Strong Female Characters*

[hopewrites]

To quote the muppets "peoples is peoples"
I would only worry if the character in question didn't feel relatable, not 'human' enough.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I agree with all this, but to write someone without taking into account social norms, how that might have affected them. Also, to not include motivations like what it is to love a child (male and female), if that's part of your theme, how we interact romantically (again if that is your theme) wouldn't seem realistic. And, bottom line is, that males and females are brought up with differing life experiences. When I was 20 I was on a par, professionally, with my brothers at the same age. Then I had kids, and they did, and it was my career most affected by that. De nada, it happens, and I wouldn't change it, but it does affect my life experience, and therefore what makes me a character as it did with them.
Sex is only one parameter to think about but when I'm considering my characters it is another thing sketched when I'm creating them, because, just like are they tall is different from being short, lots of common sense vs, insanely smart, wear glasses or not, it has an effect on how we perceive life. Therefore, it can't be disregarded.
But, it also shouldn't be stereotypical - it's only another parameter.

 

[Montero]

I think specialisation and education also changes things. I did science and then moved into IT, women always in a minority in the workplace. Very broadly speaking, with occasional exceptions, the women and the men were similar in the way they dealt with things, reacted and to some extent dressed. There were very few girlie women, or macho blokes. It was get on with the job time and gender was irrelevant.

It is by no means like that everywhere. and I have worked outside IT and science companies and found the assumptions and expectations to be different - actual demarcation between male and female roles. Or if doing the same job, the woman doing the job is the one expected to buy the milk for coffee and do the domestic-ish things.

So I think it varies a lot with what the social/commercial group is - and perhaps which part of the UK - though don't have much data on that.

When I was at University there were women/girls around who'd pull the "I can't get the TV to work, I'm a girl, can you help."

Once read The Working Lives of Women in 17th Century, by Alice Clark. Very interesting, pre-industrial revolution social economy. What she found was that the economic and leading from it social importance of women dipped from the 17th Century due to the Industrial revolution. Basically when the family was working as a team, whether farming or a town based trade or craft, the wife had an important role in the business - guilds allowed family to work in the craft without necessarily having full guild accreditation - and you had husband and wife working productively together, with the kids around doing likewise as they got older. Industrial revolution separated work and home and that was a thumping great social change.

 

[David Evil Overlord]

And I have a male character who hates it when a girl pulls the 'I can't get the TV to work' thing (he likes capable females).

 

[Jo Zebedee]

~When I was about to go to uni my dad who was an electrician set me down with a plug and made me learn how to wire it - he said no ridiculous male undergraduate was going to get me blown up. I've taken it as a lesson for life.

 

[Ursa major]

And I have a male character who hates it when a girl pulls the 'I can't get the TV to work' thing (he likes capable females).

Are you sure it isn't cable females he prefers?

 

[David Evil Overlord]

He's quite happy to be tied down to just this one girl...um, but not in a Fifty Shades of Mommy Porn kind of "tied down".

That was the kind of cable you were thinking of, wasn't it?

 

[Warren_Paul]

And I have a male character who hates it when a girl pulls the 'I can't get the TV to work' thing (he likes capable females).

Some people just aren't technologically adept. The boss asked one of us guys at work to turn down the TV in the kids corner today. It was her TV, one that had been there for years, yet she didn't know where the volume control was. In all other respects, she is a very capable business owner and a great person to work for.

 

[Gumboot]

I bet every author has worried about this at some point or another. The fairer sex has cliché after cliché moulded around them for cases when an author doesn't know how to make a character act 'womanly', and so we wind up with Damsel in Distress tropes, Bitch tropes, and, most unfortunately, Mary Sue tropes.
And personally, I'm not sure why. I have three prominent female characters in my WIP, and really, they don't feel much different to write about than my male characters. Stereotypes and gender-based expectations don't cloud their thoughts or actions, as far as I can see. But this gets me worrying that... well, what if I'm doing something wrong? What if I'm not portraying mannerisms that should be shown? Are there any? Does a complete lack of gender-based mannerisms risk dulling down some characters? Will it make them seem too similar to a character that may be seen as their male/female counterpart?

I think I'm more concerned about my characters themselves, rather than how their genders behave.


Anyone else feel this way?

The first time I realised this could be an issue was when I read Robin Hobb's Farseer books. Although I love them, something about Fitz really, really bugged me the whole way through, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Finally I learned Robin Hobb was a woman, and it all clicked into place; Fitz is a woman.

Which really opened me to the realisation that there ARE differences between men and women that are separate from "well realised". I don't think anyone would dispute that Hobb writes complex characters, but there's something fundamentally female about them. She gets away with it in the Liveship books because the main male POV character is pretty feminine anyway by that society's standards, but Fitz is meant to be pretty masculine and he just... isn't.

