So, this is a topic I’d been thinking of making into a video, but there’s no way I can talk about this on YouTube.

Since you’re already wondering about the title, I’m just going to cut to the chase: life for women was terrible throughout history, and women don’t like to read about it in books.

Okay, now I’m going to back up a bit to give you more context. A friend of mine has a daughter in college right now who recently had to read the Travels of Ibn Battuta. The book is undeniably important as one of the few historical accounts we have of the time, and it also gives us an important source of internal information regarding the Medieval Muslim world. And it’s the story of a man who, as a Qadi – a lawgiver of the Muslim world at the time – who goes through women like Kleenexes on a Saturday night.

The man uses his position as a lawgiver to make some rather corrupt deals with men who offer up their daughters in exchange for legal favors. He also exploits the easy divorce laws of the Ottoman Empire to take multiple wives when he moves to a new town, and then divorces them as he leaves and goes to a new place. Rinse, wash, repeat.

For understandable reasons, my friend’s daughter did not like the class and wanted to drop it altogether. When I had a moment to talk to her about it, I asked her the following question:

“If an author wants to write a story in a historical setting, how can he be historically accurate and avoid offending women, when life for women back then was pretty terrible?”

Her response:

“Don’t be historically accurate.”

And I’ve discovered that this is an incredibly common reaction.

Now, before I get too into the weeds on things women had to endure throughout history, I have to stop and point out that life was terrible for everyone. If you were a man, you were likely to be working yourself into an early grave on a farm, or in a mine, or would get drafted to fight in a bloody war and die on a battlefield because of some petty squabble between nobles over a strip of land. But I’ve noticed a problem.

In A Song of Ice and Fire, and in the HBO series Game of Thrones, Theon Greyjoy suffers the most brutal abuse at the hands of Ramsey Bolton. He’s tortured, broken mentally as well as physically, and castrated, the last of which was a very common fate throughout history for men unfortunate enough to be taken captive in war and made into slaves. And in the HBO series, Sansa Stark is assaulted by Ramsey in a particularly horrific manner, but you’d have to play some sever mental gymnastics to claim her fate was as bad as Theon’s.

And guess which character’s suffering enraged female fans?

For whatever reason, men can read a book or watch a show where men are put through 41 flavors of hell that would have been normal in a historical setting, and women, for the most part, cannot.

And maybe that’s because, on some sort of cultural level, we have more disgust towards the things women went through in the Dark Ages and other periods than the troubles men faced. Maybe we think things like sexual assault, after which you can potentially heal and still live a full life, are worse than things like castration, which is permanent, denies you the chance of ever engaging in things most people would consider are essential for having a full life, and historically could easily lead to death from infection, and was the equivalent of the death penalty in Byzantium.

But the reasons don’t really matter; what does matter is that a significant portion of the women in your audience will tune out the minute they see female characters facing the kinds of things that were unfortunately common throughout history. They would rather you avoid being historically accurate, so they don’t have to see this sort of thing.

However, I’ve noticed that there’s a problem with the common approach of avoiding these topics altogether.

A lot of times, women didn’t really have to worry so much about assault from men within their own tribe, or their own village. They had a greater chance of invaders from outside their community attacking them or carrying them off as a slave. This was something that their entire communities were often worried about and would shape a lot of restrictions on women’s freedoms specifically to keep them out of harm’s way.

If you look at historical settings and think, “that’s not fair, they’re forcing the women to stay at home,” then chances are, you have no idea what life was actually like back then. The threat of some sort of brigand coming in and kidnapping the women in your village was so great back then, that the threat of raiders coming from nowhere and attacking your town was as present as the threat of nuclear war in the 1970s. And you also have to remember that there was no mass media back then. If a boat full of Vikings was sailing to your shores to raid your town, they might as well be coming from the moon, because you can’t see or hear them coming, and you have no local newspaper around who can show you details of the upcoming invasion.

