The History That Laid the Groundwork for Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing Series

On Tuesday, Rebecca Yarros released Onyx Storm, the highly anticipated third installment in the Fourth Wing series. The series blends together fantasy and romance, which means readers get to enjoy both steamy scenes and dragon riding. Set in a country called Navarre, it follows the freedom struggle of a group of students at the Basgiath War College, with themes of government control and imperialism—not to mention, again, all that steaminess. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

One of its other themes may be less obvious, but has a deep history: Yarros’ series builds on a cultural obsession with women riding powerful beasts, including horses and dragons, that emerged over the 20th century, especially in literature. Deeply linked with beauty-and-the-beast imagery, the success of the Fourth Wing series would’ve been unimaginable even a generation ago, but it developed out of a literary tradition that appealed to readers by offering up strong female protagonists who have deep emotional connections outside of traditional romantic relationships. These characters became a tool for feminists looking to portray women’s empowerment and flip gender relations on their heads—but, due in part to the idea’s past in American culture, did so often in ways that maintained white supremacy.

In 19th-century America, gender ideals held that women should, if they could afford to, ride sidesaddle (called riding aside, as opposed to astride) to protect first their hymens and then their reproductive capacity. Women could even be arrested for “disturbing the peace” while riding astride in places like New York City’s Central Park during the 1890s. One scandalized man wailed in 1899, “Riding astride is unwomanlike, to say nothing of its being unladylike.”

With the first wave of feminism burgeoning at the same time, however, women like Francis Willard and Susan B. Anthony began to challenge this cultural norm. They advocated for women to use horses and bicycles to gain both physical and social mobility. As manufacturers made bicycles cheaper and safer, women across racial, ethnic, socio-economic, and geographic lines were able to transport themselves to new work opportunities, participate in sporting events, and connect with other women through riding clubs. This sparked a national debate with doctors, riding-club officials, legislators, animal-welfare advocates, and society matrons voicing their opinions on women openly straddling bikes and horses in public. 

Read More: A Deep Dive Into Whether Targaryens Can Survive Dragon Fire

Notably, white suffragists often invoked how even women of color in colonized regions could ride astride, but they failed to build a multi-racial movement. Instead, in March 1913, riding astride became entrenched as a white feminist cause at the Women’s Suffrage Procession in Washington D.C. Inez Milholland, a lawyer and avid women’s rights organizer, famously bestrode a white horse named Gray Dawn and led the parade, including many other white women riding their horses in “man fashion.” Faced with a hostile crowd and ineffective police protection, many of the women even used their riding crops to beat back attackers.

By the 1920s, this push for normalizing women riding in “man fashion,” succeeded in upending the old norms. Women astride machine or beast were no longer perceived as “hoydenish creature[s],” with a “shocking lack of modesty” who desired to “ape masculine ways.” 

This change enabled a new fictional genre to develop: horse-girl fiction, which idealized stories about girls and their ponies. Enid Baghold’s 1935 National Velvet was one of the first bestsellers in the genre. Horse-girl stories often featured young female protagonists who overcame challenges, experienced emotional growth, and developed relationships through the trials and travails of horseback riding. Instead of providing a means to political agency, by midcentury, this genre depicted horses affording young white women — and in these stories, they were almost always white — a sense of freedom while also giving them the tools to understand their own blossoming femininity. The self-discipline, nurturance, and confidence required to build a trusting relationship with their equine partner gave them new physical and emotional strength and enabled them to embody the ideal of white womanhood: middle-class, self-controlled, and maternal. Importantly, pony stories were designed as juvenile fiction targeted at teenage white girls, with romantic relationships often operating as one of the challenges a heroine navigated — even as her relationship with her horse remained paramount.

As second-wave feminism reshaped the nation in the 1960s, a new science-fiction twist to steed-and-rider imagery raised the stakes of women’s bonds with beasts by seating them on dragons. To this point in American culture, dragons had been depicted as evil — something to be slayed — or as friends to young children. But a new genre of dragon-riding fiction reimagined human and dragon relationships to be much more reflective of the girl/horse relationships lionized by earlier generations. This time, however, the relationships were even better because dragons and riders were telepathically linked. 

