Despite the time that has passed, you sketched a key tension between woman-as-preserver and woman-as-leader that I want to pick up. I feel that it’s not a gender-specific tension – it’s just that the balance falls inequitably.

Both men and women have social and moral mandates to preserve and nurture. But men aren’t held to account as swiftly or strongly as women when they fail that mandate.

The shameful truth is, most of us men are so very poor and untrained at it that perhaps when we move from half-hearted incompetent nurture to utter abdication of the role, it’s not so far to fall.

Just as I work with young women on leadership, I find myself working with young men on protection and nurturing – and for the same reasons. They mostly don’t know where to start.

I personally feel that our most celebrated leaders do not protect and nurture well. Rather, they destroy, shift and topple. It’s their many unsung followers who clean up after them – and that’s when the benefits begin to flow.

There are exceptional heroes who are also protectors and nurturers. Florence Nightingale, Mother Theresa, Edward “Weary” Dunlop. But they’re not celebrated as aspirational or influential in the same way that Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great are.

Even more important than the glamour of charge-the-guns heroism, I think, is the quiet, selfless dignity of protection and nurture. Without that, we are nothing. And it falls to us to honour and dignify that every day, and not just on days when carnations are twice the price in stores.

What you say about leaders not necessarily being strong and healthy got me thinking…you are right. When I think about examples, there are stacks. Possibly because the nature of their illness forced them to use other means – like power grabbing or using intelligence – to compensate?

I wonder about women, though. My mother once told me how irritated she was because her mother admired the aviatrix Amelia Earhart and kept saying what a wonderful woman she was. And yet Earhart left a sick mother at home while she went gallivanting… This at a time when my own mother was obliged to stay home and look after her mother, who suffered debilitating kidney disease!

In other words, I think for a woman to be a “hero”, she often had to sacrifice those around her, or throw away her own chance at “normality”. It wasn’t possible for a woman to be both a hero and a mother in the way a man could be both father and hero.

It was interesting, though, that my very conservative grandmother, who would have been the first to revile my mother had she left and gone her own way, could still praise a woman who had done exactly that.

I’m especially interested in stories where women are strong and overcome the historical circumstances holding them back. This requires an acurate portrayal of those circumstances. I agree with Satima that nobility and the wealthy can have a better crack at this than the poor, but history is also full of outcast women who have done great things.

My stake in this is that as an employer and teacher, I’m concerned that young women lack decent female leadership role models and a realistic appreciation of what leadership actually costs. I’m keen to see more accurate role-models in literature, and more exposition of just how much you have to retool a society economically, medically and socially to create anything like equity of opportunity.

As a seed for further though, I think it worthwhile to point out that many great leaders were not particularly strong or healthy – I’m not persuaded that these things are as important as respect, confidence, courage, aggression and conviction for instance. Certainly when I’m working with young women it’s those things I generally find myself working to develop.

Best of success with your writing, and I look forward to checking in from time to time.

Ruv.

Nice examples.

But human relationships are incredibly complex. While in purely physical terms most men could ‘beat up’ most women, there are many other factors involved in whether a particular man would use physical violence on a particular woman aside from physical strength. As a bullied child, I have been beaten but would never beat.

So, within a patriarchal society, it is possible to have non-stereotypical relationships, and to justify them in terms of your story.

Seems to me that magic is not the only way to ‘even out’ the gender disparity. We are fantasists, after all. So we could choose from a number of options:

• change the female gender so that women gestate and give birth more easily (Julian May attempts this in the Saga of the Exiles)
• conception and childcare can be politicised differently (look no further than Aldous Huxley)
• gender itself can be blurred (Ursula le Guin’s ‘Left Hand of Darkness’)
• selective breeding can ‘de-claw’ men (like the Bene Gesserit in ‘Dune’).

I can think of many other examples. I don’t think being true to history is a primary consideration of the fantasist. We can do what we like, really, as long as we explain ourselves and are careful to be internally consistent.

This could turn into a new thread, Glenda!:-)

There was an article in Time magazine a while back about whether the urge to spiritual belief might be carried on certain genes. Though I confess I didn’t pay much attention at the time – genetic encoding seems to be the trendy solution for everything nowadays.

Sort of off-topic, but I do recall a rather weird study on adopted children where the adopted children were shown to be more inclined to follow the religious disposition of their real parents rather than that of the adopted, i.e. if the natural parents were atheist, there was a statistically significant majority of the adopted kids who were atheist too, even if their adoptive parents were religious.

Boy, do our genes have a lot to answer for.

Brin doesn’t portray it as wholly desirable (it’s a scary kind of caste system, really) but it’s an interesting read.

Yup, great discussion. And no flaming, either! All the posts have been interesting and relevant.

I’d love to hear from Gillian on this, too, Glenda!