If you are a regular reader of women’s fiction, you’ve probably heard the phrase “strong female character” thrown around with increasing frequency these days. Many of us are in favor of reading books that feature strong female leads, but most bookstore or library patrons don’t stop to consider what it actually means to be a “strong woman” within a story or elsewhere. Once we begin to examine this phrasing, it becomes apparent that as a society, our collective modern-day definition of a “strong woman” has evolved over time and is currently very different from what it once was.
There have long been multiple definitions of “strength.” For starters, we must acknowledge the fact that strength can refer to superior physical prowess or to a hearty metaphorical backbone, meaning how someone behaves. Let’s start with the easy one: physical strength. Back in the day, (think Victorian times or even earlier), a woman could be considered strong for obvious reasons, like being able to carry multiple heavy buckets of water uphill from the well or heave large piles of laundered clothing along with herself while climbing a ladder up from a cellar. These domestic skills, as well as capability with tasks like sewing, laundering, cooking, and cleaning, were the ones that led a woman to be respected. Even better was if the woman had a body strong enough to birth multiple healthy children, providing her husband with offspring to help work the land or heirs to carry on the family legacy. These were the accomplishments that society applauded, and so a woman who could achieve them with ease was valued for her strength. Today, many women are still engaged in physical labor that requires great strength, but the activities which society values have changed. Now, if asked about females with physical strength, many people would look to professional athletes as the pinnacles of success. Where a useful and industrious homemaker would once have been considered a great asset, domestic work is less valued today than it was in centuries past. With more women working outside the home, new metrics are being used to evaluate female strength.
Long ago, a woman was admired if she had moral virtue, religious piety, modesty, and a strong work ethic. Most of all, self-sacrifice was the utmost commendable trait. Women were believed to be the moral touchstones and influencers for their families. Thanks to restrictive gender roles and pre-set expectations, there wasn’t much a woman could do to impact those around herself in ways that would be considered positive, other than keeping a tidy home, instructing her children in manners, and performing other wifely duties with grace and skill.
Luckily, there were women who broke the mold, even during those restrictive eras long ago, and acted in ways that those of us with more modern sensibilities would consider to be deserving of the highest praise. We are all aware that women are conspicuously absent from the historical record. It’s not because they weren’t participating in the major events of their day. They just had to do it behind closed doors. Becoming involved in matters outside the domestic sphere required a level of creativity and bravery well beyond what most of us can imagine.
One woman who challenged her times by participating in activist activities in the form of abolitionist endeavors, is Ann Phillips, who was an American hero born in the early 1800s. Physically, Ann was the opposite of strong. She suffered from a mysterious illness that was never diagnosed and which left her bedridden for days at a time. It is widely conjectured now that the condition she had was rheumatoid arthritis, but that autoimmune condition had not yet been discovered during Ann’s day. Because of her symptoms, poor Ann was often prevented from leaving her house for weeks on end. Even so, she managed to find ways to continue spreading the abolitionist message. Whether by writing speeches for her husband, the great orator Wendell Phillips, to deliver in public or by sending letters that helped create and solidify clandestine abolitionist plans, Ann did not give up. She was a pinnacle of what people in modern times would consider a “strong woman.”
Now, in 2023, the definition of “strength” continues to evolve. We live in time where women no longer aspire to beauty and domestic bliss as the be-all-end-all. Women aspire to this amorphous concept of strength, which is now associated with resilience, empathy, vulnerability (all of which were qualities that Ann displayed in spades during the antebellum era). A person need only scroll through a social media site to see mothers wishing daughters happy birthday with messages like: “to my strong, resilient, brave, empathetic daughter.” This is vastly different from the wishes sent to women in greeting cards of generations past, that read: “to my beautiful daughter,” or “to the prettiest girl in town.” Similarly, when “influencers” first appeared on social media, advertisers tried to show us all the beautiful people as a way to convince us to buy whatever they were selling. Now, the advertisers have wised up, and they are showing us “real” people instead, people who look like us, women who aren’t wearing makeup, or who didn’t have time for a salon blowout before the photo shoot. We are moving away from images of perfection toward a more realistic approach because society has come to appreciate that a woman cannot be strong without being her authentic self.
A strong woman seeks happiness actively. She challenges herself and those around her. Strength is no longer about heavy lifting or individual achievement so much as it is about collective empowerment. No longer is a strong woman the one who can make the floor shine brightest with her mop. It is the women who engage, create, resist, persist, and who lift the rest of us up along with them who are ultimately the strongest women of all.
Jacqueline Friedland is the USA Today best-selling and multi-award-winning author of He Gets That From Me, That's Not a Thing, and Trouble the Water. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and NYU Law School, she practiced briefly as a commercial litigator in Manhattan and taught Legal Writing and Lawyering Skills at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law. She returned to school after not too long in the legal world, earning her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Jacqueline regularly reviews fiction for trade publications and appears as a guest lecturer. When not writing, she loves to exercise, watch movies with her family, listen to music, make lists, and dream about exotic vacations. She lives in Westchester, New York, with her husband, four children, and two very lovable dogs.