Sorry, it’s just something that I’ve picked up in reading various things over the years. I enjoy reading books with titles like Life in a 15th Century Castle, only I don’t limit myself to the 15th century. If I happen to come across any reliable references I’ll try to remember to drop you a PM.
Spanish “Moros” are Muslims and come in different colors, for some people the term includes Blacks. The term is most-commonly but not exclusively used to refer to north-eastern Africans (people from Argelia, Morocco…); it may be that the Middle-Ages English term was equally wide, and/or that, much like modern-day Ebonists, many people from England thought that everybody from Africa was Black. And there is also the term Blackamoor, used IIRC to refer for example to Othello.
I still expect that people would have been curious about him; I remember my own amazement upon seeing a black person on the street for the first time (I was 15 and abroad) and have seen small kids ask why is that person so dark (or why that other one is so pale, or why another one wears a veil, or…); often they ask whether the black person is sick and show clear relief upon finding out they’re perfectly fine, thank you.
I’m currently reading Pérez-Reverte’s latest novel, set in Cadiz during the Napoleonic wars. His characters tend to be extremes; for example in this case the policeman is one nasty bastich, there is a heiress who is in charge of her family’s business (and an explanation of how the specific cultural circumstances of Cadiz make this acceptable, where in most of the country it wouldn’t have been)… one of the things I like about his books is the whole background, actually, including the nasty details. Yes, hidalgos had fleas and went whoring - and by the way, D’Artagnan is an adulterer and any similitude between the Musketeers of the title and St Antony of Padua is limited to their genetic structure, children’s editions notwithstanding (Pérez-Reverte has mentioned The Three Musketeers as being one of his favorite books and Dumas father among his biggest influences).
Whether it is an insight into a world gone by through the mind of a writer who finds the -ism perfectly natural, or of one who fights it, or part of weaving a believable tapestry, I’m fine with it so long as the story is good. When the “exotic setting” is just a false decoration for a bad tale or an excuse for the author to pontificate, not so much. I enjoy A Yankee… enormously; there is an explanation on the importance of comparing Purchasing Power rather than straight salary that I consider should be compulsory reading for any college student; but it takes someone as good as Twain to keep it from becoming a soapbox.
The exact title for my own ancestors translates as “Captains of the troops of (Village-and-surroundings) and keepers of the Stronghouse at (Village)”; they were “knights” in the sense of having the title of Caballeros and in the sense of riding horses, but they weren’t part of a cavalry troop nor were they full-time soldiers. The horse wasn’t so much of a jousting implement as one to be sure their men could see the Captain, and the “extraction of resources” involved things like keeping in the stronghouse enough food to feed the villages through the winter if the fields got burnt during a raid. While I’m sure that many of the notions I’ve gotten from family lore are romanticized, I’m also reasonably sure that the situation was very different just in our village in the 8th Century (when those burning raids were frequent, making that easily-defensible central storehouse necessary) and in the 10th (when there hadn’t been such a raid for ages but the centralization of resources had become ingrained). The situation of women was very different in different Spanish kingdoms and periods, too, all within the Middle Ages; there’s letters from the French bride of one of our Kings to her mother, astounded that “those barbarians at the mountains” actually want to hear her opinion. Juana la Loca and Isabella happened to be Queens of the only Spanish kingdom where, under their own reigns, women weren’t legally allowed to own property. There’s legends, tales and histories about bad lords and good lords.
Europe was indeed quite a varied place, the Middle Ages quite a varied time, and knights were not the same animal from location to location or time to time, nor was one knight the exact same as his neighbor.
I disagree. You are right about the number of people who would die, I did misremember that. But if it was a young man instead of a young woman, it would not have played out the same. And the reason has more to do with the attitudes of the author and the audience then the necessity of the situation.
It is common in older SF to see these things pop up. Men are engineers and pilots, and women are secretaries and stewardesses. Read older Larry Niven and Robert Heinlen stories and you see that on trips to Mars no women would be allowed and the hint of homosexuality is understandable justification for murder.
In some ways just as jarring to me is how many stories written in the “Golden Age” of SF casually assume asexuality in the heroes. Crews or even individuals go out on multi-year missions with no thought of how being without sexual outlet will affect them. This was not universal, but it seemed it was quite common.
And, of course, TVTropes has relevant pages:
In fact, Heinlein was remarkable for his (relatively) enlightened views on women…and I suspect that Ginny Heinlein had a lot to do with that, and his mother before Virginia. By all accounts, both women were quite intelligent and quite independent minded. Still, Heinlein’s women were all interested in becoming mothers (with one notable exception) and were all feminine in nature. Sure, Hazel Stone was an engineer (and resented the fact that being female held her back) but she was clearly a mother first, as was Podkayne’s mother.
I also found Fred Pohl’s attitudes towards women changed dramatically. In at least one story, his female human character was the classic 50s ditz, but in his later years, his female characters were as strong and independent and intelligent as his males.
