LogFAQs > #908133337

Zeus posted...

Because geeks were sexist? =p Granted, the LOTR books came out *after* Wonder Woman was a thing so the idea that women can kick ass shouldn't have been wholly alien to his readers.

The only geeks that existed in the 1940s were the ones biting heads off chickens in circuses.

And it's more like "because everyone was sexist", at least when judged by today's standards. That's the problem with trying to judge people in the past - we have a bad tendency to use modern morality to weigh their actions and beliefs, which can make even people who were the most progressive people of their era seem like terrible bigots (like when people get pissy about Mark Twain naming a character N***** Jim, in spite of the fact that Twain was a huge abolitionist and repeatedly complained about how blacks, Asians, and Native Americans were treated in the US, called bullshit on how whites tended to exploit the hell out of "savages" around the world, and was one of the stronger advocates for women's suffrage in the era - but Tumblrites today would probably just bitch about how "problematic" he was).

But it's definitely worth remembering that, when Wonder Woman first debuted, she was mostly just an excuse for her creator to indulge in his bondage fetish and boast about his contributions to creating the polygraph. She stood out precisely BECAUSE she was an anomaly in what people expected a woman's role to actually be (and the appeal of Amazons in general throughout history has always been that there's something WRONG with them for eschewing traditional female roles in favor of acting like men). And that, in most of the Justice Society stories of the era, she wasn't actually allowed to go on missions with the male members most of the time. In fact, they explicitly recruit her in the first place to be their secretary. She definitely wasn't presented as anything even remotely resembling an equal of her male counterparts.

The idea that Wonder Woman was some sort of feminist icon was very much the PR fiction of later eras, not really true at the time. As was the idea that she somehow forms the third corner of a mythical DC "trinity" with Superman and Batman (and the fact that she was shoehorned into that role is why she's always felt a bit out of place there).

There WAS at least some positive movement towards the idea that women could potentially do the same sort of things men do because of WWII and the Rosie the Riveter sort of situations, but that faded a LOT post-war, and the 50s were definitely a return to more traditional assumptions. It wasn't really until the 60s and 70s that the pendulum sort of swung back again.

When Tolkien wrote the books, it was the 1930s, in conservative England, and he was an older man who had a lot of his attitudes formed when he was a younger man in the WWI years. It's part of why, as modern readers occasionally complain about, 99.8% of all characters in LotR are male (and why the bad guys are "from the East", and why there are racist undertones in the work, and blahblahblahTumblr).

Ironically, Tolkien probably saw the likelihood of a female warrior being more of an obvious thing than his original readers would have, considering he was drawing on a lot of prior Norse/Germanic myth when writing, and shieldmaidens WERE a thing in those stories (but even there, half the time a shieldmaiden only showed up so a male hero could rescue her, or so that she could die horribly and provide an unsubtle moral that women should stick to their roles).


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