Do you feel that fantasy literature is heading in a more feminist direction? If so, what role has The Wheel of Time series played in that? Did you consciously focus on creating strong female characters? Who do you think is your strongest female character? Who is your favorite female character?
Whether or not fantasy is becoming more feminist, I couldn’t say. If it is, I certainly don’t know whether The Wheel has played any part. There have been fantasies based at least in part on the feminist struggle for many years, long before I began writing these books. In fact, I have been accused of ignoring the feminist struggle, though that isn’t exactly true. I simply decided to write in a world where the feminist struggle occurred so long ago that no one even remembers it. People in this world may think that a woman acting as a guard on a merchant’s train of wagons is odd, but just because it’s a rare sight. (When weapons depend on upper body strength, as swords, spears, halberds and bows do, the people who end up wielding the weapons are usually those with the greatest upper body strength.) But if a merchant or a magistrate or a dock worker is a woman, that’s just part of the description. I mean, the most powerful single group in this world for the last three thousand plus years is all-female. The Aes Sedai are actually the most sexist bunch in town, in many ways. In the eyes of most of them, a Warder is a man. The very notion of a female strikes them as peculiar and even uneasy-making. Which might just be the remnants of knowledge of what the differences are between a bond that links a man and a woman and the bond that links two women. (RAFO, guys, though the clues are already there. And by the by, a bond linking two men is also different, just not different in the same way.)
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