I'd also like to point out that the perception that any story with a heroic female MC vs society must be "women triumphing over male oppressors" is related to the numbers issue.
interesting, my number wasn't 100%. care to give your interpretation of which stories employ the theme?
Actually, in the Fiery Horse thread, you said,
but there's one thing about podcastle that's beginning to bug me, all three stories have had a heavy theme of female empowerment
Later you revised that, saying that no, Come Lady Death hadn't had that theme. But consider your first reaction. At first blush, you classed all three stories together as "female empowerment" stories. Why?
Later, in this thread, you said,
speaking for myself, the problem is that five of those six (all but come lady death) center on a protagonist struggling against oppression, specifically male oppression
For Fear of Dragons does not feature a protagonist struggling against specifically male oppression. You could make the priesthood female and the society a matriarchy and not change the story in any fundamental way. You could make Jeanette a boy, and leave the priests male, and not change the story except for the need to find some sort of virginity test.
The protagonist of For Fear of Dragons is female because of the template she was working from--the maiden given to a dragon as payment/appeasement/sacrifice. Her gender is what it is because it's traditional, not because it's a story of female empowerment.
Now, Firey Horse is a bit trickier. But we have the words of the author--she'd heard about how the horoscopes of little girls affected their futures (or lack of it) in this particular society. She wondered about those little girls. She sat down and constructed a story out of the elements she found.
Now, in this case you can't change the genders quite as easily. Boys didn't get their feet bound in China. No one was worried if their son was a Fire Horse. You can't just change the protagonist to male and have the same story. It's clear that the gender of the protagonist is essential if the author wants to stay in China in that period and ponder Fire Horse girls.
Is the essential conflict of the story one of a woman triumphing over male oppression? Personally, I don't think so. It's part of a whole flock of "outsmarting the devil" stories, of which "The Devil and Daniel Webster" is one of the more famous. The antagonist isn't The Patriarchy, or Male Oppression, it's the demon/devil with which she makes the deal.
In fact, she receives a lot of assistance from her father. Her father has not oppressed her at all. He refused to expose her when she was born. That fact, and his character later, makes one wonder just how encouraging Tsi Cha had to be, to convince him not to bind her feet. It's her father who assists her in overcoming her adversary.
Yes, she's brave and smart and overcomes--but what she's overcoming isn't "male oppression" unless you assume that any heroine triumphing against a male adversary is "female empowerment."
And assuming that, as I see it, is part of that "numbers" illusion I was talking about earlier.
...the assumption is that a main char is going to be male, unless there's a specific reason to make them something else.
It's rarer to see male protagonists with those themes, but they do exist.
here's something worth talking about. how often do short story authors employ female main characters and why?
from the stories we've been hearing it's usually used as a quick way to create conflict. this isn't true in stories considered higher literature but in these stories it's noticeable.
Why do you assume that these stories choose female protagonists as a quick way to create conflict? I'm speaking here of the Podcastle stories.
For Fear of Dragons seems to me to have chosen a female protagonist out of convention. Fiery Horse, because it was the idea of all those baby girls who died during Fire Horse years that intrigued the author, according to the author's own testimony.
In neither case was there a desire to shorthand conflict. And in any event, just putting a female character in the lead does not automatically create conflict. Not unless you assume that any female protagonist must of neccesity be strugging against The Patriarchy. Which I find an odd assumption.
I don't know the numbers of female main chars in fantasy. I do know that as a writer, I choose the genders of characters because they seem right to me, for whatever reason. Sometimes I pick a female lead just because all those years when I was a kid reading fantasy and sf I wished I had a few more stories with female leads. Sometimes I pick whichever gender would be conventional, because frankly it's easier and I had other things I wanted to play with. Once, pondering a type of story that would normally have a female lead, I put a male lead in. The results were very interesting, to me at any rate.
Not once have I chosen the gender of a main character because it would shortcut creating conflict with male oppression. And none of the writers I've spoken to have, either. This includes writers I talk to who I know are explicitly feminist or political in their writing.