One of the things that I really disliked about Bradbury’s stories was how he assumed that sex/gender roles would remain the same as in the 50s. It’s very much like watching Flintstones or Jetsons cartoons…supposedly, we’re seeing a society which is set far in the past or future, and yet the sex roles are exactly the same as the (then) modern roles. That is, women are ONLY housewives, and they shop, gossip, and do a bit of very light housecleaning, while men go out and earn money. And men are undeniably the head of the house.
Characters can be portryed as sexist/racist/bigoted without the representations of the the targets actually being so. It doesn’t bother me if the chauvinism on display is historically accurate, and if some meta-acknowledgement is made that the prejudice is irrational and baseless.
For instance, you couldn’t do a story about the antebellum south without racist characters. Showing slaveowners as racist would not be offensive. Showing slaves as actually being stupid and inferior, or as conforming to other stereotypes would be offensive. It’s all about the difference between what the characters feel and what the author really feels.
Take the Flashman books, for instance. The title character in those books is irredeemably, unapologetically racist and sexist, yet it doesn’t hurt the books because the author is being accurate about the period, does so in a satirical way (Flashy is SUPPOSED to be an asshole) and routinely portrays women and people of other races as three dimensional, intelligent characters who don’t fit into Flashman’s bigoted assumptions, are frequently his intellectual superiors and almost always his moral superiors.
On the other side of he coin, I used to read a lot of James Ellroy, but eventually stopped because I was so put off by the pervasive racist language, and because Ellroy does not contradict the racism of his characters in his portrayal of other races, but plays right into it. I don’t think he’s ever written a black character who isn’t a one-dimensional criminal dengenerate. From what I’ve heard and read from people who know him or have met him, Ellroy really is a racist, who hides behind “that’s just my characters” in interviews.
That knight lived out on his estate with his serfs and frequently had direct personal contact with them. They need supervision and attention, and any noble who simply neglected them was setting himself up for trouble. The peasants often accompanied their masters to war as well, and few things create stronger personal bonds than depending on each other for survival in battle. We’re talking about communities that might number no more than a few hundred or several dozens, and it’s not likely that nobles would never have seen the peasants as human. I’m not saying there weren’t plenty of horrible abuses, clearly there were, but there was often genuine affection and respect between them as well.
Project Moonbase (1953): A woman gets the pilot’s slot because she only weighs 90 pounds. This gives her a swelled head. It comes out all right in the end though: She agrees to marry the male lead but requests he be given a promotion after marriage so he will outrank her.
For a defense of all this, see here.
My biggest complaint about Heinlein’s treatment of women was that he tended to use the abilities and strengths of women to show how much better the men were. In Stranger in a Strange Land one of the ways he shows what a Great Man Jubal Harshaw was is by describing how talented his secretaries were! In this world being an exceptional women just meant she could work for/marry an even *more *exceptional man.
I just finished reading ‘Tunnel in the Sky’ and the sexism in it really was jarring. Not only were the women in separate depts to men. There were strong, capable women, but they were pointed out as being unusual in that respect, and every single one of them ended up completely subservient to a man. They all even stopped work when they got married.
Even though I know that kind of sexism was not a big deal at the time he was writing, it’s still a lot more difficult to adapt to than a work set in the past; I know that the past really was extremely sexist, but I doubt that the future will be.
TBH, what jarred more in that book was the assumption that everyone was deeply religious. This would probably have been less of a problem if the book were better written; the latter half reads like a summary of a story rather than a story itself.
That’s a great opening line for a site that wants people to take it seriously as a gender critique. :rolleyes:
Skald has it. At the time, a common theme, especially in Astounding, was how space was unforgiving. New space workers would be told that the slightest screw up would be fatal, unlike on Earth. Godwin gave an unwinnable scenario, like the one cadets in the Academy have to face, but for real. Like it or not, the fact that the victim was a young innocent girl intensified the dilemma. If you were writing a tragedy about a rabid dog who had to be put down, would you use a big mean dog or a cuddly puppy?
Now the story stirred up a lot of discussion. In a sense it is a problem of evil story. Think of how those who believe in a loving god try to find ways in which natural disasters somehow come out for the best. Godwin constructed this story to prevent any hint that this was happening to her because she was bad in any way. People just hated that.
As far as lack of sex, Doc Savage and his crew didn’t do lots of partying. Any hint of sex was tabu especially in magazines thought to be for kids. Think of what a shock “The Lovers” by Farmer was.
As for Heinlein, remember that all starship pilots were women in “Starship Troopers” because they were better at it. Kind of in advance of the Air Force at the time. In “Tunnel in the Sky” I’m sure there was one woman who would up unattached. One girl disguised herself as a boy, but given the situation, that might have been understandable, though Heinlein doesn’t give the sexual context. Sure pairs hooked up, but the point was that they were building their own society, which might be permanent for all they knew.
She ended up unmarried, but still very subservient to the male hero of the story. The girl disguising herself as a boy is understandable, I agree; she was a cool character even though she inexplicably all but disappeared from the storyline mid-book.
Pairs hooked up, but it was assumed that they all HAD to get married, and they all really wanted to. Everyone was religious.
It might have been relatively advanced for the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a bit jarring reading it now; that’s not Heinlein’s fault.
