Agree and disagree. TL;DR: This is a much more nuanced topic than you made it out to be in this post.
The unrealistically overpowered Strong Woman, e.g. the kick-ass Urban Fantasy heroine with amazing sword skills who can best any man, is indeed an absurd trope deserving of an intelligent reader's eye-roll. But the contrary trope, the Weak Woman who can do nothing a man can do, is just as absurd — and that trope was around for a long time, which means it's commonly assumed to be the alternative by default. But the trick is to strike a realistic balance, getting away from these extremes.
I agree that a lot of what you call "feminist" literature presently fails at striking the balance. But I think this has happened because of an over-correction. Every time a new trope takes off in literature that subverts age-old expectations, writers go overboard with it. "The shiny new thing" seduces readers, we know, so as writers we're seduced, too. It takes a while for the shine to wear off so we can interrogate the new trope, get realistic about it, and see how it ought to be used.
So, really, there's an Unrealistic Strong Woman and a Realistic Strong Woman. As readers get bored with the former, rolling their eyes more and more, writers will figure out how to write the latter. The pendulum will swing back towards the middle.
Now, as harsh as what I'm about to say is, please bear in mind I'm doing you the courtesy of assuming you're simply unaware of something, rather than assuming you're arguing in bad faith...
Re: "The goal of feminism is to become the same as a man." In the context of your piece, this means feminism's goal is to turn women into men. That's not the goal. If you think it is, either you're poorly informed about feminism or you're assuming the over-correction stands for the whole philosophy (the exception stands for the rule). Feminism's basic intention is to deconstruct patriarchy and show that women are entitled to the same considerations as men, not that women are men. Various issues, from voting rights to equal pay for the same work to the handling of sexual assault cases, show feminism's intention and application — but I shouldn't have to gesture at them. If you're critiquing a philosophy, first take the trouble to understand it — learn its history, the conditions which gave rise to it — so that you frame it fairly in your critique. A little knowledge goes a long way. I really don't think you'd like to live as a woman in the world as it existed before feminism, if you understand what that world was.
As you probably know (or I can't imagine you'd use it), the phrase "feminine mystique" was coined by a feminist writer, Betty Friedan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique). The problem Friedan identified was not that "women have this streak of Damsel in Distress" (fair enough) but that the Damsel in Distress was all patriarchy ever permitted a woman to be. Friedan didn't say you couldn't be a housewife, if that's what you wanted. She pointed out that society generally thought you couldn't be anything else, so many men and women (both) made sure you never became anything else.
There certainly are positives to the feminine mystique. You've identified a strong moral foundation, gentleness, listening, and service as qualities of a strong female character. I agree, and I'd add fortitude to that list, since many women have had to stand strong in the face of certain kinds of suffering that many men can't even begin to understand. In my own writing (see the serial novel on my substack), I try to portray women with these qualities and to show men can have these qualities (can in fact learn them from women). The women in my fiction do take up arms alongside the men, and I try to depict that realistically, too. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility. History abounds with examples of women warriors.
The Unrealistic Strong Woman is indeed a tired trope. Let's get away from it, by all means, but let's be thoughtful about what we replace it with. We don't have to swing back to the other extreme. There's a whole spectrum of possibility.
P.S. "Technically" women can't develop enough upper body strength to wield swords? History begs to differ. Since you bring up the katana specifically...
Thank you for the intelligent response, Joshua. Humans are complex creatures with a broad range of possibilities, and writers, to be great with their art, must understand these depths as much as possible.
The usage is “a lot,” not “alot,” and the novelist’s surname is spelled Austen, not Austin. Had you not made these errors, and had you specified exactly what idea all of Austen’s novels are supposed to illustrate, I’m sure your comment would’ve floored us all with the sheer inarguable force of your literary acumen!
Other than a couple typos, none of Aust*E*ns works show women being nothing more than damsels in distress. If you read them, this is self-evident, and no one thinks they are.
