Iâm writing a story set in the Victorian era, something I have done a lot of research on, and my female character (a teenager) is a skilled fencer. I have been told that this is âunrealisticâ despite research telling me noble women would have actually been ENCOURAGED to fence, as fencing was seen as graceful. I was going to have her get into a duel but Iâm worried readers arenât going to believe woman could fence back then and impose even more restrictions than were in place at the time.
So, with fiction, you can essentially normalize whatever you want. Youâre not limited a very narrow view of someone elseâs reality. You create the reality your readers experience. You shape the world to your liking. You have that control, you have that power, and, when you get good at crafting new realities, your readership wonât question it because you never gave them the opportunity. However, the trick with normalization is understanding there needs to be more than one. You need many characters from in a multitude of age groups in order to normalize a behavior pattern in a setting.
Never forget, you are the creator and they are the consumer. The consumer doesnât dictate what the creator creates. A well-written story will always find a home, even one filled with uncomfortable and inconvenient truths. Be confident that youâll find yours.
Remember, perception of history doesnât outweigh real history except when we ignore the real historyâs existence. The fact women were encouraged to fence as they were encouraged to participate in other sports like tennis for the benefit of their health doesnât outweigh the sexism which existed in Victorian England. It also doesnât reject womenâs participation in sports as being seen as secondary to menâs. Their participation treated as less âlegitimateâ, less serious, and entirely hobbyist. Which is not so different from how womenâs professional sports are treated today.
The trouble with the presentation of many female characters who fight (and this has been normalized) is that theyâre the only one. Theyâre the trailblazer, the only one who fights, who earns her stripes by playing with the big male dogs, who is different from other women. This gives them the position of being special and unique. However, by being different from other woman in such a big way, we cut the setting off from normalizing female participation and the concept of a woman fighting is treated as abnormal. A single outlier is not normalization, and isnât really proving anything. In fact, the treatment of a female fighter as being different, unique, and special due to her gender throws the violence and combat ball squarely into the male court. By normalizing violence as the domain of men, these female characters are framed as infringing on spaces inherently male rather than just culturally male. This treatment of sex and gender ends up normalizing the very sexist stereotypes and cultural mores that the narrative is trying to combat. The treatment posits that men are inherently and naturally better at combat than women because violence is male, and the truth that combat is a skill you practice and work at in order to be good gets lost.
Women have always fought. Youâll find at least two women in just about every martial arts class, and probably more. There will be older women and younger women, the women who threw off societyâs rules to completely embrace their martial calling, the women who didnât, the women who are there just for that bit of added grace, the ones who are there because their mother or father made them, the ones who love it, the ones who arenât really interested in fencing. Theyâre just crushing on the salleâs fencing instructor or taking the opportunity to go husband hunting among the available gentry. You need lots of female characters with varying opinions on the subject and with their own reasons for engaging in the sport. The primary opponents for a female fencer are going to be other female fencers, and thatâs also who sheâll be training with; even if the master is a man. Where women dueling women is acceptable, women dueling men will be socially frowned upon. This doesnât mean a woman canât duel a man on equal terms, they can. However, the social and societal consequences for breaking with tradition are much more severe.
This is where the sexism the audience has been trained to expect leaks back in. The mental jump is in the statement: âit is socially frowned upon for women to do Xâ and the logic then  becomes âwomen canât do X!â because we donât talk about the ones who challenged social mores. Thereâs the assumption, and then thereâs the reality. Audiences demanding realism often overfocus on their assumptions, rather than what is real. Fiction is a poor substitute for the real world, which is often much more complicated. The reality is womenâs fencing as a codified sport has been thriving for over a century. Women have been fencing and fighting for much longer than that. Women learned and practiced self-defense in Victorian England, there were women who did fight in live duels against other women, and there were those who participated in the sport purely as a means of exercise.
Women didnât duel in Victorian England, they say? We have actual historical events of women dueling topless, and not for the entertainment of male or female spectators. No, they dueled topless to avoid infection and to keep cloth from going into the wound. In this particular instance, the countess and the princess were dueling over floral arrangements for an upcoming musical exhibition.
The reasons your characters have for dueling could be really, really out there. Violence over floral arrangements may not make sense to us, but it did to them. Humans can be really out there, and history isnât a sham collection of men doing everything while women stayed home. History is littered with badass women from all over the world doing crazy things. I wouldnât even say that a woman dueling a man in Victorian England would actually be all that out there because women did, what would be unrealistic is there being no consequences (societal or otherwise) for the act. There were certainly women who openly flouted convention. Novelist George Eliot is one example. Female prize fighter and all around bare knuckle boxing champion, Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes is another.
However, culture involves more than one.
If you want to portray an attitude as normal, you need to have your characters treat the attitude like itâs normal and back that up with a robust mixed gender cast. Women are drawn to violence in the same way men are, and female members of the aristocracy certainly did duel each other. There were articles written on the subject of how fencing is good for womenâs health.
So, should you fear detractors? No, you shouldnât.
Donât give them power over your work. Women have been carving out their place in the world of professional sports and on the battlefield for a long, long time. The tragedy is that our culture at large pretends they donât exist in order to uphold the sexist mores underpinning our society. Remember, women make up half of the human race and half of every society. Honestly, read this article. The Boyâs Club may be societally acceptable, but itâs actually unrealistic.
So, if you want normal, jam your work full of female fencers of every age. Main characters, secondary characters, side characters, and cameos. Female friends, female rivals, female mentors, female teachers, female assistants, female family members, female characters who just donât understand, female characters of every stripe imaginable. Women who fence, women who donât, women who look down their nose at it, women who think its unseemly, women who long to be taken more seriously, and the women who just donât care what society thinks. Those do it anyway. All these types of women have existed.
Youâll always find detractors, but the answer is easy.
Do it anyway.
-Michi
Q&A: When it comes to women, âRealismâ is often wrong was originally published on How to Fight Write.
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