Not about quails (or chickens)
A book I read this week got me thinking. Feminists and historians and fiction writers often work against each other's goals unintentionally, simply because of the nature of what they do and who they are. What gets really fun is when you get a feminist historian fiction writer.

In an ideal world for feminists, women have strong and achievable choices presented to them in popular fiction that will help open vistas for their own lives. While women now appear as major protagonists in a lot of genre books, they often score badly on the DAMN Feminist Index (if one excepts romance and chick lit) and if you analyse them critically (including romance and chick lit), the standard spectrum of roles is quite limited. Some feminists complain - rightly - that this creates a problem for facilitating cultural change and expanding options for individual women. When we grow and change throughout our lives it really helps if we don't have to experience all possibilities personally. So limited range of models equates to limited choices for all but a few imaginative and extraordinarily strong women.

Except that the writers who write these limited choices into their fiction are following their personal writing dreams. Making their own difficult choices in an amazingly tough industry. They are also being professional in their career choices: choosing themes people already read about and enjoy means they have audiences. Writing for a market is a legitimate thing to do. Making a living is not a bad thing.

The point is that the market doesn't currently sustain the range of views necessary to changing society to ofer more or easier options for women. The shape of the publishing sector and how rewards are handed out are factors that can't be forgotten. In fact, they *inform* many writing decisions by successful authors.

It takes a brave writer to say, "I can live on less/no money - I am going to break the mold." While there are writers who break out and do innovative things and change who we are, they are not even 5% of the whole. The vast bulk of writing accepted by editors for publication pushes boundaries only gently, because that is the path to sales.

Telling a good story is usually more important than challenging society if you are making a living telling stories or editing stories for the telling.

When you get down to it, many writers don't even examine it from this angle. We write from our heart and use our knowledge of how to tell a tale using current paradigms. Unless our heart is the heart of an Ursula le Guin, we tend to deal with what we know, not what we have yet to discover. And even Le Guin can depict women according to the broad culture of her time, rather than according to the dreams of a thoughtful minority. Grab the Wizard of Eathsea and analyse it on the DAMN Feminist Index for a sad result. Le Guin's testing of boundaries is profound and her gender discussion can be extraordinary, but she is working within her own culture and her own writing culture.

The historian in me wants to analyse the cultural frameworks and work out the choices women are actually given through reading genre fiction. The feminist in me wants to see a thousand more choices open and everyone achieving their potential and having happy lives regardless of sex or gender, and the writer in me has a personal dream and rather likes the thought of paying grocery bills.

I haven't yet succumbed to letting my dream be dominated by industry constraints, but I can see it happening if I want to move from being very small fish, given my talent is not one of those exotic and special ones society enjoys watching dream unadulterated. But if I follow industry constraints, then I betray the feminist in me by accepting different choices for my characters. I follow the story not the ideal, and the story has to fit within other stories told to make sense to the reader: my tales need familiar signposts at this moment in history. So Gillian-the-feminist is continually tangling herself and tempting betrayal and Gillian-the-writer is trying to juggle too many balls.

Gillian-the-historian is perfectly happy: she watches the whole thing and says, "very interesting the way these factors affect the cultural dynamic." The more tangles and the more balls in the air (and even the more mixed metaphors) the happier she is.

I am being very convoluted today. All I really wanted to say is that choices for women in our society and the modelling of those choices in fiction aren't nearly as straightforward as they look.