LOL! Have you actually read the novels? All of them? Or even a few of the most popular ones, e.g. Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion? And really thought about the characters and their choices? I don’t see characters like Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet as damsels in distress, even if the society they live in gives them little or no choice in truly hard scrapes (i.e. where money is involved) than to turn to men for help because men were the only people with resources — which is itself a social fact Austen urges readers to think about. Austen’s heroines are rather independent-minded women who make their own choices, despite criticism and pressure. For instance, Elizabeth Bennet, who is hard up for a husband (her whole family is pressing her to marry and stop being an economic burden to them), rejects a keen suitor everyone expects and pressures her to accept. That’s her decision, no one else’s. She doesn’t ask any man to step in and make it for her or shield her from criticism for making it. She takes it on the chin.
Secondly, Austen’s novels offer a window into and commentary on women’s lives in late 18th / early 19th century England. Of course women were relatively powerless then! Feminism was in its infancy. Wollstonecraft is the only feminist in British history predating Austen, and by only a couple of decades. I wonder, seriously, whether you are familiar with Austen’s role in this history — how her books gave impetus to feminism — or just making a superficial, vague observation based more on stereotypes about the books than close, careful readings of them. At any rate, if you expect women’s literature two hundred years ago to feature heroines who “do it all themselves,” either you must be stunningly ignorant of history or you must expect other people to be.
And you call my yap “detached from reality”?! Go read a book!
You suggested that it was a common trope of weak women that the strong women trope over corrected for. I gave a counter example. Austenwas not a feminist, and to read any feminism in her books is kinda insane. Emma, as well as Sense and Sensibility, both show women in non-feminist lights. One, the woman needed to be brought to heel by a man. And the other, how women need sensible guidance in choosing one's husband, when she's taken advantage of by an evil man. S&S also shows horrible women, and brow beaten men being ruled by their wives (in a negative light).
And I don't know why you would want to bring up Mary Wollstonecraft, who lived a somewhat miserable and pathetic life. If such a woman, or person in general, is the basis of your thought, you should think some new thoughts, and form a new foundation from people's who's ideas aren't shaping, or coming from, a place of pathetic misery
Oh, I see. You didn’t give a “counter example” to anything. Rather, given my original point was that the damsel in distress is a tired trope of weak women characters, you simply gave an illustration of that (thank you for backing it up with some kind of evidence from the books).
I’m still wondering why you even brought Austen into a discussion about how authors write female characters NOW, not two hundred years ago. But I never said Austen was a feminist. I said her books later gave impetus to feminism. I’d add that feminist scholars today still find plenty of interest in Austen because she offers so much insight into the British society of her day from a woman’s perspective. An author doesn’t have to agree with your views to inform them. Supposing they must reveals a very narrow way of thinking about literature and literary theories.
Nor did I say anything one way or another, in praise or not, about Wollstonecraft. I only brought her up to illustrate how early Austen came in the whole history of feminism (just one generation after the first proto-feminist). Jeez, you really like to make specious attacks on other people based on a whole lot of nothing, don’t you?
Attacking Wollstonecraft as “miserable,” as if that has the first thing to do with the merits of her ideas, doesn’t surprise me. You’re shaping up to be a disordered interlocutor with a tendency to fallacy, and I think I’m done here.
I still think you ought to go read a book. Or, really, several.
But in any event, even if I were to grant that you’re entirely right about Austen, what on earth does it have to do with how writers write women today, not two hundred years ago? What does it really have to do with the topic of Realistically versus Unrealistically Strong Women as a modern trope? Why did it even occur to you to bring Austen into this???
It has always seemed to me that the problem with the "strong woman" trope was that it missed the nature of female strength. Painting with the broadest of brushes, I would say that men are bold and women are patient. Of the two, boldness is certainly flashier, but if the man's bold action does not kill him he can go off down the pub with his mates and get blotto on free beer afterwards. Women's patience, on the other hand, goes on and on without remit. It is certainly easier to make a story out of boldness, and I would not want to suggest either that women are never bold or that men are never patient, but making a story out of patience is perhaps a little more demanding task, but perhaps all the more worth doing for that.
Amen! We have too many feminist heroines that are men in women's bodies. I hope the pendulum starts to swing back toward more realistic men and women, even in fantasy.
Oh, so very true. Whenever I talk about *A Princess Seeks Her Fortune* and I say that Alissandra is, indeed, a Typical Fairytale Princess, which makes her just about unique nowadays, I've never had anyone argue the point. (Be startled, but not argue.)
