Linking this interesting article on the social conditions that might lead to a fantasy society that has a greater proportion of female warriors than our own history has produced. With my own worldbuilding I went with the relatively ubiquitous (if limited) magic approach and took the tack that healing talent led to lower infant and maternal mortality rates, so women in general were not as tied to the role of childbearing for their entire adult lives.
The author of this article discusses this, along with some other approaches, that could also work for setting up a more egalitarian society.
http://worldweaverpress.com/2013/05/28/female-warriors-in-fantasy/#comment-1579
This is always an interesting subject but I'm not sure I agree that you can fit women warriors into any fantasy society that isn't an egalitarian one, therefore not one with kings, primogeniture and gods. Women just don't have the esteem to occupy top rated jobs like warrior. By all means have female warriors when everything else is equal, but the token female in armour when the rest of the female population is stuck in front of the stove or in a harem doesn't seem realistic to me.
ReplyDeleteHave you read this article?
ReplyDeletehttp://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2013/05/we-have-always-fought-challenging-the-women-cattle-and-slaves-narrative-by-kameron-hurley/
It's really interesting, because it provides some evidence that women did in fact step outside their proscribed roles far more often than we were taught in our history classes. The occasional female warrior in a man's world may actually be more realistic, from a historic perspective, than a fully egalitarian pre-industrial society.