So, a lot of restrictions on women were actually meant to keep them behind thick, protective walls, or at least, inside a house with relative protection. And there were periods of history where this wasn’t the case; in the Roman Empire, Roman women had a lot of freedom. They actually had their own version of feminism, complete with a lopsided family court and a government that tried to buy their votes with the dole. However, they only got to that point after the Romans had eliminated all immediate threats from the vicinities of their cities or wealthy estates, and these movements for women’s liberation never really took off in the border towns or less protected villages. If you’ve ever wondered why feminism isn’t as popular in rural areas with mountain lions or bears, this is why.

But of course, you can be free, or you can be safe. Not both.

Another issue that women never want to talk about is, well, their monthly cycle. Historically, most women didn’t have access to cheap, disposable sanitation products, and you can forget about antibiotics. People in the ancient world had no concept of germ theory; they just knew that people who touched blood tended to get sick. And once a month, that meant women in public were a problem.

Imagine what would happen if your fantasy warrior woman was involved in a long military campaign, lasting more than a month, and she was involved in a battle at an extremely inconvenient time. Of course, anyone suffering from any sort of malady in battle would have problems, but not predictable, monthly problems that you know are going to strike like clockwork, and there’s no hormonal birth control pills to prevent them.

To our knowledge, it is possible that the Romans had something like a birth control pill in the form of a plant root called Silphium, a plant that they used as birth control that couldn’t be cultivated and had to be harvested from the wild. It’s possible (not provable) that the plant worked like hormonal birth control pills today, and if so, it might have allowed women to avoid their monthly euphemism. But then the Romans got so into this stuff that they harvested it to extinction.

This is a topic that women almost never want to talk about, and while it is true that most portrayals of periods in fiction have ranged from clueless to offensive, the fact remains that women don’t really want to read a story that includes these details. The classic response of “do your research, and make sure you know what you’re talking about” isn’t going to be enough here.

And I do believe that simply not addressing these issues in historical settings is having some pretty bad effects on culture as a whole. It’s very easy to forget about these problems and then read ancient Jewish law and think, “man, they were so sexist! Why wouldn’t they let women into the inner part of the temple? Why so much restriction on women’s movement?” It’s no wonder people look at history and think men were constantly oppressing women if we never talk about the biological reasons women couldn’t do the same things as men without getting lots of people sick and drawing in a biblical plague of flies drawn to all the soiled burlap rags. And I’m guilty of this, too. I deliberately avoided this topic in Heroes of Janaan despite knowing it would have been a major breakthrough for a society to rediscover antibiotics and have access to medical alchemy, especially when women in the Middle Ages after the fall of Rome had to make do with a rag on a stick, which frequently lead to infection.

Remember, the Travels of Ibn Battuta is the best historical document we have from that period of the Ottoman Empire. And you can’t just ignore the fact that corrupt lawgivers and wealthy men looking for legal favors would use young girls as bargaining chips in the game of politics. If you sanitize history like this, you erase the entire point of studying history: to learn from it.

So, what are our options? Well, I believe that exposing these elements in a diluted form might be able to get the point across without alienating too many people. You can mention that women are afraid to go outside of their town’s limits lest they be grabbed up by marauders. You could include the threat of things like assault, or being used as a political tool, where the woman would be expected to offer favors and is not really allowed to say “no.” But then, never actually show it onscreen. If you’re writing a book, you can state that the women of a town were assaulted after an invasion without going into detail.

You’re still going to alienate some women this way, but nowhere near as many, and you’ll still be able to inform people that the restrictions women lived with were often the result of trying to keep women safe, not just brutalizing women for no reason.

And as for the monthly euphemism, I don’t have a solution. I’ll let you know if I ever find one.

 

By the way, the picture above is from the 1997 animated adaptation of Beserk, which in my opinion is the closest an adaptation has come to doing the series justice. The scene above happens to be one of the rare cases where a warrior woman is trying to fight an enemy while struggling against period cramps, and actually handles the subject rather tastefully. Of course, the manga is better. Just be aware that it is a very…”adult” series.

 

Finally, this is the last weekend where I can sell Heroes of Janaan: the Science of Magic for $16.99. After this weekend, Amazon will raise the price to $19.99 due to paper costs, so if there’s someone you know who you want to get a copy, buy it now before the price hike.