Part of it is that they have highly limited ideas about what heroines do in older works of fiction. Waving a sword is indeed, rare, but really, it's not the only thing you can do.
I'd run afoul of trying to conceptualize what a strong female character was when I penned a fantasy story, that is unfortunately in a state of limbo. I know what strong male characters are. I can open a history textbook to just about any page and find an example, that works well enough. Feminism made finding the reverse, finding the feminine... difficult.
Though it's an interesting observation from the original blog post of yours that these four traits are the same no matter the sex of a character. That wasn't a framing I was aware of. That encourages some thought!
I was thinking about this one last night. I'm to the point that I greatly distrust any media with a female lead, and especially any which uses the wording, Strong Female Character/Girlboss. They're all pretty horrible. I watched Transformers One last night. Alita-one is a girlboss, however, she works because she's supporting and while she's a little annoying, it's outright her personality and she concedes that the lead MMC is better than her at something very important, rather than being insufferable about being better at everything and trying to take his place.
As with any trope and trend, it’s going to have a lot of poorly-done examples and very few good examples, but that’s the nature of the beast with tropes. It goes the same way with male characters like James Bond or Han Solo.
This was a refreshing read! Women are at the very least as strong as men but their strength is very different. Women create and Men subdue, This is how it’s always been.
When a woman is acting is accordance with her Telos she gives life. She may give life through her gentleness by helping to turn a man from anger. She may give life through her beauty by pointing us to The True and The Beautiful. Or maybe through her mysterious nature she makes life intriguing or exciting. And let us not forget the incredible power of her body to conceive, create, and bring forth new life!
In “Game of Thrones,” Brienne of Tarth was an incredibly large and strong woman who wanted to be a knight. In the HBO miniseries, Gwendolyn Christie portrayed Brienne as vulnerable as well, which I don’t remember the novels doing. Brienne ends up protecting one of the Stark children and falls in love with Jaime Lannister. He does not reciprocate, but comes to respect her as a woman and a knight. Ms. Christie turned what could have been a “strong girl trope” into a believable and sympathetic character.
In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen's female lead Fanny Price, is usually judged by modern readers as too wimpy and weak. I wrote a couple of articles covering the fact that I think Austen actually created one of the strongest heroins ever penned. We moderns are very shallow and one dimensional in our view of what strength looks like. I'm not sure we even know how to see Christ's submission to death on the cross as an expression of strength.
Glad to know I'm not the only one sick of them. It's so messed up that people think women and men must be the same in order to be equal. We should just accept them as having equal worth.
Thanks for this! I love how Wonder Woman was always intended to show both physical strength/superpower and feminine empathy, kindness, diplomacy, and even whimsical humor! (WW in her early comics was hilarious!) Hope more authors celebrate the unique skills and qualities of women in their heroines!
The other day, a 'friend' of mine said that the reason men respect my intelligence is that they see me as something other than a 'woman'. I'm a woman, albeit not a feminine one, and apparently, I'm expected to downplay my intelligence and education according to other women. I've been called a feminist because I help women in my line of work, which is based in a combination of empathy, listening skills, and logical reasoning. I agree that strength takes many forms, and repeatedly showing it as sword-playing and physical strength is shallow and short-sighted.
You lost me at "the goal of feminism is to become the same as a man" - not my brand of "feminism" and not that of many others. My goal is simply to make sure women are safe from harm, and safe to pursue the lives they'd like, whether that be as a feminine woman, a happy homemaker and mother; or one like me, that's not so feminine-presenting and to whom that sort of femininity would be a nightmare.
Stronk Woman = Mediocre Man Clone
Sensitive Man = Your Girlfriend with Different Plumbing
I think the latter one is worse, as it is in general more deceptive dangerous for women.
But, neither holds much to desire in their arrival, and their departures are typically a relief.
Men and Women are complimentary, with their own strengths, weaknesses, and desires.
Write to those strengths, weaknesses, desires, and differences and it will resonate with your readers.
Agree and disagree. TL;DR: This is a much more nuanced topic than you made it out to be in this post.
