Mid-year reflection

The books and plays we've read this year have been quite different, but they've all shared one thing in common: their treatment of female characters.

The books I read as a child were mostly modern children's fiction. As such, they were divided fairly equally between male and female protagonists. It didn't matter if the main character was a boy or a girl, or both, for books with multiple protagonists. They were equally as capable of overcoming any obstacles placed between them and their goals, no matter how insurmountable they seemed. 

I suppose I took that for granted.

All the books we read this semester, excluding the book club one, have had male protagonists, with women being reduced to side characters and love interests, without any of their own goals, dreams, or even interests outside of their relation to a male character. This surprised me, but in hindsight it shouldn't have been surprising at all. For most of history, women have been devalued, looked at as solely their husband or father's property, so it's not surprising that women are only relevant in relation to them.

To be clear, female characters having little characterization outside of "love interests" is a problem that still exists today. I'm reminded of Strawberry Fields Once Again, a manga series about a girl named Pure who goes back in time to find her fiancee, Akira.

...And that's pretty much all we know about her.

We get detailed information on Akira's backstory and how it made her the person she is today, but we don't get any of that about Pure, besides her mentioning that she lived overseas before returning to Japan. Sure, Akira's backstory might be more relevant, but the lack of any meaningful information about Pure that isn't related to Akira in some way is dissatisfying.

However, this case differs from the others. In this series, female characters do have the power to make choices for themselves and change their own fate, something absent from everything we've read so far this year. In this case, it's not that female characters are devalued, but that the author focused more on the relationship between characters rather than the characters themselves.

I knew beforehand that women didn't always have the same rights as men. I heard about the people who had to fight to get where we are today. But those were just vague hypotheticals, seeming divorced from the reality I knew. It was only after reading everything I have this year that I finally realized what it must have been like. To have your importance based solely off someone else, with no power of your own, something I can only imagine today.

I may have taken the children's books I read for granted, but I shouldn't have. The fight for equality may seem distant to us, but it's important that we not forget it, so that we are never again reduced to side characters in the story of history. This is the lesson I've taken away from the books and plays we've read in class.