A couple of links kept here for my own reference, and your interest (if you're interested)

[capri0mni]

spiralsheep has been doing an ongoing series of posts about strong Asian Women in History. And a subset within that series has been focusing on Indian Statues of Queens Riding to Battle.

One of the things I've been noticing is that all these mounted warrior queens have been riding astride their horses, "like a man," and that got me wondering about the meme that's been nestled in my head for much of my life, that:

"In Ye Olden Times, women rode Sidesaddle. Period. Women riding astride their horses is a welcome, but relatively newfangled, thing that emerged along with women's jeans and pantsuits.

But, after seeing spiralsheep's pictures of mounted Asian women from the 1800s and earlier, often shown with much better "seats" and riding techniques than I've seen demonstrated in European statues of male knights on horseback, that got me wondering if the sidesaddle really was as universal and "normal" as I always thought it had been.

The Wikipedia article on the sidesaddle is certainly written as if it were universal and normal. But this picture made it clear to me just how unbalanced, and therefore uncomfortable (and probably unhealthy), riding sidesaddle was for the horse (considering all the health warnings doctors give us about the dangers for humans of carrying full backpacks lopsidely, off one shoulder, and how bad that is for our spines). And the article's implication that the sidesaddle plays an important role in therapeutic riding programs was eyebrow-raising for me, because, in my experience, most of the benefits of riding (for those with mental and physical disabilities), come from the symmetricallity and body movement that riding astride gives you.*

Then, at the bottom of the Wikipedia page was a link to this article: Sidesaddles and Suffragettes: the fight to ride and vote. And the author of that piece points out that yes, the sidesaddle was important to the Ancient Greeks, but the Ancient Greeks were terrified of women's power. According to her, sidesaddles didn't come into Western Europe until late in the fourteenth century. And yes, that's a long time ago, but it's a hell of a lot more recent than "Always." And the sidesaddle wasn't "normal" for women even in all of Europe, much less Asia and the Americas.

---

Further down in the discussion thread of that post, there's a brief discussion of whether Feminism is a White-women's Thing. And that prompted me to go searching for this:

Sojourner Truth's Ain't I a Woman? Speach (1851)

I'll keep the link here because it's a wonderful speach, and one that I'd like to come back and reread on a regular basis.

*(I haven't ridden in years -- since the school horse I rode at the therapeutic school here went lame with a parasitic infection, and they never got a replacement suitable for my needs -- and I miss it so much, I could cry, sometimes. Whenever I see a picture of horse and rider [including spiralsheep's postings] I click my tongue, in a horse-encouraging way as a Pavlovian response... Just saying.)

Comments

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

I'm sad to hear you can't find a ride.

The tongue click is, as you say, wholly ingrained as a method of interspecies communication. Also, in my case, breathing up horses' noses, heh, which also works on unbroken horses (unlike the tongue-click).

In the American West there were panel skirts that could be worn full or the panels rebuttoned to make a split-skirt. I'm not sure how modest the rebuttoning process was though.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Yeah. As I understand it, the puff of air in the nostrils is how horses greet each other, even in the wild. I think they asses the other's state from the smell, or something. So willingly offering your breath would kind of be like a human offering a handshake (as proof that we're not carrying a weapon).

The tongue-click is totally an inter-species pidgin, and needs code learning to work.