Until then I'd always presumed that ultimately what mattered was writing good complex characters, and gender wasn't really important. Now I'm not so sure, and for my female POV chapters I make a point of having women read them, and I pay careful attention to their feedback.

Now, here's the bit where it gets complex... for me, the right note of "woman-ness" only matters for the female POV sections - I am not concerned about it when it's women characters being observed by male POVs. Why? I'm a man, I know what it's like to observe a woman from a male's POV already, and I wanted that version of events clouded by a male's assumptions and presumptions about the fairer sex.

But when it's a woman's POV, that's when getting input from women matters, not just for how that character acts, but how she interprets how others act - both male and female.

 

[Gumboot]

I think specialisation and education also changes things. I did science and then moved into IT, women always in a minority in the workplace. Very broadly speaking, with occasional exceptions, the women and the men were similar in the way they dealt with things, reacted and to some extent dressed. There were very few girlie women, or macho blokes. It was get on with the job time and gender was irrelevant.

It is by no means like that everywhere. and I have worked outside IT and science companies and found the assumptions and expectations to be different - actual demarcation between male and female roles. Or if doing the same job, the woman doing the job is the one expected to buy the milk for coffee and do the domestic-ish things.

So I think it varies a lot with what the social/commercial group is - and perhaps which part of the UK - though don't have much data on that.

When I was at University there were women/girls around who'd pull the "I can't get the TV to work, I'm a girl, can you help."

Once read The Working Lives of Women in 17th Century, by Alice Clark. Very interesting, pre-industrial revolution social economy. What she found was that the economic and leading from it social importance of women dipped from the 17th Century due to the Industrial revolution. Basically when the family was working as a team, whether farming or a town based trade or craft, the wife had an important role in the business - guilds allowed family to work in the craft without necessarily having full guild accreditation - and you had husband and wife working productively together, with the kids around doing likewise as they got older. Industrial revolution separated work and home and that was a thumping great social change.

It probably started even before that; the Crisis of the 14th Century pretty much rewrote the social fabric of western Europe and the ultimate losers were women; the church led a really savage backlash against women (who had enjoyed relative equality in the high middle ages) leading to propagation of the Eve temptation myth and the emergence of delightful activities like Witch Burning. Far from a time of enlightenment, the Renaissance saw horrific oppression of women that reversed generations of progress toward gender equality.

 

[Montero]

Some people just aren't technologically adept. The boss asked one of us guys at work to turn down the TV in the kids corner today. It was her TV, one that had been there for years, yet she didn't know where the volume control was. In all other respects, she is a very capable business owner and a great person to work for.

Don't dispute that.

Just get annoyed by the assumption that some people make, that all men can do technology and all women can't.
And the converse one that all men can't cook/do domestic things and all women can.

My own view based entirely on unscientific day to day observations is that some men and women have a strong technical/scientific/engineer ability (that which is assumed to be male)
some men and women have a strong domestic/cooking or linguistic ability (that which is assumed to be female)

and that the remainder of men and women don't necessarily have a big interest either way, so tend to drift into the role they are pointed at which tends to be gender biased.

There is by the way, also different assumptions of what is thought to be appropriate to male or female people. I think it was in a book by Edward T Hall, that he commented that in arabic cultures, the expectation is for the woman to be cold and businesslike and the man to be emotional. (Not looked at this any further or ever travelled there.) (And by the way, that author was in the bibliography at the back of Janet Kagan's Hellspark, which is a lovely book - she does a lot of work in her book on culture, body language and so on.)

 

[Montero]

The first time I realised this could be an issue was when I read Robin Hobb's Farseer books. Although I love them, something about Fitz really, really bugged me the whole way through, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Finally I learned Robin Hobb was a woman, and it all clicked into place; Fitz is a woman.

Which really opened me to the realisation that there ARE differences between men and women that are separate from "well realised". I don't think anyone would dispute that Hobb writes complex characters, but there's something fundamentally female about them. She gets away with it in the Liveship books because the main male POV character is pretty feminine anyway by that society's standards, but Fitz is meant to be pretty masculine and he just... isn't.

Would it be possible for you to explain the details of this?

As I've mentioned elsewhere on this thread, I largely worked in science and IT and I did not see differences between the genders for men and women from that background.

Just curious. It is something that comes up moderately regularly on here. I can (obviously) tell the difference between girlie women and macho blokes (which tends towards stereotyping if you aren't careful) but I am really not sure about there being much difference between women and men who are not girlie and macho respectively.

