How physically active were actually "medieval" noble women? I know is a long period but I usually see people complaning about noble women in fantasy doing stuff such as hunting or riding horses. I have seen a couple of illustrations of fencing manuals with women in them too.
We, as a culture, especially in the US, have a very bad habit of using the British Regency/Victorian era as the gold standard for how women all over the world were treated throughout history. And the truth is, it ain’t that way. It never was, because women in this exact era used to duel each other in other parts of Europe and often did it topless.
Yes, this is real. We have records of it.
Was it all women, all the time? No. Was it often enough to mention? Yes.
There’s a really good article by Kameron Hurley, “Women Have Always Fought” that goes over the history of women warriors and the laziness of specular fiction in detail. This is a particularly great few paragraphs from the article that covers where our popular conception that women don’t fight comes from.
“Women have always fought,” he said. “Shaka Zulu had an all-female force of fighters. Women have been part of every resistance movement. Women dressed as men and went to war, went to sea, and participated actively in combat for as long as there have been people.”
I had no idea what to say to this. I had been nurtured in the U.S. school system on a steady diet of the Great Men theory of history. History was full of Great Men. I had to take separate Women’s History courses just to learn about what women were doing while all the men were killing each other. It turned out many of them were governing countries and figuring out rather effective methods of birth control that had sweeping ramifications on the makeup of particular states, especially Greece and Rome.
Half the world is full of women, but it’s rare to hear a narrative that doesn’t speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man’s daughter. A man’s wife.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Check out some of these real women below.
Empress Maude, the daughter of the English King, Henry I, was named her father’s heir after her brother died. While her cousin Stephen stole the throne after her father’s death, she raised an army and took the country into a civil war to take it back. They fought it out for the decade it took for her son to reach adulthood, and laid the groundwork for Henry II to become king. There’s a great novel by Sharon Kay Penman, When Christ and His Saints Slept which chronicles the civil war. If you’re interested in medieval history, I recommend reading it. Her daughter-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine, also led an interesting life. (It should be said, real history got to the denied female heir fights for her throne before George R.R. Martin.)
There’s great videos from Xiran Jay Zhao discussing the Chinese warrior queen Fu Hao of the Shang Dynasty and Wu Zetian, who became China’s first female emperor. (Yes, you read that right. Emperor.)
There is Khutulun, the Wrestler Princess and the great-great granddaughter of Gengis Khan, who is one source of our “defeat her in battle to marry her” tropes. She issued this challenge, “defeat her in wrestling, she’ll marry.” She scammed would be suitors out of 10,000 horses. Western male authors are so threatened by Khutulun, they’ve kept trying to rewrite her history by making her fall victim to the power of love. (No, seriously.)
There’s also Hojo Masako, the Buddhist nun who deposed her own son when he proved incompetent and ruled Japan as Shogun. Here’s her wiki entry too.
The Amazons of Greek Myth were real in that they were actual Scythian women who went to war. (As Scythian women did, just like their men.) They terrified and terrorized the Greeks so much, they became immortalized in their mythology. Don’t believe me? Here’s an article from National Geographic and this one from Live Science.
There’s stories like this all throughout history from big events to small ones. (You can find more over at Rejected Princesses if you’re interested.) There are female warriors, female generals, noblewomen who took command of their husbands’ forces, widows who took to the sea to get revenge on those who wronged them, women who rode with their husbands to battle, female assassins, female leaders of rebellions, etc. The women of the Japanese samurai class were trained to fight, and fight they did. Women warriors, queens, and politicians are all over mythology too. You’ll often see these women come out of the upper echelons of society because money creates options, but they are there. Many of those stories are lost to history, in some cases purposefully, and there was a long trend among archeologists that assumed because a person was buried with male grave goods, the body had to be male. We’re now finding out that isn’t true. There’s a significant portion of warrior corpses that have turned out to be female. Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla chose to post a notice about it in response to these exact criticisms you’re questioning.
Those people you see complaining online? They’re clinging to a version of history that doesn’t exist. More, we know it doesn’t, because popular culture is hungry to the point of desperate for aggressive, confident, and competent female characters. If they were truly a lie, they wouldn’t ring true for so many people.
The history we’re taught today largely downplays women’s achievements, contributions, and successes while uplifting those of men. It’s a fact. Go look at famous female figures anywhere, you’ll find the same story at play over and over. Historically, fantasy as a genre largely portrays a world that is, in fact, fantasy, but that fantasy has nothing to do with women doing things they’re not “supposed” to. There’s no clubhouse. There’s nothing unrealistic in imagining your female character is a kickass queen who defeats overconfident men in wrestling competitions and robs them of all their horses. It’s not unrealistic to come up with an ending that doesn’t conclude in tragedy, violent deaths, them “learning their place,” or even locked within the bonds of an unhappy marriage. (Shocker!) Some did, but the truth isn’t universal. It’s not even unrealistic to imagine they might have supportive male family members, love interests, and followers who happily (gasp) assist them in these endeavors. Maude, for reference, had bastard half-brothers who helped her instead of trying to take the throne for themselves.
History got here before fantasy authors. There’s nothing unrealistic about reality. Popular conceptions and common knowledge fed to us by the majority male dominated culture isn’t always the truth. Reality is, it’s the stories we see normalized across the media spectrum that are wrong. The ones that insist women are objects, who commodify their pain, and reframe their stories to ensure the focus remains on men. While this is changing, women are still often treated as the NPCs of male driven stories.
The people you hear complaining? They want storytelling traditions to stay that way, for the Great Man values countless narratives have reinforced to remain unchallenged. Funny as it sounds, they’re threatened by the very existence of narratives that countermand that centralized focus on men being superior, that there is a stratified gender hierarchy, and men taking their place as the sole, worshipful focus of a woman’s existence, much less these female characters being important in their own narratives. If these people weren’t threatened by female characters being people, they wouldn’t say anything. They’d just move on in apathy.
Reality is people are complicated. There’s room for all stripes in all colors and contexts. It’s no secret that history has suppressed and erased countless stories that don’t support the ruling narrative of the dominant culture. These same people forget there’s plenty of storytelling traditions that include women taking their place as warriors in cultures outside America. For all the sexism and misogyny, women fighting is not an alien concept, it’s not even foreign to other Western European traditions.
Believe what your own research is showing you, not what a bunch of idiots who can’t tell their ass from their elbow are whining about. They can’t handle someone who isn’t straight, male, and (most often) white being the central focus. Really, they can’t handle these characters as even a side focus. That’s their loss, it doesn’t have to be yours.
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