The unrealistically overpowered Strong Woman, e.g. the kick-ass Urban Fantasy heroine with amazing sword skills who can best any man, is indeed an absurd trope deserving of an intelligent reader's eye-roll. But the contrary trope, the Weak Woman who can do nothing a man can do, is just as absurd — and that trope was around for a long time, which means it's commonly assumed to be the alternative by default. But the trick is to strike a realistic balance, getting away from these extremes.
I agree that a lot of what you call "feminist" literature presently fails at striking the balance. But I think this has happened because of an over-correction. Every time a new trope takes off in literature that subverts age-old expectations, writers go overboard with it. "The shiny new thing" seduces readers, we know, so as writers we're seduced, too. It takes a while for the shine to wear off so we can interrogate the new trope, get realistic about it, and see how it ought to be used.
So, really, there's an Unrealistic Strong Woman and a Realistic Strong Woman. As readers get bored with the former, rolling their eyes more and more, writers will figure out how to write the latter. The pendulum will swing back towards the middle.
Now, as harsh as what I'm about to say is, please bear in mind I'm doing you the courtesy of assuming you're simply unaware of something, rather than assuming you're arguing in bad faith...
Re: "The goal of feminism is to become the same as a man." In the context of your piece, this means feminism's goal is to turn women into men. That's not the goal. If you think it is, either you're poorly informed about feminism or you're assuming the over-correction stands for the whole philosophy (the exception stands for the rule). Feminism's basic intention is to deconstruct patriarchy and show that women are entitled to the same considerations as men, not that women are men. Various issues, from voting rights to equal pay for the same work to the handling of sexual assault cases, show feminism's intention and application — but I shouldn't have to gesture at them. If you're critiquing a philosophy, first take the trouble to understand it — learn its history, the conditions which gave rise to it — so that you frame it fairly in your critique. A little knowledge goes a long way. I really don't think you'd like to live as a woman in the world as it existed before feminism, if you understand what that world was.
As you probably know (or I can't imagine you'd use it), the phrase "feminine mystique" was coined by a feminist writer, Betty Friedan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique). The problem Friedan identified was not that "women have this streak of Damsel in Distress" (fair enough) but that the Damsel in Distress was all patriarchy ever permitted a woman to be. Friedan didn't say you couldn't be a housewife, if that's what you wanted. She pointed out that society generally thought you couldn't be anything else, so many men and women (both) made sure you never became anything else.
There certainly are positives to the feminine mystique. You've identified a strong moral foundation, gentleness, listening, and service as qualities of a strong female character. I agree, and I'd add fortitude to that list, since many women have had to stand strong in the face of certain kinds of suffering that many men can't even begin to understand. In my own writing (see the serial novel on my substack), I try to portray women with these qualities and to show men can have these qualities (can in fact learn them from women). The women in my fiction do take up arms alongside the men, and I try to depict that realistically, too. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility. History abounds with examples of women warriors.
The Unrealistic Strong Woman is indeed a tired trope. Let's get away from it, by all means, but let's be thoughtful about what we replace it with. We don't have to swing back to the other extreme. There's a whole spectrum of possibility.
P.S. "Technically" women can't develop enough upper body strength to wield swords? History begs to differ. Since you bring up the katana specifically...
Some history about samurai women and the katana: https://katana-empire.com/blogs/katana/samurai-women-and-the-katana
The naginata was a long bladed weapon, technically not a sword but a polearm, used by samurai women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCo6-BSwdJs
More about the naginata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naginata
Thank you for the intelligent response, Joshua. Humans are complex creatures with a broad range of possibilities, and writers, to be great with their art, must understand these depths as much as possible.
Alot of yap that is completely detached from reality. For a start, every single Jane Austin novel.
The usage is “a lot,” not “alot,” and the novelist’s surname is spelled Austen, not Austin. Had you not made these errors, and had you specified exactly what idea all of Austen’s novels are supposed to illustrate, I’m sure your comment would’ve floored us all with the sheer inarguable force of your literary acumen!
Other than a couple typos, none of Aust*E*ns works show women being nothing more than damsels in distress. If you read them, this is self-evident, and no one thinks they are.