More data please

 

[Montero]

It probably started even before that; the Crisis of the 14th Century pretty much rewrote the social fabric of western Europe and the ultimate losers were women; the church led a really savage backlash against women (who had enjoyed relative equality in the high middle ages) leading to propagation of the Eve temptation myth and the emergence of delightful activities like Witch Burning. Far from a time of enlightenment, the Renaissance saw horrific oppression of women that reversed generations of progress toward gender equality.

Ah interesting. Ta.

And thinking further about it, under the vague impression that Anglo Saxon women had more status before the Normans - had heard they could walk out on a marriage in year 8 and return home with all their wedding goods (and the girl children) if they were not happy. How many did it is another matter.

 

[Venusian Broon]

It probably started even before that; the Crisis of the 14th Century pretty much rewrote the social fabric of western Europe and the ultimate losers were women; the church led a really savage backlash against women (who had enjoyed relative equality in the high middle ages) leading to propagation of the Eve temptation myth and the emergence of delightful activities like Witch Burning. Far from a time of enlightenment, the Renaissance saw horrific oppression of women that reversed generations of progress toward gender equality.

It is of course obvious that there was a great deal terrible misogny from the church, and that the majority of witches killed were women, but it would be a mistake to think of witch finding/crazes as anti-female crusades. It was much more complicated than that.

My understanding from academic sources that at least 25% of witches killed were male and these men have tended to be airbrushed out by modern feminist interpretations of what happened.

It should also be noted that the church/(s) really reserved it's main hatred and invoked terrible violence and deaths on other groups of people: heretics & those of different faiths, of which gender played no part whatsoever and far more people were killed (many orders of magnitude, I'd guess). Just look at the 30 years war and what it did to the German states. Probably killed half the population.

 

[Montero]

re 30 years war
I remember reading something about at trip by an English prince, possibly the young Charles (who became Charles 1) to a court at one of the German principalities. They crossed a war zone area which had been reduced to miles of mud with an occasional starving refugee wandering around. All done without tanks or massive bombardment of shelling
(But this is probably a topic for a different thread)

Re - The airbrushing of male witches. Yes - and there is still two way inequality in 20th and 21st century.
1. Male single parents get odd looks at school gates when waiting for their kids.
2. Assumption that all domestic violence is men beating up women

Also - Nazi concentration camps also killed homosexuals, gipsies and mentally subnormal people. Not something much publicised.

I think it comes down to simple is easier to remember. Having done all the 17th century re-enactment one of the great big also promulgated by Hollywood myths is:
All people in support of Parliament were puritans who wore black
All people in support of the King were not puritans and wore lots of pretty colours

In actuality, the Puritans were one sect of Protestantism who were not initially massive. There were plenty of non-puritan lords in fancy colours on the Parliamentary side.
Lord Hopton, a Puritan, was one of the King's Generals.

So wombling back to the thread - it is easier to assume that all women do x, all men do y and not look at the details.

 

[allmywires]

I think specialisation and education also changes things. I did science and then moved into IT, women always in a minority in the workplace. Very broadly speaking, with occasional exceptions, the women and the men were similar in the way they dealt with things, reacted and to some extent dressed. There were very few girlie women, or macho blokes. It was get on with the job time and gender was irrelevant.

I do a scientific, male-dominated degree, and I agree with these. 90% of my fellow undergraduates are essentially the same in the way they approach tasks and life. But I rarely find that university, especially in my degree, reflects the wider world. In fact I think even the females boil down to a more male way of thinking and even dressing.

And I have a male character who hates it when a girl pulls the 'I can't get the TV to work' thing (he likes capable females).

But I do that at work - because I simply can't lift some of the heavy boxes and the boys can. There's a degree of sex separation in which the men are usually in the back room sorting out the stock and the girls are more customer-facing, because on the whole girls are more likely to greet customers, serve them politely and make small talk, and boys would rather be lifting boxes and chatting amongst themselves. (I know it's not quite what you're getting at but it's similar).

On the whole I like to think I'm pretty good with technology, but most people are these days, since we've grown up with it, we're better at adapting when it changes.

 

[Kylara]

Just an amusing anecdote here...my boyfriend (electronic engineering PhD guy) visited some old friends of his a while back who he hadn't seen for a while, and mentioned me, now I am a girl (hehe) and I play console and PC Games, (mainly stealth and fps) and I like computery stuff, and I shoot things (air rifles, paint ball, airsofting etc), climb, basically I do boy stuff, but (apparently) look very girly if you know what I mean...
Anyway, my boyfriend's friends thought that he was making me up or that he was desribing a chracter from something because they were unable to put what I am like together with any of their preconceptions of "girl"...which amused me and my bf quite a bit...

