You’ve come a long way, baby! I mean … um … ladies.

Women have made a lot of progress over the past century, particularly in the Western world.  Western readers in the 21st Century have a low tolerance for the sort of overt sexism that readers of previous eras — and in broad stretches of the map even today — would simply take for granted.  This puts a lot of pressure on writers of historical fiction and fantasy set in a fictional past.  How can we tell a story with female characters which won’t offend (or worse, bore) modern readers, but which also doesn’t seem hokey in its chronological context?

Well, there are at least four approaches to this dilemma…
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