Women and Equality in Fantasy Literature

Hello and good morning all! I've just given a presentation in my summer marketing class and am now taking a break to give my first ever writing rant. There are many things that irk me about writing, specifically the fantasy/speculative fiction genre. I'm in school mode right now, so I've given this post an essay-sounding title. This post won't be structured like an essay though, so you don't have to worry about accidental learning.

I am upset about the state of women in the fantasy genre. Because most fantasy tends to be neo-medieval, the authors seem to think they need to portray women as they were in the medieval times. It is like they forget that a fantasy world is a made up one and that it can be whatever they want. The women almost always wear dresses and are seen as aberrant if they wear pants. Put a female character in pants when everyone else is wearing fancy dresses and suddenly oooh, edgy girl appears. Yes, she is breaking stereotypes, which is an important first step towards equality, but the fact remains that this is happening in a made up world. There doesn't HAVE to be inequality; the woman shouldn't have to break stereotypes in the first place. It is true that the authors are reflecting the cultural views of the society they are living in, and are conforming with the standards of the fantasy industry. Sword and Sorcery fantasy as we know it today, which is the dominant kind of fantasy found at your local bookstore, came about in the early 1900's in the form of serial stories, and later found wide acceptance in The Lord of the Rings, written between 1937 and 1949. This is only a few decades after women won the right to vote, so it is understandable that the stereotypes of women in dresses was normal. It is now 2011. These stereotypes are now outdated no longer have a proper place in fantasy literature. The fantasy genre as a whole has become somewhat stagnant in my opinion because of these outdated views, but that is a topic for another rant.

As it stands, sword and sorcery fantasy all tend to follow the same sort of ideas and have similar worlds. As mentioned before, they are neo-medieval, so the women live at home with their parents until they are married. Far too many fantasy novels involve the arranged marriage plot, and the woman is seen as empowered because she refuses and runs away (only to fall in love with the thief, who is also trying to overturn stereotypes). This isn't true of all fantasy, there are many that have unique worlds where the women have roles more equal to the men, like Anne Bishop. Her Black Jewels trilogy has a mix; there are the queens who are in full power and rule, with the men serving under them. There are good queens and bad queens, so there is a fair mix. However it simply replaces men in absolute power with women, so it is not true equality. Her world is very different from sword and sorcery however, which leads me to the conclusion that the more neo-medieval the world, the more likely there is to be inequality. On the low end of the scale are Katherine Kerr's books, which are a historical celtic-inspired world. There is the war, and the quest and so forth, and there is also the arranged marriage and wives who act as chatelaines. In the middle are authors like Terry Brooks and his Shannara series. These are your typical quest narrative; they have the fetch quest and the wars and the armies and elves, all the things you see in your everyday fantasy novel. It is in the middle because the world is more original than a historically based one, but there are still women in dresses and so forth, so it is not all the way there. On the high end of the scale are authors like Robert Jordan, who has a fully functional world that he created from the bottom up; his world operates under the assumption that the sexes are equal, and he is able to not work his cultural stereotypes into his writing successfully.


In conclusion, the authors feel that they are empowering women by putting her in pants and having her refuse her culture trying to arrange her life, but in fact the opposite is true. The authors create their worlds with the assumption that dresses and arranged marriages are normal; if they really wanted to empower women they would create a world where women are equal from the start. In order for men and women to be equal in a world, they must change the underlying assumptions society has by creating a world that assumes everyone has the same opportunities.

In double conclusion, I lied about the accidental learning, that was surprisingly scholarly off the top of my head. It may not have been exactly structured like an essay, but it was pretty close. I think I've gotten most of my women-fantasy rant out of my system. My next rant will probably have to do with Fantasy as a war novel, and another one going more in depth about the pros and cons of creating your own world.

Enjoy!