: Re: How to write female characters with agency? I'm attempting to write a novel, an historical fiction with a small fantasy component (time travel through a portal). The travelers (main characters)

@Angie602

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Before deciding on how to make your female character think (and/or act) like a real female (as opposed to "a dude writing a chick"), in your specific story you'd have to answer these questions first:

Do your characters have anything (devices, knowledge, weapons, any other thing) from the 23rd century... or just themselves?
Are your two characters reasonable - will they try to fit in the world, or to fight it - that is, to behave according to their 23st century habits, at the cost of going against the customs of the entire society?
In a situation such as that, a wiser decision would be to follow local customs (even if the protagonist's private opinion is different) at least until they acquire some power and independence, otherwise, constant clashes with the society could take all their time and energy.
Will your characters try to introduce any of their 23rd century knowledge - medicine, chemistry, something? There's any number of SF books with this topic, and you can read them and decide how you want your story to go.

What I'm aiming at is, it is much easier for a woman at that time to behave like a 23rd century one... if she has wealth and power. If she is capable of making good gunpowder, for example, thus making herself extremely useful to one ruler or another. Or medicine (saves the king's child, and becomes his personal doctor), or whatever.

If she has no skills applicable and marketable in the day and age in which she finds herself... now that's going to be troublesome, and she'd better not further worsen her situation.

This, you see, is the main problem: what if someone is transported back in time... and that someone's skills are not applicable? Computer programmer, for example? Social worker? TV repair technician?
Skills that either require a full stack of other industry (with skills that specific person doesn't have), or skills that are only applicable in a very rich and much more humane society.

On one extreme end, if the male in the story is incapacitated (sick, dead, wounded...), and the female doesn't have any marketable skills, she could even be forced into... less-than-virtuous means of earning money.
In that situation, any talk about equality etc is just so much BS.

So, what I'm saying is, decide on their story first, decide on their situation.
Then you will know how much leeway she has (or doesn't have).
Only then you can decide how she will accept it, and then how to write her.

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