A few things I’ve been reading lately caused me to reflect on a double standard I hold regarding Women’s Work in fiction.
I’m a fan of Women’s Work, as behooves somene who grew up on Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ingalls. I dearly love a character who excels in the Womanly Arts, but my view of those arts is pretty much pre-electricity. A Womanly character, in my mind, can build a fire in a woodstove and figure out how to adjust the damper. She can take a chicken apart and cook it, grow a garden full of vegetables and put them up for the winter, and shoot the occasional bear. And she always knows what’s edible in the woods and marshes.
In her spare time, she can make a dress or knit or crochet. She can also handle less practical handicrafts like quilling or making paper snowflakes, and she can make a comforting meal out of two old tomatoes and a straw hat. When the adventurers come home and find the table set, the kettle purring on the hob and copper pans reflecting a homey glow, I feel very happy both with the story and the homemaker, and it troubles me not at all that the homemaker is female in 99% of cases. I am way more impressed with her stew than I am with the swordswoman’s antics.
So basically, I appear to be OK with stereotyped female characters. But there is a stereotype that makes me snarl out loud, and that is Caregiver. I do not admire heroines who interpret every nuance of expression, worry about how members of their battle team are getting along or whether the aliens understand the engineers. It drives me crazy when becoming a witch or a dragon rider or the best musician or the Chosen One ™ means the heroine spends the rest of her life as an amateur social worker.
The weird thing is, this seems to be the aspect of stereotypical femininity that authors discard last. Lots of fiction ‘liberates’ women by taking them out of the kitchen but still leaves them saddled with the emotional work of the novel.
I was discussing this with a friend today and she asked how a writer could possibly create a sympathetic character who wasn’t a caregiver. Write her like a male character, I said. Like 90% of the male characters out there.
