Guest Post- Strong Female Characters in Fiction May Lead the Way in Real Life

Today we pleased to have a guest post courtesy of Phyllis Zimbler Miller, co-author of Lt. Commander Mollie Sanders. More about Phyllis and her work at the end of the post.

Strong Female Characters in Fiction May Lead the Way in Real Life

In the mid-1970s I taught a newswriting course at Temple University Center City (Philadelphia). In that long-ago time women were not portrayed very positively even in news stories. In fact, I had quite a collection of news clippings of negative portrayals of women, including condescending descriptions of women in front-page stories of The Wall Street Journal.

Being an early feminist, I wanted my newswriting course students to learn to portray women in an equal light to the way men were portrayed in news articles. What this turned out to entail was first disabusing both the male and female students of negative stereotypes of women.

From that time on I have felt strongly that the way in which women are portrayed in the media has a strong impact on how both men and women perceive women.

Thus it was natural that, when my husband Mitch and I started writing screenplays together, we always had a strong female (and often an accompanying strong male) as the protagonist.

In the years since those newswriting courses, women have gotten more and more opportunities in the U.S. military. But when Mitch and I first wrote the screenplay “Lt. Commander Mollie Sanders,” women were not allowed to serve on subs, and we wanted to explore a story about a woman who forced her way onto serving on a sub.

We liked the character of Lt. Commander Mollie Sanders so much that we then wrote a prequel screenplay, “A Needle in a Haystack.” And when neither screenplay got produced, I decided to combine the two screenplays into the technothriller ebook “Lt. Commander Mollie Sanders.”

Of course, we did a great deal of research about submarines. We were helped in this research because Mitch is a member of the U.S. Naval Institute, which produces the monthly print magazine Proceedings.

Also, I’m now a member of the Department of Defense’s Bloggers Roundtable. Because I heard firsthand the interview about how women will soon be serving on U.S. subs, I know that the first women will be assigned in groups of three to a bigger sub than the one on which our protagonist serves.

While the technical aspects of our ebook are as accurate as we could make them, we also feel that the portrayal of how the first woman on a sub might be treated is realistic. Part of that realistic portrayal requires an exceptional woman who has had to continually fight her way in a man’s world to get where she is. Getting to serve on a sub is just one more obstacle she is determined to overcome.

Perhaps 10 years from now women serving on U.S. submarines will be commonplace. But for now this is still uncharted waters. And for what it’s worth, Mitch and I think our fictional character may help pave the way for the real women who will be serving on submarines.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the co-founder of the marketing consulting company Miller Mosaic, LLC. “Lt. Commander Mollie Sanders” is available on Smashwords at http://budurl.com/MollieSandersebooks and the first chapter of the technothriller ebook may be read at www.MollieSanders.com