Now, [Wheel] of Time also has a lot of strong, decisive women characters. I need to know, what made you bring women to the forefront in a genre that is dominated by men in leather diapers?
Well, I decided at each point who was the best to narrate a scene, who was the best point of view character to ‘see’ a scene…who is the person I wanted the reader to ‘see’…through whose eyes did I want the reader to see this scene. And after The Eye of the World , that came out to be—about half the time—women. The women are strong for a number of reasons. One, because I decided that women could talk about the feminist struggle a lot more than I could—a lot better than I could—therefore I would write a world where the feminist struggle happened so long ago that nobody even remembers it. If a woman is a magistrate, or a merchant, or a dockworker, or a wagon driver, or a blacksmith—well, somebody might say it’s a little unusual to see a woman blacksmith because you need a lot of upper body strength for that—but for the rest of it, that’s no big deal. That’s just the way it is, and I thought this world would hang together because for 3000 years of created history, the major center of political power in the world has been the White Tower which is all female, and has been all female for 3000 years. But mainly, perhaps, I wrote a world with a lot of strong women because of my own family. See, all of the men in my family were strong. All of them. Because the women in my family killed and ate the weak ones.
Okay! That’ll do it.
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