Society/Culture of Alethkar - The Way of Kings

Map from http://stormlightarchive.wikia.com/wiki/Roshar

In both real and fictional worlds there are generally at least some sort of divide between the sexes, Alethkar really takes it to the extreme. Which in turn makes it a very interesting country to look at. It is pretty much the furthest east you can go on the continent, which as far as I can tell is a lot like Pangea, the super continent. Outside of the Unclaimed Hills and the Shattered Plains, there is nothing further east which means Alethkar gets most of the brunt of the highstorms. Now to the main topic of the post.

Now I am going to let you know where I am in the book, beginning of Chapter 54. So as of this point, assuming Dalinar's visions are true (which I am sure they are), we know that the Knights Radiant had women in their ranks and that really surprised Dalinar. So in the distant past there did not appear to be such a severe divide between men and women. Or at least they made an exception. In the present however, things are very much different.

Picture of Shallan by Johanna Rupprecht

Now the most noticeable difference will be clothing, generally you do not find many women wearing pants. Which is not that surprising, the whole dress or long skirt fashion being worn by every woman around you is a pretty good indicator of some things. The MOST interesting thing about their fashion however is the idea of a safehand. The safehand is their left hand and it is covered by a long sleeve or if you are going to be a little risque a glove would work. In their safehand sleeve there is a pouch, which is very private. And to look at a woman's safehand pouch, it is almost synonymous with strip searching her. And as you can imagine, prostitutes and the such do not have their safehand covered. This essentially has the same effect when women's fashion used to be conservative and when someone wore something significantly less so it made it very alluring in some sense. When out in public or having a nice little gathering at home, it would be very important for the woman to wear her hair up. And again, the more risque of the females would wear it either semi-up or even just not care and wear it down to the amazement of those around them.

And to even take this divide even further, the foods they ear are very different. The women typically eat the sweeter and more delicate foods. The men on the other hand eat more spicy heartier foods. If you were a man it would be social suicide to be caught eating sweetbread and jam. The only exceptions are the male ardents, they are allowed to eat the food that women eat. And in one of the interludes there is a man whose calling has to do with chemistry, and he decided to use cooking as a way of achieving it and he makes sweeter foods to taste.

The women partake in reading and writing, while the men only learn to decipher glyphs. It is seen as very strange for a man to want to read let alone learn how to. So all of the history books are written by women who are writing down what some man is saying. The very interesting thing about this however, is that it gives the woman who is scribing the leeway to make notations at the bottoms of pages to interject her own opinions or to clarify something. And scholars who delve into the history books as you can imagine are mostly women. However, not all scholars are those who read history, there are those who do more in the field research and have female assistants to write down what they found. Speaking of which, there are even some scholarly pursuits that are scene as more feminine than others.

Now this is just a basic broad overview of the society that is Alethkar, mainly because to do more indepth would require a significantly longer blog post that I am sure no one else would want to read. It is amazing how different the culture is between the different countries across the whole continent.