I think that power comes into this.
Like, yes, producing food and clothing are important skills that would, in an ideal world, be valued more than the ability to kill people. But in a medieval world, the people with swords (and armour, and horses, etc.) are the ones with power, so if no women do swords, that means that they are at the mercy of the men who do have swords, or are reliant on those men to protect them from enemies with swords.
To speak about my namesake for a second, one element in Eowyn’s desire to fight is a rejection of powerlessness. Her entire society is on the verge of destruction, and she wants to ride out and meet it and die heroically in a manner befitting the legends of her people, not stay at home and wait for it to come for her. “All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no longer.”
Women in historical fantasy rejecting cooking and textiles in favour of combat or magic isn’t about saying that making food and clothing is are useless or pointless, it’s about the combination of personal preference and the problem of women being denied the things that grant power and prestige in their society. The same way a humble farmboy going off on a quest and becoming a knight isn’t inherently saying that Swords are intrinsically more important than growing food is.
Let’s compare this to the present day, where men are most of the politicians and Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs and women are most of the social workers and teachers and nurses. Now, there are two principal issues to point to here. The first is the fundamental problem that our society values and rewards Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs a heck of a lot more than it does teachers and nurses and social workers, in the same way that the medieval world valued and rewarded people who could Do Swords. The other problem is that men hold the bulk of the power. And it really does drive me nuts when people act like getting a few more women to be corporate CEOs and stockbrokers is a fix, because the women who do that tend to act the same as the male CEOs and stockbrokers (i.e. in a way that is not conducive to the general well-being of the world), and I want is for the CEOs to have less power and the people who do valuable things to have more.
But in a medieval fantasy story, unless you want to try to abruptly make the society have values that are modern rather than medieval (and I expect that you don’t, because so many of your posts are about the need for historical versimilitude in terms of characters’ probable values and opinions), the people in that story are stuck with the basic social framework they have got, even if a particularly villainous regime is overthrown. And within that framework, a woman being able to Do Swords is the only thing that gives her a form of power and autonomy that is not reliant on her ability to influence men.
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theartofmadeline
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