Safehand

Safehand is an Alethi term for a woman's left hand. According to Vorin cultural tradition, it's obscene for a woman to leave her safehand uncovered. Upper class (i.e., lighteyed) women adhere to this tradition by wearing a sleeve that covers their left hand loosely. Often the sleeve has a safepouch sewn on its inside for women to store personal objects there. It is considered extremely rude to open another woman's safepouch.
Further, for an Alethi woman to rest her clothed safehand on a man's shoulder is a gesture reserved only for family.
Lower class women wear a glove so they can use both hands freely, as do Thaylen women, and prostitutes provocatively wear no covering at all on their safehand.
The right hand is generally referred to as the freehand. Lighteyed women are very proficient at working with just their freehand.
==Notes==
In an interview, Brandon stated that the tradition derives in part from " ... a famous book written by an artist who claimed that true feminine pursuits and arts were those that could be performed with one hand, while masculine arts were those performed with two hands, in a way associating delicacy with women and brute force with men."Goodreads WoK Fantasy Book Club Q&A with Brandon Sanderson, Goodreads.com, December 2010 He has also compared it to traditional foot binding in China.
According to Brandon, being left-handed in Roshar is not a good match.Salt Lake City ComicCon 2017, Salt Lake City, UT, 9/21/17
Further, the top paragraph relates back to philosophical treaties written in-world, long ago, where a woman was saying 'these are feminine arts, these are masculine arts'.Book signing, Stuttgart, Germany, 5/17/19 It was partially a way to control access to Shardblades,Book signing, Hoboken, NJ, 12/3/16 when Shardblades and Shardplate first were allowed the common people, because the Knights Radiant had abandoned them. At the same time, there was a struggle for power over language, and this happened long ago. Really the reason is "humans are weird."Book signing, Salt Lake City, UT, 4/19/19
==External Link==
Safehand hub ...
==Q&A with Brandon==
Q. I was wondering, in Roshar, if any of the women were left-handed, if that interfered with the safehand? Or do they force them to ...
A. They force them. It doesn't work for everybody, but at least - I read into this - there are countries where you're not allowed to be, in our world, left-handed. It's not a thing. They just force people to not be left-handed. It works better for some than others ...Book signing, San Francisco, CA, 11/15/17
Q. So men cannot write, it is a feminine art. Women do all the writing and reading while also covering their left hand with a sensible long sleeve (not godless whores). But what if a proper Vorin woman is born left-handed? Would she be forced to wear a glove in order to write? Or would she do her best to write with her right hand to avoid her sinful nature as a lefty? I wonder if these women write in secret, away from the lecherous eyes of others, and expose her safehand to write freely.
These thoughts keep me up at night. I pity these left-handed Vorins for the rough life they must live.
A. This isn't as big a deal as you might think, because for a lot of the population, they just wear a glove and use their left hand.
It gets interesting when you are upper class, female, and left-handed. Part of the inspiration for the safehand was the way that the left hand is regarded as unclean in some of our cultures on Earth. You might be curious to read about what left-handed people did, historically, in some middle eastern cultures.
The short answer is "They learn to be ambidextrous" but the long answer is that it can be quite a pain, and very embarrassing. So yes, you are right to feel sorry for those left-handed Vorin women.General Reddit 2018, 1/1/18
==References==
Category:Culture
Category:Religion