A Good Day

[jducoeur]

So the Important business in court today was the Knighting of Ankara, making her the first female Knight of the East. This was expected by more or less everyone except her, I believe, but that took nothing away from the moment. The ceremony was very powerful, and magnified by both Gavin and El giving long and moving speeches about how long they've waited for this day.

The Cool business of the day, OTOH, completely sideswiped me -- they gave msmemory an Augmentation of Arms, IMO the second-highest prestige award in the Kingdom. Truly faboo, and I had no idea it was coming. (Although it's eminently well-deserved, and I was planning on quietly suggesting it later in the reign...)

Comments

[keshwyn]

Oh wow! Vivat to your lady, and also to the Lady Knight as well.

Cool. :)

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

making her the first female Knight of the East

*boggle!*

I didn't realize that this hadn't ever happened before. Hell, I didn't realize that we didn't have female knights during *my* SCA tenure!

they gave msmemory an Augmentation of Arms, IMO the second-highest prestige award in the Kingdom

Congrats to her! It sounds well-deserved.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

The problem is that not very many women fight - certainly well under 5% of the fighters are women, I would estimate. In the years I've fought, I've only known six women who did it seriously:

Ianthe: she stopped before she got any good, really.
Morgan Elandris: I'd have knighted her if I could have gotten 50% of the chivalry to agree. However, her attitude that one should target groins if you thought someone wasn't taking shots, plus her expertise being strictly melee fighting, doomed her.
Rowain: Aethelmarc went off and became a kingdom and knighted her before we could. I think we'd have knighted her eventually.
Bearengaria: I don't know what happened to her. She lifted in the southern part of the kingdom, and looked to be on track, but then I just stopped seeing her.
Shiro: again, does only melee. She has the heart for it, and puts in the time, but we generally require knights to also shine in tournament combat, which she hasn't.
Ankara: the one who made it. One hopes she won't be the last.

[cellio]

Bearengaria: I don't know what happened to her. She lifted in the southern part of the kingdom, and looked to be on track, but then I just stopped seeing her.

She's still playing (in AEthelmearc), but so far as I know has not fought in years.

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

Well, I stand (or really, sit) enlightened.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the analysis, Your Grace. Useful info.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

You might look also at Sichelgaita von Halstern, who is serving on the Queen's Guard.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

I think I've seen her fight at Pennsic. In general, I underrate all the von Halsterns, as their defensive style lends to lasting a long time, but hard to strike at other opponents.

I also didn't know exactly how to count Countess Margaret (sp?). She certainly fought while here, but didn't really become good at it until she moved to Ansteorra. I don't know if they knighted her or not.

It would be an interesting experiment to take an arbitrary batch of 10 Tygers Combattant, and see how many of them eventually got knighted. My guess is that it would be 1 or 2, and in that light, this group stands up pretty well - 2 eventually knighted, and 1 that controversially could have been.

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

The problem is that not very many women fight - certainly well under 5% of the fighters are women, I would estimate.

We had a long discussion at dinner about this with the folks we'd driven down with. A couple of them (Jean who got the Troubadour with the song, and his lady) are fairly new to the Society and had many questions about why this was such a big deal, why they called her Sir, why the other knights kept hitting her instead of hugging her, etc, and then the conversation turned to the whys and wherefores of women fighting.

Ivan's comment, which I think was most interesting, mirrored the 5% figure, but he added that the 5% number has seemed fairly static for as long as he's been doing this ... he knew about as many women who fought when he started fighting as he knows now, and they covered about the same range of dedication and abilities.

The one thing last thing I will note about Ankara's ceremony is that it did not have the feeling of one which was overdue. Rather, I think they recognized her at just the right time in her career. Sure this is a landmark in the East, but really every Knighting is important and dramatic (in some ways the other one they did at 12th night - Oskar? - was mores in that they quite literally brought him from his hospital bed to the site and returned him at the end of the day) and it is a disservice to Ankara to make more of a fuss over this than one would over any other Knighting. After all, she's just another Knight, right. :-)

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

Well, one thing to note is that the disparity in numbers is not enough to explain the lack on its own. If something between 1-5% of the fighting population were women, I'd expect that to mean between 1-5% of the chivalry would be too, for that cause.

And yet, we see the numbers as being lower than that, and so something else must also be going on. There are lots of possibilities - it might be that the extra musculature on guys lends a real advantage; or that our techniques of teaching are geared towards men; or even that women are not so foolish as to be defined by one activity only, and so have a larger spread of interests. And of course, it may just be that as much as we hate it, we're collectively prisoners of our culture, and for all our desire of equality in all things, still pigeon-hole people into roles when given any sort of opportunity.

After all, she's just another Knight, right. :-)

Well, true; but we find reasons to make all the knightings special, and to fuss over all of them. I was at Tomaltack's knighting recently, and lots of people made a big deal over how old he is. I think there's two competing things going on: on the one hand, one wants to be counted as a member of the group, which tends to emphasize why we are the same as the knights who have come before us; but one also wants to distinguish oneself as a worthy member of the Order, which is why people often grab onto the exceptional bits.