Home » Strong Female Authors and Characters: They Can’t Ban Us All!

Strong Female Authors and Characters: They Can’t Ban Us All!

September 1, 2024 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

By Martha Engber

If you follow my blog (MarthaEngber.com), you’ll know that when the Utah State Board of Education in the United States banned 13 books from all public schools (New York Times, Aug 6, 2024), I checked the list of books. All but one were written by strong female authors, and all involve strong female characters.

The list includes five by fantasy writer Sarah J. Maas, “Forever” by Judy Blume and “Oryx and Crake” by Margaret Atwood. The only book penned by a male author, Craig Thompson, is an autobiographical graphic novel about his youth in an evangelical Christian family.

The Utah BOE banned the books to comply with a new state law that gives local education agencies — instead of schools and their librarians — the right to decide which books get shelved based on prioritizing the protection of “children from the harmful effects of illicit pornography over other considerations.”

The fact such a religiously conservative state is the first to elevate book banning to a statewide level doesn’t surprise me. Nor would I be surprised to learn that those responsible for the ban didn’t read the books.

But I didn’t expect the fury I felt at the clear targeting of female literature. Specifically, this question blared in my head: what is so threatening about books by and for strong women and girls?

Despite their Midwestern, conservative natures, my mom and dad reared my two sisters and I to believe we deserved the same opportunities as men. That includes the right to have female heroes.

Reading Nancy Drew books, I imagined myself as the clever teen who solved the mystery. Reading “Jane Eyre,” I felt indignant toward those who were cruel to the orphan, just as I cheered her cleverness and accomplishments. When listening to my mother recount how she and her female friends would imagine themselves as WW II war heroes willing to parachute behind enemy lines, I relished the gleam in her eyes that spoke of spirit and power.

But as I grew older, I began to notice how our culture favors male heroes in books and movies. I chafed at reading about or watching one nameless, cliched female character after another introduced only to be raped, murdered or kidnapped, thus providing the male hero with the determination necessary to succeed against the bad guy.

When I also began noticing how society discouraged me from talking about intimate issues related to being female — menstruation, sex, ambition, depression, isolation, inequality — I started reading groundbreaking books by women who addressed those subjects: “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker, “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood.

When the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution failed in the 1970s, a change that would have guaranteed legal gender equality for women and men, largely based on the efforts of Phyllis Schlafly, right-wing leader of the STOP ERA movement, the message was clear: some women are/were willing to work with men to slow the advancement of females at every level, including literature.

For those reasons, when I began writing books, I wrote what I would have wanted to read as a kid: stories about females kicking ass and taking names. Females who suffer trauma; get embarrassed and humiliated; have burning desires; curse when they get upset; discover beautiful things about themselves. Most importantly, they’re girls and females who have the guts to push through every obstacle, face their worst fears, and slay them.

In “Winter Light” I write about 15-year-old Mary Donahue of suburban Chicago, a burnout on the cusp of failure during the blizzard winter of 1978-79. Yes, Mary has sex with her boyfriend, swears as a first language and goes toe-to-toe with overbearing males. But the focus is on how she overcomes the hundreds of unseen obstacles placed on kids — and girls in particular — who come from impoverished, highly dysfunctional households rife with alcoholism and substance abuse. Her success is not some glorified Hollywood ending, but instead a narrow escape that comes at a long, slow-burning price. (The sequel, “Scattered Light,” will be published Nov. 2025, by Vine Leaves Press.)

In “The Falcon, the Wolf and the Hummingbird,” I write about Pino, a 19-year-old indigenous female warrior in precolonial southern Connecticut. Yes, Pino belongs to a people and era far from my own. But the story revolves around a woman like all of us, who at times in our lives have felt like outsiders in our own tribe, or isolated because we don’t feel we have the right to talk about the traumas that are killing us.

And in “Bliss Road,” I write about myself making the midlife discovery of how my dad’s undiagnosed Autism Spectrum Disorder derailed my happiness…and led me to bliss. The point is not to lay blame for what went wrong, but to show how I, and so may other women, hunt down the source of our angst to overcome it, and when we do, encourage others to do the same.

Considering how much female-centered books teach us about ourselves, and encourage us to prevail in the face of inner catastrophe, I can only hope that those aiming to label such stories as “pornographic” or amoral actually read the banned books and allow themselves to connect with their inner hero.