LOL! Have you actually read the novels? All of them? Or even a few of the most popular ones, e.g. Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion? And really thought about the characters and their choices? I don’t see characters like Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet as damsels in distress, even if the society they live in gives them little or no choice in truly hard scrapes (i.e. where money is involved) than to turn to men for help because men were the only people with resources — which is itself a social fact Austen urges readers to think about. Austen’s heroines are rather independent-minded women who make their own choices, despite criticism and pressure. For instance, Elizabeth Bennet, who is hard up for a husband (her whole family is pressing her to marry and stop being an economic burden to them), rejects a keen suitor everyone expects and pressures her to accept. That’s her decision, no one else’s. She doesn’t ask any man to step in and make it for her or shield her from criticism for making it. She takes it on the chin.
Secondly, Austen’s novels offer a window into and commentary on women’s lives in late 18th / early 19th century England. Of course women were relatively powerless then! Feminism was in its infancy. Wollstonecraft is the only feminist in British history predating Austen, and by only a couple of decades. I wonder, seriously, whether you are familiar with Austen’s role in this history — how her books gave impetus to feminism — or just making a superficial, vague observation based more on stereotypes about the books than close, careful readings of them. At any rate, if you expect women’s literature two hundred years ago to feature heroines who “do it all themselves,” either you must be stunningly ignorant of history or you must expect other people to be.
And you call my yap “detached from reality”?! Go read a book!
You suggested that it was a common trope of weak women that the strong women trope over corrected for. I gave a counter example. Austenwas not a feminist, and to read any feminism in her books is kinda insane. Emma, as well as Sense and Sensibility, both show women in non-feminist lights. One, the woman needed to be brought to heel by a man. And the other, how women need sensible guidance in choosing one's husband, when she's taken advantage of by an evil man. S&S also shows horrible women, and brow beaten men being ruled by their wives (in a negative light).
And I don't know why you would want to bring up Mary Wollstonecraft, who lived a somewhat miserable and pathetic life. If such a woman, or person in general, is the basis of your thought, you should think some new thoughts, and form a new foundation from people's who's ideas aren't shaping, or coming from, a place of pathetic misery
Oh, I see. You didn’t give a “counter example” to anything. Rather, given my original point was that the damsel in distress is a tired trope of weak women characters, you simply gave an illustration of that (thank you for backing it up with some kind of evidence from the books).
I’m still wondering why you even brought Austen into a discussion about how authors write female characters NOW, not two hundred years ago. But I never said Austen was a feminist. I said her books later gave impetus to feminism. I’d add that feminist scholars today still find plenty of interest in Austen because she offers so much insight into the British society of her day from a woman’s perspective. An author doesn’t have to agree with your views to inform them. Supposing they must reveals a very narrow way of thinking about literature and literary theories.
Nor did I say anything one way or another, in praise or not, about Wollstonecraft. I only brought her up to illustrate how early Austen came in the whole history of feminism (just one generation after the first proto-feminist). Jeez, you really like to make specious attacks on other people based on a whole lot of nothing, don’t you?
Attacking Wollstonecraft as “miserable,” as if that has the first thing to do with the merits of her ideas, doesn’t surprise me. You’re shaping up to be a disordered interlocutor with a tendency to fallacy, and I think I’m done here.
I still think you ought to go read a book. Or, really, several.
But in any event, even if I were to grant that you’re entirely right about Austen, what on earth does it have to do with how writers write women today, not two hundred years ago? What does it really have to do with the topic of Realistically versus Unrealistically Strong Women as a modern trope? Why did it even occur to you to bring Austen into this???
It has always seemed to me that the problem with the "strong woman" trope was that it missed the nature of female strength. Painting with the broadest of brushes, I would say that men are bold and women are patient. Of the two, boldness is certainly flashier, but if the man's bold action does not kill him he can go off down the pub with his mates and get blotto on free beer afterwards. Women's patience, on the other hand, goes on and on without remit. It is certainly easier to make a story out of boldness, and I would not want to suggest either that women are never bold or that men are never patient, but making a story out of patience is perhaps a little more demanding task, but perhaps all the more worth doing for that.
