Sorry in advance for the wall of text! :) The Watcher's Mask has a female protagonist and no misogyny plot. It centers around a "two-souled" woman, Jamil/Alasil, that acts as an agent of the Emperor (as all of the two-souled people are raised from birth to do). She starts having blank periods in which neither of her personalities can account for what she was doing, and ends up stranded among a "primitive" northern people who may be planning to kill the Emperor.There are, of course, buried secrets to be discovered about the nature and origin of the two-souled people, but the story doesn't work out in either of the stereotypical ways of Jamil joining the northern people against the emperor or Jamil crushing the dangerous rebels for the good of the empire. It's an interesting setting as well- there are trains, for example, so some level of technology, but it's not at all "steampunk." J.F. Rivkin (a pseudonym for two anonymous authors) has a four-book sword-and-sorcery series (beginning with Silverglass ) that follows the adventures of mercenary Corson and noble-born sorceress in exile Nyctasia. The first book is, in my opinion, rather mediocre, but each one after it gets better. All four books are short, on or around 200 pages. Anne Logston has several books with female protagonists that don't rely on a misogyny plot. Shadow and sequels follow an elvan thief (short, light reads, around 150 pages). More along the romance lines, Firewalk follows a woman of high birth in a grasslands kingdom/tribe whose family unexpectedly calls her from her training as a priestess/mage and marries her off to the head of another kingdom/tribe as part of a treaty- without all of the arranged marriage angst- and she and her new husband work together to fight a third kingdom/tribe bent on taking over. Jane Fletcher 's Lyremouth chronicles (starting with the two-part The Exile and the Sorcerer and The Traitor and the Chalice , originally published together as Lorimal's Chalice ) is set in a world where, in the largest society, women and men have equal social status because the ruling class is made of sorcerers who have randomly gifted/non-hereditary magic. One of the two (female) protagonists starts off in a society with reversed gender roles where the women have a closely-guarded magical strength potion and are the (very war-like, macho) warrior class, and men are considered "the weaker sex".These books have mystery plots- the first two try to track down the origins of said super-strength potion, in the third the two protagonists try to prevent the death of an Empress who has foretold her own death, and the fourth they try to stop- or decide whether to stop- a sorcerer who has decided that the best way to stop the wars that have historically ravaged the world is by nullifying magic. There is a romance between the two female leads. Tanith Lee 's YA Unicorn trilogy (starting with Black Unicorn ) follows Taniquil, the daughter of a sorceress. Taniquil doesn't have her mother's magical ability, but she does have a gift for machinery and fixing things- this gets her in trouble when her pet (a desert creature called a peeve- yes, her pet peeve) digs up the bones of a unicorn and Taniquil manages to "fix" it back to life. Patricia Wrede 's Lyra Chronicles contain some good stand-alone (set in the same world but separated by hundreds of years) books. Caught in Crystal follows Kayl, a middle-aged former warrior who left her sisterhood after a disastrous adventure to defeat evil in an abandoned wizard's tower that ended up killing several of her fellows. She is now a widow (no, her husband wasn't secretly killed by the evil so she has to avenge him) with two children, running an inn, and of course, the sisterhood finds her and convinces her to finish the unfinished business. N.K. Jemisin 's Inheritance trilogy (starting with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms ) is in my TBR pile and also looks like it might fit the bill.Hope this helps!