They aren’t proving a point about what women could, should, or can do they are ignoring that whole question (which none of them considers a question worth asking at all) and getting on with doing the things that interest them most.” None of these women takes any guff from anyone. My real-life family and friends are full of women like Cimorene, from my twin cousins, who have been fur trappers in the Alaskan bush for most of their lives, to my mother, who became an engineer long before women’s liberation officially opened “nontraditional careers” to women, to my grandmothers, aunts, and cousins, who were office managers, farmers, nurses, nuns, geologists, and bookkeepers, among other things. I find their surprise hard to understand. Explaining this occasionally confounds people who think that I wrote Cimorene as some sort of feminist statement about what women can achieve. “From what I’d written in “The Improper Princess” and from the history I’d given in Talking to Dragons, I already knew the general outline of her adventures, which, again, required someone smart, practical, and sure of herself.
“Well, I fence,” Cimorene said with the air of one delivering an unshakable argument.
He had been bracing himself for a storm of tears, which was the way his other daughters reacted to reprimands. “Yes, of course you are, my dear,” said her father with relief. “Fencing is not proper behavior for a princess,” he told her in the gentle-but-firm tone recommended by the court philosopher.Ĭimorene tilted her head to one side. When she was twelve, her father found out. Consequently, the fencing lessons became more and more frequent. As she got older, she found her regular lessons more and more boring.
When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she would go down to the castle armory and bully the armsmaster into giving her a fencing lesson. (.)Ĭimorene found it all very dull, but she pressed her lips together and learned it anyway. There was a great deal of etiquette, from the proper way to curtsy before a visiting prince to how loudly it was permissible to scream when being carried off by a giant. They hired the most superior tutors and governesses to teach Cimorene all the things a princess ought to know- dancing, embroidery, drawing, and etiquette. “The King and Queen did the best they could.
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