Strength

I'm a writer. Mainly fiction/fantasy. I grew up with High Fantasy, elves and dwarves, etc., but I really like dark modern fantasy. Anyway, I have recently discovered about myself that I write not just to tell a good story (which is what I thought), but also for a "moral" purpose. Which kind of annoys me, because I always hated books that had obvious moral purposes.

But anyway, one of my big "things", my main morals I write about, of course, is gender.

A friend of mine told me about a series she was writing, the Emperor series. She told me, with a note of pride in her voice, that she had gotten an entire group of people (the writer's group who was reading/critiquing it) to see a female face when reading the word Emperor. Her mission (one of them) is to turn masculine-oriented words like prophet, priest, emperor, etc. into gender-unbiased words, and to get rid of words like prophetess, priestess and empress.

Something I have observed and my thoughts:
Women are often portrayed as weaker-minded than men. Ophelia goes mad, but Hamlet only pretends to. I watched two instances of older couples and driving and saw indications of how we as a culture view women's minds. The first: the woman picked the man up, but got into the passenger seat so he could drive her home. The second: two older men in the front seat, two older women in the back seat. They stopped at a house, the passenger side couple got out, and the driver side older woman stayed where she was, and the man drove her home. Both instances, the impression I got was that weaker-minded women couldn't drive as they got older, because their minds would become too weak for such a complicated procedure.
My thoughts: Women are susceptible to greater weaknesses than men are, because of their greater inherent strength. Men have bodily strength, and they can lose that as they get older. Women have other strengths, less noticeable and more subtle, granted, but I think that makes them greater, deeper, more. And they can lose that strength.