Being a woman, I have always been aware of sexism and misogyny, and how they shape the roles women take in the world. I’ve thought less, however, of the roles women played historical, assuming (from everything I’ve read and what little I remember of history from school) that female leaders and warriors are rare exceptions.<\/p>\n
Although I haven’t recently written as much about it here (with the exceptions here<\/a> and https:\/\/klishis.com\/notreally\/archives\/10970), I’ve been reading a lot about it on Twitter and various blogs. (A good roundup of the science bits can be found here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n What I can\u2019t decide if whether things are still bad, or whether things are actually getting better, but as things improve more women are willing to step up and relate their stories and name the names of their harassers. My hope is that the incident rate of sexism and harassment is decreasing, but the rate of doing something about it is going up.<\/p>\n With that background, this post was was sparked by a couple things. I read two fantastic online articles: Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy<\/a> and We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative<\/a>.<\/p>\n Additionally, I recently read two books about women in history. The first, She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth<\/a><\/em> was very good, and the second, The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West<\/a><\/em>, while interesting, was less well-written. <\/p>\n Both books raise interesting points about the various roles women played in society and how those roles were portrayed by historians, but I think She-Wolves does a much better job pointing this out.<\/p>\n She-Wolves<\/em> emphasizes time and again how scarce the materials we have about these women\u2014these female leaders and rulers of England\u2014are, and how the views of these women are colored by the agendas of the (male) historians and chronicles who wrote about them.<\/p>\n For instance,<\/p>\n Matilda inherited her father\u2019s commanding temperament, his ability to inspire loyalty, and his political intelligence\u2014but the role she played and the qualities she possessed have been much obscured, then and now, by the preconceptions of the lords she sought to lead and the clerics who wrote her story. \u201cHaughty\u201d and \u201cintolerably proud\u201d are the adjectives indelibly associated with her name, phrases coined in those few months of her life when she tried to exercise power as a monarch in her own right, and repeated by historians ever since. Strikingly, they were never used to describe any male member of her fearsomely domineering family; and they do not fit well with what we know of Matilda in the decades before and after. (T)he writer is troubled by the very idea of a woman holding power in her own right. Matilda was facing the challenge of becoming Queen of England \u2026 not in the conventional sense of a king\u2019s partner, but in the unprecedented form of a female king. And kings did not deport themselves with a \u201cmodest gait and bearing.\u201d Instead, they were\u2014and were required to be\u2014supremely commanding and authoritative.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So our opinions of these women are often formed from historical revisionism\u2014histories written by men (of course) with a point to make (or an axe to grind). After all, most of these women lost their bids for power, so they weren\u2019t the ones writing the history.<\/p>\n But the two articles, especially We Have Always Fought<\/a>, point out that a lot of what women did simply wasn\u2019t written down, and what was written was deemed unimportant solely because it was done by women.<\/p>\n In the US, primary school education is dominated by women. It\u2019s also seriously devalued by almost everyone except teachers and their families\u2014people who know how much hard work goes into being a teacher.<\/p>\n The other field that comes to mind when I think of a job that is seen as primarily female is nursing. Nurses are overwhelmingly female, and from what I can tell (I help in our school of nursing orientations, and so actually see each incoming class) the students getting degrees in nursing remain predominantly female. Spent any time in a hospital recently? If so, you know that the vast majority of your care will be performed by nurses.<\/p>\n Yet nurses are valued far less than doctors.<\/p>\n In the very early 90s, I was reading a lot of epic fantasy, and most of it had female protagonists. And time and again, when we were introduced to these women fighters or mages or wizards, we were always given a justification why they had taken that path. Not just a backstory, but the reason why they would follow a masculine path. <\/p>\n So, we were expected to be okay with gods and magic and mythical creatures, but a female fighter had to be justified or we might find her beyond belief. <\/p>\n I don\u2019t read science fiction, but I do know what it wasn\u2019t until 1995 that we had a female captain in Star Trek, and that was two years after we had our first black captain. (Says the rabid Deep Space Nine fan who could never stand Voyager.) <\/p>\n How is it that we were able to accept aliens and elves but couldn\u2019t accept female fighters or women in command?<\/p>\n
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