I noticed this in Dragonseye even more, but Masterharper has so many more women in it than earlier pern books. Not major female characters, just normal women doing normal side character activities and literally just existing in the world.
I’m going to put this down to a shift in the way Mccaffery was writing/what she wanted to write later in her career. One could argue that in Dragonseye there are more women because it’s a less “regressed” time period where women actually existed more in the public sphere but a) it’s perfectly possible to write many women even into a world where they are oppressed and b) having a bunch of women significantly involved in the crafts actively contradicts/complicates what we’re told in dragonflight and the Harper hall trilogy. Now I do think that Ruatha under Fax and half-circle are supposed to be unusually repressive environments, but having women who were craftmasters a few decades before still seems contradictory to the world that is presented. So honestly I feel like when she was writing Masterharper, Mccaffery was just feeling like she really wanted to write a pern where Merelan was a master harper and women were journeymen fishers and Lady Hayara takes an active role in the Hold, and w think too much about the inconsistencies that created.
