Dorne was at war, on and off, with the Storm Kingdom and the Kingdom of the Reach, from almost the moment it was founded until Aegon's invasion, a period of about one thousand years. It was also isolated by geography (mountains and seas) from the rest of the Seven Kingdoms, as well as culture. Antagonistic nations can exist right next to one another without sharing cultural norms, as can be seen in real life and history, let alone in numerous other fantasy works (WoT rather unrealistically has cultural tics screeching to a halt at the border of one country and new ones starting just past it even though the countries have been at peace for decades or centuries, with little of the blendings you see in real life, say along the French-German border).



The ironborn culture favours reaving above just about everything else, which was not the case with the Vikings (who spent a lot more time running households and working the land). The ironborn attitudes to reaving seem to have spilled over to holding all of those who do not fight, including their own women (but also land-workers, thralls, merchants, foreign priests etc), in disfavour. Note that these attitudes are not universal (the Reader of Harlaw doesn't share these attitudes) and even Asha's activities are tolerated to a fairly large degree.

It does occur to me during this discussion that actually the most equal societies we've seen in Westeros - apart from the Dornish - are actually the wildlings and the mountain clans (where women can fight, lead tribes and wield authority without any major issues), which is interesting.



Fair criticism. The Seven are not dominated by male figures (three male and three female, with the Stranger being sometimes regarded as male but also as a sort of sexless force of nature) in the same way Christianity was/is (God being represented as male, Jesus being male, the apostles being male etc). The Faith should probably be more equal, more like the religion in Kate Elliott's CROWN OF STARS series.

The maesters are also an anomaly. In real medieval life, women often ran the castles and households whilst their husbands were away, and required knowledge of accounts, ledgers and the ordering of the castle and lands. There are indications this is the same in Westeros (Catelyn neglects such matters after Bran is injured, leaving Robb to sort them out), so women would have to learn a lot from the maesters. Even if we accept that the maesters want to handle such matters themselves as part of their conspiracy to hold back information for their own purposes, there is no explanation for how this precludes women being part of that conspiracy.

At the same time, we don't have much worldbuilding background on either the septons or maesters in Westeros, so the picture is incomplete.



True. I think there is an argument that Martin has used the iconography and imagery of the medieval period without also necessarily replicating the background that led to those things being the case. The only major historical element I can think of in Westeros that might have caused women to be viewed with suspicion was if they were blamed for the civil wars (Naerys for the Blackfyre Rebellion and Rhaenyra for the Dance of Dragons), but even that is a bit of a stretch.



As I said earlier, many of the female characters in Martin do have agency and quite a few of the cultures are reasonably equal (the Valyrians/Volantenes, the wildlings, the Dornish etc), however, so the criticism is a little over-wrought. Bakker is a fair comment, as is Goodkind (who does have a couple of major female characters, but they exist and are defined solely by their relationship with the male characters).