Amen! We have too many feminist heroines that are men in women's bodies. I hope the pendulum starts to swing back toward more realistic men and women, even in fantasy.
Oh, so very true. Whenever I talk about *A Princess Seeks Her Fortune* and I say that Alissandra is, indeed, a Typical Fairytale Princess, which makes her just about unique nowadays, I've never had anyone argue the point. (Be startled, but not argue.)
Part of it is that they have highly limited ideas about what heroines do in older works of fiction. Waving a sword is indeed, rare, but really, it's not the only thing you can do.
I'd run afoul of trying to conceptualize what a strong female character was when I penned a fantasy story, that is unfortunately in a state of limbo. I know what strong male characters are. I can open a history textbook to just about any page and find an example, that works well enough. Feminism made finding the reverse, finding the feminine... difficult.
Though it's an interesting observation from the original blog post of yours that these four traits are the same no matter the sex of a character. That wasn't a framing I was aware of. That encourages some thought!
I was thinking about this one last night. I'm to the point that I greatly distrust any media with a female lead, and especially any which uses the wording, Strong Female Character/Girlboss. They're all pretty horrible. I watched Transformers One last night. Alita-one is a girlboss, however, she works because she's supporting and while she's a little annoying, it's outright her personality and she concedes that the lead MMC is better than her at something very important, rather than being insufferable about being better at everything and trying to take his place.
The problem with stories about strong women is they have no men you can like.
Or they do, but the men are either Dark and Brooding Alpha Males, or they're super nice doormats.
As with any trope and trend, it’s going to have a lot of poorly-done examples and very few good examples, but that’s the nature of the beast with tropes. It goes the same way with male characters like James Bond or Han Solo.
This was a refreshing read! Women are at the very least as strong as men but their strength is very different. Women create and Men subdue, This is how it’s always been.
When a woman is acting is accordance with her Telos she gives life. She may give life through her gentleness by helping to turn a man from anger. She may give life through her beauty by pointing us to The True and The Beautiful. Or maybe through her mysterious nature she makes life intriguing or exciting. And let us not forget the incredible power of her body to conceive, create, and bring forth new life!
But guns are pretty cool too…
In “Game of Thrones,” Brienne of Tarth was an incredibly large and strong woman who wanted to be a knight. In the HBO miniseries, Gwendolyn Christie portrayed Brienne as vulnerable as well, which I don’t remember the novels doing. Brienne ends up protecting one of the Stark children and falls in love with Jaime Lannister. He does not reciprocate, but comes to respect her as a woman and a knight. Ms. Christie turned what could have been a “strong girl trope” into a believable and sympathetic character.
In Mansfield Park, Jane Austen's female lead Fanny Price, is usually judged by modern readers as too wimpy and weak. I wrote a couple of articles covering the fact that I think Austen actually created one of the strongest heroins ever penned. We moderns are very shallow and one dimensional in our view of what strength looks like. I'm not sure we even know how to see Christ's submission to death on the cross as an expression of strength.
This was so interesting & loved your examples
Glad to know I'm not the only one sick of them. It's so messed up that people think women and men must be the same in order to be equal. We should just accept them as having equal worth.
Thanks for this! I love how Wonder Woman was always intended to show both physical strength/superpower and feminine empathy, kindness, diplomacy, and even whimsical humor! (WW in her early comics was hilarious!) Hope more authors celebrate the unique skills and qualities of women in their heroines!
The other day, a 'friend' of mine said that the reason men respect my intelligence is that they see me as something other than a 'woman'. I'm a woman, albeit not a feminine one, and apparently, I'm expected to downplay my intelligence and education according to other women. I've been called a feminist because I help women in my line of work, which is based in a combination of empathy, listening skills, and logical reasoning. I agree that strength takes many forms, and repeatedly showing it as sword-playing and physical strength is shallow and short-sighted.
You lost me at "the goal of feminism is to become the same as a man" - not my brand of "feminism" and not that of many others. My goal is simply to make sure women are safe from harm, and safe to pursue the lives they'd like, whether that be as a feminine woman, a happy homemaker and mother; or one like me, that's not so feminine-presenting and to whom that sort of femininity would be a nightmare.