Author Anne McCaffrey was pivotal to the development of the new genre. In 1967, she published her first short story “Weyr Search,”which later became the novel Dragonflight. Centered around a “not-like-other-girls” trauma survivor heroine and a stoically capable hero (free from trauma himself), the initial stories follow the struggles of the Dragonriders of Pern in their fight against a colonizing organism called “Thread.” Tired of science fiction stories in which women simply functioned as “props” to tell the heroes’ stories, McCaffrey ensured that women on Pern held crucial political roles because they rode the only dragons that could reproduce, golden queen dragons. 

Telepathically bonded as the dragons hatched from their eggs, the relationships formed between rider and mount were far deeper than any human romantic attachments, with riders and dragons often dying if they lost their partner. McCaffrey was an avid horse girl and romantic, and she envisioned the dragons in her stories as the ideal companions: “Everyone would love to own a dragon of Pern, for that touches on a universal wish to be understood, to be not alone.” 

Feminist writers, including McCaffrey, Ursula Le Guin, and Mercedes Lackey built worlds that seriously considered women’s daily troubles and political agency, often centering relationships beyond heterosexual marriage. And audiences were hungry for these stories. McCaffrey became the first woman to win the Hugo and Nebula Awards and one of the first science fiction authors to appear on the New York Times Bestseller List.

As caring companions and lethal protectors, McCaffrey’s dragons became “those by which all other dragons are measured” in the 1970s and 1980s. Film, fantasy art, and literature exploded with dragon babes, from Heavy Metal’s warrior Taarna to Afrofuturist Samuel Delany’s Neveryóna series. These characters exerted their newfound freedom from the sexual strictures of previous generations.

Read More: Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

By placing women on dragonback, and literally giving them firepower, authors and artists used dragons, like horses, to assert female political agency, physical strength, and emotional endurance, essentially providing women with a pathway to power that lay outside of male authority. At the same time, male protagonists in dragon-riding fiction by authors like Jane Yolen, Christopher Paolini, and Cressida Cowell often reflected traits like nurturance, kindness, and empathy long associated with women. Yet, despite the norm-challenging values embedded in these stories when it came to gender, dragon-babe fiction often continued to privilege white women in imperial settings who used their dragons to defeat stereotyped racial others. 

In many ways, the dragon-riding fiction boom ignited by McCaffrey’s Pern culminated when HBO’s adaptation of Game of Thrones became a runaway hit in the 2010s. The Mother of Dragons herself, Daenerys Targaryen, embodies the cultural fear of and fascination with a petite, white female wielding her dragons—not a husband or son—to build a seemingly socially just army that will brutally conquer in her name. 

In today’s feminist landscape, dragon riding fiction continues to resonate. For many, the thrill of these stories, especially in the romance genre, is that heroines no longer derive power directly from their relationships with men and in turn they are not seen as subordinate to hero’s goals. In Yarros’ Fourth Wing series, rebellion leader and crown prince Xander Riorson seats Violet Sorrengale on his throne and makes sure she knows, quite literally, that her pleasure comes before any of his own political or personal priorities. For many cis-gender, heterosexual women who grew up reading pony stories, Tolkien fantasy, or 1980s bodice rippers, this scene is also indicative of a fundamental cultural shift that centralizes women’s autonomy. Violet’s relationship with her dragons imbues her with far more literal power, including lightning, than does her relationship with any love interest.

Over the 20th century, riding astride transformed into a significant cultural symbol for feminists because bonds with horses and dragons became alternative routes for women to gain political power and personal agency. As horse-girl fiction expanded into dragon-riding fiction over the past half century, this new interpretation of a steed and rider has continued to influence beauty-and-the-beast stories. Readers would do well to remember that while the genre has in the past had room to improve with regard to inclusivity, without a century and a half of women fighting to ride beasts astride—in both the real and imagined worlds—we’d all be dreaming of riding our dragons sidesaddle like so-called proper ladies.

Rebecca Scofield is an associate professor of American History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Idaho. She is the author of Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West and co-author of Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo. She is currently writing a cultural history of women riding astride called Astride the Beast: Women Riding Horses, Dragons, and Everything In-Between. 

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.