So maybe the issue with some of these characters are that they get written and then mucked about with because (even though they are right) the writer thinks what he is describing can't possibly be true...possibly...

 

[Montero]

I don't dispute that on average men are physically stronger than women and that the strongest man is stronger than the strongest woman (wow that's an awful lot of "strong"s in one sentence ).

I have no problem for asking with help on lifting things - I've done umpteen safe lifting courses.

However what I object to is:

a) anybody who says "I can't do that because I'm a girl/man" - whatever it is. Returning to lifting - by all means "I can't do that because" - I'm not strong enough, got a bad back, whatever. But not on gender.

b) The assumption that men are stronger than women. A big fit woman is probably a lot stronger than a small unfit man. (Ever seen Charlie Dimmock tote a sack?) I am just looking for recognition of individual characteristics, not assumptions. Swimming against the flow a bit I know but...
It is unfair to assume that a man will do all the lifting - he may not be physically able to do so but the assumptions of society could force him into doing it, unwisely, and injuring himself.

@ allmywires - And back to the behaviour thing character thing.

You are saying that at University in sci-tech there is little differentiation - but that the women are acting more like men.
Um, please, please could you go into more detail - what is it that you think a man acts like and a woman acts like?
I really cannot get my head around what people think it is that is characteristic of men and women, in the smaller, subtler things. OK, you've said women are better at small talk than men, um - what else?

I started to try and write a list of big obvious stereotypical things for men and women, to eliminate them from the discussion.
e.g.,
boots, rugby, cars, beer, thumping fights, loud rude songs.
make-up, high heels, frilly tops, wine, giggling.

And promptly pictured men in make-up, women in combat outfits etc - all of whom I've seen either in life or on TV. So not that simple

 

[mosaix]

I was wondering if this 'strong = bitch' thing was, in fact, sexist at all and wondering if it couldn't be applied to male characters as well and then wondered what the male equivalent of 'bitch' is.

So - what is the male equivalent of the term 'bitch'? Is there one? And if there isn't why not? Suppose we saw the characteristics that we interpret as 'bitch' applied to a male character what single word term would we use to describe him?

 

[Mouse]

This is another thread I was dying to comment on at work and couldn't! So I'm here now and lots of people have posted in between what I wanted to talk about so... sorry to go backwards/repeat/bang on.

The first time I realised this could be an issue was when I read Robin Hobb's Farseer books. Although I love them, something about Fitz really, really bugged me the whole way through, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Finally I learned Robin Hobb was a woman, and it all clicked into place; Fitz is a woman.

Which really opened me to the realisation that there ARE differences between men and women that are separate from "well realised". I don't think anyone would dispute that Hobb writes complex characters, but there's something fundamentally female about them. She gets away with it in the Liveship books because the main male POV character is pretty feminine anyway by that society's standards, but Fitz is meant to be pretty masculine and he just... isn't.

I don't believe that's true. Hear me out. You didn't know quite what was bugging you about Fitz until you found out Hobb was a woman. Then you decided that that was what it was. What if it was just Fitz as a character that didn't quite gel? I'm thinking it's suggestion. Hobb's a woman! Oh... so that's why.

Think of users here, for example. You can't tell whether some members are male or female from their usernames. You can make guesses. If you (and I mean 'you' as in anybody) had been thinking X was a female for as long as they'd been posting, then suddenly found out they were a male, it would then change the way you read their posts and it wouldn't be because 'oh, I knew there wasn't something quite right,' it'd be because now you know they're male, so are perceiving them/their posts differently.

I hope that makes sense. Hard to write what I mean. I know people often think TJ's a guy. I've been referred to as a he a few times too.

Re jobs and what have you. I work in structured cabling (oh yes, it's as exciting as it sounds), and I help with the qualifications of the guys in America. Most of these guys are exactly that. Guys. But, there are women too. And they're not all manly looking butch-type women (some of them are, but some of the guys are pretty so...). Some of them are stupidly pretty and I'm sat there thinking 'why are you working in structured cabling?!'

So there you have it. Mouse's thoughts. I'm sure I had something else to say but for the life of me, can't remember what it was.

edit: Oh! I was going to mention that I don't think Fitz is supposed to be all that 'masculine' anyway. I was also going to mention that I don't get, or like, why cars and ships and other inanimate objects are referred to as 'she.' And I was going to say that I also don't understand why women have to change their names when they marry and men don't, but I might leave that for a blog and... I did remember something else after reading Montero's last post but it's gone out my head again.

edit number 2: one of my female mates is the fifth strongest woman in the UK. No kidding.