ect.
Treating all women like NPCs is silly. Just like treating all peasants as NPCs is silly. Or all people of any sort of class, race, or culture. People are people, and always have been.
One thing that bothers me a bit, though, is the myth of corpulent beauty which is just kind of tossed in the middle there. The reality is that the idea that in the past, being fat was a good thing is actually a myth.
The reality is that few cultures have preferred fat people; there are exceptions (the Big Men of Polynesia come to mind), but in the vast majority of cultures and societies, being fit was considered to be attractive – hardly surprising, given that good health promotes survival. This is immediately obvious if you look at historical paintings and sculptures of both men and women, from Ancient Egypt to the modern day; the healthy weight range was the norm for beauty.
Regarding childcare, one of my only real regrets (and it’s not really a regret per se, as I’d still make the same decision again) is that I don’t live near any extended family due to where I chose to settle for my job and after getting married. I do kind of long for the idealized ‘good ol days’ where families stuck together for generations and there was more of a communal and less isolating approach to childcare.
However I do take issue to the statement that women doing childcare are the ones doing the ‘less interesting’ thing. It’s not the choice I made (I work full time and my husband is a SAHD) but I know many women who find it very interesting and I like hearing about the things they do.
Fabulous article! I’ve been plastering links to it all over my social media and have saved off a copy for reference. (And thanks for the shout-out to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project.)
You’ve mentioned several of the books that made major shifts in my assumptions about the demographics of women in history, in particular the Bennett and Froide collection on singlewomen in Europe. When you’re brainstorming a backstory for a 15th century middle-class woman in Geneva, it’s very relevant to know that 50% of adult women in that city/century were unmarried. And…well, I could go on and on, you know?
@21: I don’t think that the article suggested that being fat was the epitome of beauty in the majority of cultures. It was just pointed out that being THIN was not seen as the epitome of beauty and something every woman needs to strive for. There’s a big middle ground between “fat” and really thin, especially the stick-thin variant that has been promoted by the media in the last few decades. The traditional European standards of beauty, for starters, required women to be curvy (which is not a euphemism for “fat”, as some have started to believe due to the erroneous use of the word!), not the recent-decades-Hollywood ideal of stick thin with big fake boobs.
Anna Beek and the War of the Spanish Succession. Publisher, Mapmaker, all around awesome person. From the Library of Congress blog. Kinda gives another excellent example of what Kate has been saying, here.
Another fascinating bit of information about Enheduanna is that she is the *first* recorded poet to have signed her works — she far precedes Homer! ;)
Thank you Kate! Your Highroad Trilogy (published in 1990 under the name Alis Rasmussen) was one of the exceedingly few action/adventure SF series of its time with a lead who was a strong, fierce, independent woman and not an anomaly as such in her universe. Plus, it was a darn good story. Your Jaran series was the same.
All of them stood out for me as a female reader looking urgently and at times desperately for fiction that wasn’t just about men, with women relegated to either the oddball token strong girl, prostitute or mother/wife. Back then, caught in a real life battle with glass ceilings and sexism, I wanted SF and fantasy as an escape and inspiration that someday things could be better.
What you reminded me of today was something I should have recalled all along, that our current culture is an anomaly. History provides many examples of fierce women – so many that they were not always oddballs in their eras.
I just just wish historic fiction would catch up. Aside from a few overexposed women such as Eleanor of Acquitaine and poor old Ann Boleyn, many (not all) novelists don’t seem to realize the wealth of fantastic women’s stories of the past they could plumb for inspiration.
That was a long thing; so widely researched. Also interesting. Thanks for posting.
This thread is a few months old, but I just have to take issue with Shawna’s comment.
Raising children is not “less interesting.” Raising children can be wonderful inspiration for “compelling” fantasy stories. Do all the large scale important things really take place only on the battlefield or on the lone wolf adventures of a hero, without any impact from the home? Don’t mothers and their children have adventures? Do mothers as mothers really not leave their mark on history, or is that just what we think because of how history is written and who it is written by?
Probably the greatest realist epic ever written is a tale of 19th Century Russian families filled with compelling female characters who never pick up a weapon, go to battle, or venture far from their domestic settings. If old Tolstoy can write a tale that takes domestic life seriously in the context of realistic epic battles and actual historical events, why can’t a modern *fantasy* writer?
I am a mother with two small children, and I’m currently working on an epic fantasy where what happens between mothers and daughters and sons isn’t just a side story – it’s central to the story, it is the story, and I have no shortage of “interesting” things to draw upon. I’ve found being home with small children to be a pretty interesting adventure into places that are both dark and light. And children have such a natural sense for wonder, for the otherworldly, for the true, and for adventure; why can’t their mothers join them?
Considering the domestic life of women and their children too boring and unimportant for an epic fantasy tale is a failure of imagination.
Maybe the revolution in epic fantasy doesn’t need to solve the problem of female characters by finding them childcare; maybe we need to instead stop wrapping fantasy narratives around exclusively male oriented narratives of history and heroism and what is “interesting.”
@29 – I would totally read this book.
You know what drives me nuts? The predominant trope of the “tiny, short, petite” heroine. I don’t think I’ve erecently encountered a heroine who was at least of average height! I started noticing this recently reading YA series like The Hunger Games and the Divergent series, but then I remembered one of my favorites, the Dragonriders of Pern – Lessa is tiny and petite. Yes, food is scarce in all these settings, but come on!
I wouldn’t call watching small children boring and tedious. Exhausting, frustrating and sometimes terrifying would be my choice of adjectives.
31, I may be wrong, but I think Kate Eliot’s Crown of Stars heroin Liath was tall? Also from McCaffrey, Menolly was considered tall.
But here’s the thing, if a heroine is petite it’s constantly mentioned. If she’s tall, it’s established and that’s it. Was it ever mentioned more than once that Menolly was tall? Versus how Lessa’s lack of height was often mentioned. Height is rarely an attractive trait in fictional women.
@33 Lord Vorless
Yes, Liath is tall. Now that I think about it, I have several tall heroines. Cat Barahal in Cold Magic (the Spiritwalker trilogy) is tall, which is mentioned multiple times. Also Jes in Court of Fives is tall and muscular, which is mentioned more than once because it matters to the plot. I believe I only have written one petite heroine. But maybe that’s just me. ;)
Hm, as a short/petite woman (barely 5’0) I can’t say I ever felt I was the mold of attractiveness – I longed to be tall and statuesque and dramatic and striking. Occasionally I’m told I’m ‘cute’ or people express amazement that I am the age that I am, which has its own baggage. So I don’t deny that there probably is a subconscious trend towards spunky, tiny girls, if for no other reason to make a juxtaposition in a way that is more acceptable than if you had a ‘petite’ male.
But Galadriel is pretty tall :)