GUEST BLOG: Kari Sperring on Women and History

We ask a lot of history. It must tell us not simply of our varied pasts, but justify them to us, explain the present, excuse or support our weaknesses and desires, reflect for us those things about ourselves – our believed selves – that we admire or cling to or wish to make acceptable. We accuse it of lying or of incompleteness when – as it must do – it contradicts our deepest held understandings. We snatch at it, claw at it, paw over it to find the stories that make us feel safe and whole and good. It’s a lot to ask of anything, let alone a thing – a set of things – as fragile and oblique and compromised as this profession we call history. We make it our magic mirror, to show us who we want to think we are.

As a woman and a writer and a historian, I’m asked to justify myself a lot. What point is there to history: it manufactures nothing tangible, critics say. It adds nothing to the GDP. What point is there to fiction? What point to any woman speaking out, anywhere, at any time? I have answers of a sort to all of these, differing according to my company. But they all come down to the same thing in the end: human beings seem to have a need to understand themselves as they are now, and they look back for help in this. Woman’s History Month seeks to highlight the hidden and forgotten histories of women, who, as a class, have been largely side-lined by the gatekeepers of the official past. Women’s history in general seeks to rediscover and document the lives and achievements of our female forebears of all times and identities. It’s a project I have a lot of sympathy with. And yet, and yet….

The Formidable Older Woman Character

One of the pleasures of Westercon 2011 was attending the panel on "Writing Formidable Women: Making sure they're formidable; making sure they're women." (As an irrelevant side note, it's always a treat to listen to a panel I'm not actually on; among other things, I get to take notes.) As a woman writer, as a woman interested in empowerment in my own life and in those of other women, and as a reader who loves strong women characters, I appreciated many of the perspectives offered.

I've heard, and participated in, many discussions about women warriors. For some years back in the 1980s and 1990s, I was active in a network of women martial artists who were also writers (or, conversely, women writers who also studied martial arts). We tossed around ideas and our experiences in training, we pushed every boundary we could find. Marion Zimmer Bradley began editing the Sword & Sorceress anthologies in the early 1980s, and it seemed there was an explosion of kick-ass sword-wielding women heroes.

Now I'm older and am finding a particular delight in characters -- men as well as women -- who are smart enough to use violence only as a last resort. My kung fu teacher, Jimmy H. Woo, used to say that young people need to study kung fu (meaning, to work all that aggression out) but that with age comes wisdom, movements become more circular and flowing, and you end up with tai chi. Much the same holds true for my ideas about heroes. I find a particular delight in the heroic older women in, for example, The Stone War by Madeleine E. Robins, or Elizabeth Moon's wonderful Remnant Population.