The end of men: the controversial new wave of female utopias
The end of men: the controversial new wave of female utopias
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‘Authors were captivated by the idea of women hiking alone’ … A woman stands in Death Valley. Photograph: Jordan Siemens/Getty Images
There have been many novels that imagine a world without men – but are these books reductive or freeing?
Sandra Newman
Wed 25 May 2022 03.00 EDT
Last modified on Wed 25 May 2022 03.02 EDT
All the men are gone. Usually this is conceived as the result of a plague. Less often, the cause is violence. Occasionally, the men don’t die and the sexes are just segregated in different geographical regions. Or men miraculously vanish without explanation. Left to themselves, the women create a better society, without inequality or war. All goods are shared. All children are safe. The economy is sustainable and Earth is cherished. Without male biology standing in the way, utopia builds itself. I’m describing a subgenre of science fiction, mostly written in the 1970s-90s. It was once so popular it was almost synonymous with feminist SF. In 1995, when the Otherwise Award, a literary prize for “works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore one’s understanding of gender”, gave five retrospective awards, four of the works were set in such worlds: Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines and Walk to the End of the World, and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and When It Changed. The fifth was Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, about a world whose inhabitants are all of the same sex.
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Ursula K Le Guin. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
Recently there has been a revival of the genre in radically different form, with titles including Lauren Beukes’s 2020 novel Afterland, Christina Sweeney-Baird’s 2021 thriller The End of Men, and my own new release, The Men. I think the way that these contemporary novels diverge from their earlier counterparts tells us something useful about gender politics in the 21st century. Part of the story, too, is a growing opposition to the basic premise, a conflict in which my novel has been recently embroiled.
The women-only utopia has a modest prehistory, going back to the myth of the Amazons and early feminist works such as Christine de Pizan’s 1405 The Book of the City of Ladies. But in its strict form as a single-sex utopia, it begins with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland of 1915. Here, in an uncharted and unspecified wilderness, three male explorers stumble on a plateau the local “savages” fear as a realm from which no man returns. With their aeroplane, they are able to land there, and are instantly taken prisoner by the all-female inhabitants. The book then becomes a tour of the features of the women’s ideal society.
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Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Photograph: The Women’s Press
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I believe there’s something potently transformative about utopian fiction. Too many of us now are trying to make a political revolution without hope. Our narratives of justice are all about punishment. We squabble about what constitutes punching up or punching down, but are poor in solutions that don’t involve punching. In our art, we don’t imagine better worlds, only more and grimmer apocalypses, and the people in them only long for the patriarchal world order that gives us supermarkets, indoor plumbing and hormone patches.
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/25/sandra-newman-female-utopian-fiction