The sex wasn’t explicit, but it was certainly implied. Monk and Ham were clearly portrayed as skirt chasers. The magazine was targeted at boys in their mid-teens who, even in the thirties, would not have been all that naive about sex.
Or such noble, do-gooding Klansmen. The movie referred to “servants,” not slaves, and never mentioned the Klan.
I can’t find the text of the story online, but the impression I and the others in my highschool class got from reading it was that the sex of the stowaway was just as shocking as her age. If it had been a young man in there (She was a young adult, not an adolescent or child) he may have felt bad about (he felt bad about it before he opened the closet) but he would have done what he needed to without even listening to the excuses and sob story. And it wasn’t just the pilot. As soon as any character heard it was a girl, their attitude changed from “Why isn’t he spaced yet?” to “Can we save her?” The fact that they couldn’t save her doesn’t change the fact that they all tried to. Would a young man have gotten a chance to say good bye to his sister? No. It is the casual assumption that her sex means that she is more deserving of effort that was jarring to me.
Also, I am not saying it is bad or bad for its time. I understand that it was quite a twist for its day. If it had been set in the 1960s, it would not have bothered me. But set in the future, it does. A non-ism example from a short novel a just read called Earthblood (although that has quite a few sexism an racism examples as well). The hero is looking for Terra. He takes over several old derelict Terran vessels with controls and instrumentation intact enough for him to use them in combat, but he never checks their databases or reads their star charts. It is like we went to space but forgot our computers. This is due to the fact is written in 1966, but today it seems as odd as story taking place in the 1970s where everyone had to walk or ride a horse.
I am not a huge Heinlein fan and I have only read a small amount of his stuff (Expanded Universe, The Moon is Harsh Mistress, Stranger, Starship Troopers) but in many of the stories I have read, women can only be almost as competent as the man they serve/marry. A woman’s highest goal should be to strive to find a man who is worthy enough for her to support.
It’s not a specific custom, I’m just making a case for a particular situation not being unthinkable or wildly inaccurate. Lynn Bodoni may be thinking of something in particular, in which case I’d like a cite for it too.
We know these facts:
-
Slaves were used for a variety of jobs, way more than in recent American slavery. Slaves taught free children, ran the owners business, formed rudimentary fire brigades and police forces, were artisans and bureaucrats, and all sorts of things in general.
-
Rich people spend, then and now, more money than they need to, to demonstrate how rich they are. The sometimes translated to having slaves for everything and having them ridiculously specialized, such as candle-holders, trumpet-players etc.
-
Rich Romans lived in extended families, centered around the free nuclear family with their slaves, freed slaves and various lodgers and hangers-on. Many of these slaves were treated more or less as part of the family. A subordinate part, but part nonetheless. Again, think of the Victorian nurse, governess and companion, as opposed to servants in general.
-
I know of at least one instance were a roman writer (Cato, maybe? Doesn’t sound like him, but it may be in his “Business manual” writings somewhere. Possibly an offhand comment in one of Ciceros letters instead) recommends buying young, even toddler slaves, and raising them with your own children, to provide loyal adult slaves for them later.
Based on these facts, it doesn’t sound entirely far fetched for a very young and very rich roman girl to have a female slave of similar age tagging along doing nothing much. I imagine several children had their own slaves, even when the slave was too young to be of much use, or the child to have much use for a slave. The slave would then take on more and more tasks as they both grew, such as carrying stuff (the Romans didn’t have pockets, and didn’t use bags and pouches much), dressing their master (a young man would need help getting into a toga), keeping secrets, doing make-up, tending the master/mistress when sick, running errands and generally being close. A subordinate friend, whose loyalty was tested and true. The sort of slave who would be treated well, because they would be really hard to replace.
No, everyone wasn’t religious. One couple was especially religious and were in the class because they wanted to become missionaries. Rod’s family was religious, but that was just ritual.
One of the themes of the book is that since the pioneers were going to be facing wilderness survival situations, they would form social structures appropriate for a frontier rather than a modern urban society. They consciously assume trappings of the 19th century american pioneers, because they were going to be living the same sorts of lives.
Heinlein was a pretty radical cultural relativist, and one of his favorite quotes was “A barbarian is someone who considers the customs of his tribe to be laws of nature”. This is how the same man can write the hippie free love book “Stranger in a Strange Land” and the militaristic “Starship Troopers”. The ethics needed by a society facing a genocidal war against aliens is different than the ethos needed by a frontier outpost, which is different than the ethos needed by a human raised by Martians.
Every character who is actually named is part of a religion of some sort.
Consciously assume trappings of American pioneers, even down to changing the way they speak, doesn’t mean that the women’s roles aren’t sexist. It’s not just the women on the frontier planet who are subservient, either; even Rod’s outspoken, independent sister ends up married and quitting the job she loved because of her marriage. It’s not too bad - she still stands up for herself - but it still stands out.
Stranger in a Strange Land definitely didn’t have equal gender roles, and was free love but only for straight people.
Like I said, it might have been relatively advanced for the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a bit jarring reading it now, since it’s set in an old-fashioned future; that’s not Heinlein’s fault.