This is a good question. I don't think people need to stop writing "first girl or woman in a male-dominated field" stories, but I do think the popularity of that trope brings some problems with it. For one thing, the emphasis on "first girls" contributes to the minimization of the problems that women/girls face when working in male-dominated fields after the "first girl" seal has already been broken. The first commenter hit the nail on the head with the boys' club remark. Also, I think some subcultures, including some parts of fandom and of the fantasy genre, are unfairly dismissive of women/girls who aren't in male-dominated fields. I'm now in grad school as a biologist in the age of "Wow, for all the talk of girls being bad at science, I can't but notice that it's totally normal for biology programs to be between 40 and 60 % female these days-- I guess biology must not be a REAL SCIENCE for REAL SMART PEOPLE like chemistry and geology, since it's so easy that girls can do it."
Plus, it kind of bugs me that "First Girl Ever" is assumed to refer to the first girl/woman/female person to do something that boys/men have been doing since time immemorial. I'd like to see more stories that cast a female character as the First Person Ever to do X. I'm reminded of an irritating fan fiction trend I noticed a while back: The canon has some organization or skill or title or activity that is important, and both male and female characters join/learn/earn/inherit/practice it. Nothing in canon indicates that women have ever been forbidden to do this or been widely considered incapable of doing this. So a fan writer comes along and decides to tell the story of the First Female X in Fantasylandia's history, and the story is mostly about how men have already been X for many generations, and the First Female X's biggest challenge is breaking into this long-established all-male tradition and proving that she can be just as good an X as any man despite her girl cooties. But for all we can tell from canon, the First Female X might well have been the First X- period. The organization/school/practice could have been founded by equal numbers of women and men. The activity might even have been viewed as "women's work" for a couple of centuries before the First Male X learned how from his mother and continued to practice despite tons of peer pressure from other men. In principle, there's nothing wrong with writing about the first girl to play on the boys' team, but in practice, the relative popularity of that versus some of the alternatives appears to go hand in hand with the idea that if something is worth doing, it must be founded by and primarily practiced by men.
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Date: 2012-09-15 10:14 pm (UTC)Plus, it kind of bugs me that "First Girl Ever" is assumed to refer to the first girl/woman/female person to do something that boys/men have been doing since time immemorial. I'd like to see more stories that cast a female character as the First Person Ever to do X. I'm reminded of an irritating fan fiction trend I noticed a while back: The canon has some organization or skill or title or activity that is important, and both male and female characters join/learn/earn/inherit/practice it. Nothing in canon indicates that women have ever been forbidden to do this or been widely considered incapable of doing this. So a fan writer comes along and decides to tell the story of the First Female X in Fantasylandia's history, and the story is mostly about how men have already been X for many generations, and the First Female X's biggest challenge is breaking into this long-established all-male tradition and proving that she can be just as good an X as any man despite her girl cooties. But for all we can tell from canon, the First Female X might well have been the First X- period. The organization/school/practice could have been founded by equal numbers of women and men. The activity might even have been viewed as "women's work" for a couple of centuries before the First Male X learned how from his mother and continued to practice despite tons of peer pressure from other men. In principle, there's nothing wrong with writing about the first girl to play on the boys' team, but in practice, the relative popularity of that versus some of the alternatives appears to go hand in hand with the idea that if something is worth doing, it must be founded by and primarily practiced by men.