Strong, self-determined female characters are the lifeblood of good commercial fiction. Modern readers quickly tire of a female protagonist who doesn’t have an intelligent thought in her head or who keeps fainting every time a challenge arises. But sometimes when reading fiction that is set in the past, I’ve been jolted out of the world the writer has created by a strong feminist statement voiced in modern terms such as ‘social justice’ or ‘marginalised’.

We have to imagine our characters in the social context of the time.

I’m not saying that strong, independent women have not rebelled during oppressive patriarchal eras of the past – they certainly have. But when we write about them we have to imagine our characters in the social context of the time. To live unconventionally and to have ideas about yourself that are different to everybody else’s takes an enormous amount of self-awareness and self-determination. Women in the past had so many restrictions and restraints to keep them in an inferior position: the law, the church, their families and social groups. And this was reinforced by popular culture.

A good way to put this in perspective is to think about our modern lives. While we like to believe that we are fully liberated women, the truth is we are still heavily influenced, sometimes to the point of oppression, by societal expectations. Let’s take wrinkles, for instance. Who here celebrates them? How many women today, when they discover a new wrinkle in the mirror say to themselves: ‘Well, look at that. Another symbol of my life, richly and fully lived, has shown up on my face.’ Judging by the fact that Australian women spend thousands of dollars a year on anti-ageing moisturisers (often with the awareness that they will make very little difference) or have a toxin injected into their faces to paralyse their muscles, you could say we have pretty strong social conditioning about the natural process of ageing in women. Add to that the fact that even in 2020 a women’s magazine editor is risking her career if she puts a ‘plus-size’ model on the cover. ‘Plus-size’ usually being the dress size of the average, healthy reader of her magazine.

I believe showing this inner struggle made her more human and therefore easier to relate to.

In my novel, The Mystery Woman, Rebecca Wood yearns for a bigger, bolder life. To play a greater role than society has traditionally doled out to her. But in creating her I had to think about all the things that would have shaped her ideas about herself. She grew up going to Sunday school where she was told the story of Adam and Eve and other biblical stories that placed women firmly in subordinate positions. She lived in a society where women did not have equal opportunities at work and certainly not equal pay. 1950s society and culture would have reinforced the idea that women were entirely reliant on men. Therefore, while Rebecca is strong and self-determined by nature, she does struggle with her own social conditioning. I believe showing this inner struggle made her more human and therefore easier to relate to.

Did your character save herself from a dangerous situation or did she meet someone who challenged her world view?

I’d encourage you to think about your strong female characters this way. Rather than have them just suddenly appear as fully formed feminists, show how their spirits have struggled against the social conditioning they might have experienced and how they eventually triumph. Show the experiences that form their points of view about themselves. Did your character save herself from a dangerous situation or did she meet someone who challenged her world view?

If you think about the home front posters of the Second World War, encouraging women to take up vital positions left by the men who had gone to battle, they would show a woman muscling up along with slogans like: ‘We can do it’. Women had to be encouraged to overcome centuries of social conditioning to step up to those roles. But once they did step into those roles, they learned they could. Then of course, in the 1950s, when men wanted those positions back, women were bombarded with messages that their place was firmly in the home.

Show your character’s mental strength and self-determination in the context of her life, her background and surroundings, and you will create a much more dynamic and layered character for your readers to enjoy.

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