Prometheus
Newsletter of the LFS
In his well-respected 1960 survey of the science fiction genre, New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis said, “Though it may go against the grain to admit it, science fiction writers are evidently satisfied with the sexual status quo.” What I'd like to do today is to look back, way back, into the history of the genre and talk about five works that contradict this idea.
Long before Hugo Gernsback had coined the term “scientifiction,” women were using what would become the genre to make political statements about the sexual status quo in their societies. I'd like to introduce you to five women who wrote utopian science fiction to communicate their messages, not only about feminism, but also about what it means to be human.
The first lady I'd like to discuss is , who lived from 1825 to 1875. (Hey, I did say I was going way back!) She was born in the UK, but she spent most of her adult life in the United States, where she immigrated in 1842. Like many thinkers of the late 19th century, embraced the three S's: socialism, spiritualism, and science. This heady combination of ideas led her to be quite the eclectic gal, and she became an abolitionist, a medium, a women's rights activist, and an advocate of free love, among other things. Miss 's contribution to genre fiction came in 1870, with the publication of her feminist utopian novel (this title's a killer), Man's Rights; or, How Would You Like It?
The novel unfolds as a series of dream-visions, in which the narrator is transported to Mars. The Martian society is the exact inverse of the one that herself experienced, so Mars is ruled by serious, thoughtful, reasonable women while the men of Mars are kept at home in a sphere of domesticity. The women are free to pursue power and careers, while the men do the child-raising and the homemaking. The women wear sensible clothes, while the men are caught up in a series of fashions that are both difficult to wear and inhibiting, as well as downright degrading. But is not making fun of the Martian men; she's suggesting that they are in a pitiable circumstance. All in all, Man's Rights becomes a rather subtle work of political philosophy. Rather than suggesting that the world would be wonderful if only women could run things and men could be oppressed, suggests through her unfolding story of Mars a more humane—or should I say Martian—solution to the problem of gender equality. Martian women prove to be interested in the issue of Martian men's rights, and a revolution of sorts occurs in the society. She describes this in an interesting way. Part of the solution, she suggests, is technological, as industrialization and automation make available devices that save time and do things more efficiently. Then, in fact, a lot of the drudgery that falls to Martian men is lifted, and men can pursue things like educations and careers.
The other solution she suggests is intellectual. It requires a revolution in the way that Martians think. For example, she writes about the problem of vice through the example of prostitution. She shows how the Martians change their laws, so that the prostitutes (who are, of course, men) are considered not criminals, but victims, and the real criminals are their clients (in this case, women). In fact she gives quite a vivid and, at the time, eyebrow-raising—account of the overnight sting operation that occurs once this law goes into place, and arrests are made of the women clients who are seeking to use prostitutes. Of course, the entire Martian example is a metaphor for 's own time. But, being able to discuss the politics of Mars, and to show how eventually Mars becomes a society of gender equality, enabled to talk about the society of her own time, and the politics of her own time, in an extremely compelling way.
Ten years after Man's Rights came a more technologically sophisticated feminist utopia, that is Mizora, by . Not much is known about herself, but we do know that Mizora was first published in 1880 and 1881, serialized in the Cincinnati Commercial, and then it appeared as a book in 1890. The full title of the work is Mizora, a Prophecy, A Mss. Found Among the Private Papers of Princess Vera Zarovitch, Being a True and Faithful Account of Her Journey to the Interior of the Earth, with a Careful Description of the Country and its Inhabitants, their Customs, Manners, and Government.
In writing Mizora, took advantage of the “hollow earth” theory, which suggested there could be, quite literally, worlds within our world. The narrator is an inhabitant of our world, but thanks to the Czarist regime in Russia, she is exiled to Siberia. She escapes and finds herself stumbling upon the world of Mizora. In Mizora, men are not allowed. (Sorry, guys! But neither are brunettes, so I wouldn't be there, either.) It's a world of blonde ladies who live quite a technologically superior life for 1880-81, in that they have video phones and chemically prepared, artificial meat, and the women reproduce asexually through parthenogenesis; no men are needed.
uses the world of Mizora to criticize a number of conventions in her own society which she finds to be problematic, most notably the idea that women cannot participate in the political sphere. Through Mizora, she shows that women are capable, and in fact the world that they might create could be superior to the one that they inhabited in her day. She took aim not only at some of the big ideas of her era—for example, criticizing the union of political power and military power—but also at some issues very close to home. She came from a period of time in which tight corsets were the fashion. She made a point of observing that in Mizora, narrow waists were considered to be a “disgusting deformity.” So, once again, a 19th-century woman used science fiction in order to make political statements about her own society.
The third novel I'd like to mention is New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future, by Newcastle journalist , which was published in 1889. In this novel, much like the better known Looking Backward (1888) by , the main character wakes up many years in the future. In the case of this book, the narrator is a woman, and she wakes up in the year 2472 to discover that the suffragette movement not only led to women's voting rights, but eventually to women taking over Ireland completely and turning it into a political utopia.
The narrator doesn't travel forward in time alone. She goes with a male companion, and so both of them explore this new Ireland of the Amazonians, and they have very different reactions to what they see. The female protagonist quite likes the world that she discovers in the future, a world in which women grow to be seven feet tall, living for hundreds of years though never looking over forty, practicing vegetarianism (and euthanasia as well), and dominating all aspects of public and private life.
Perhaps not surprisingly, her counterpart, her male companion, isn't quite as keen on this world or how it treats him as a second-class citizen. Eventually his inability to connect and assimilate to the culture leads the Amazonian leaders to determine that he is insane. Both travelers ultimately make their way back to their original time period, but it's clear that, for the main character, this is not a happy homecoming.
A decade after New Amazonia appeared, U.S. author wrote Arqtiq: A Story of the Marvels at the North Pole (1899). This book shared some similarities with its ancestors. It was a feminist utopia. It was also a story that bought into the “hollow earth” theory and suggested that a lost race of humans lived inside of our planet.
The novel begins with a woman creating a flying craft, part balloon and part airplane, in order to go to the North Pole. There she discovers a group of people who call themselves the Arq. (Thus Arqtiq.) This isn't, however, like New Amazonia, a world of female domination. It has much more in common with 's Man's Rights on Mars, as the novel portrays a world of gender equality. In their crystal world beneath the ice, the Arq are telepaths, and the main character finds herself developing telepathy as she lives with them. These people also practice Christianity, and their faith is responsible for part of the egalitarianism of their society. In a way, then, this book also qualifies as a work of religious utopianism.
The Arq have developed a quite high level of technology. Before the adventure is through and revealed to be actually a dream, the Arq and the main character encounter a meteorite from the moon and encounter Lunar people who are not the kind of folks you would want to have over for dinner. But makes her central point by envisioning a world in which the sexes coexist in peace and harmony and together create a vastly superior world.
The last work I want to mention is, I think, the most compelling, and that is Herland (1915), by the US novelist, lecturer, and social reformer . lived from 1860 until she took her own life—in her words, choosing “chloroform over cancer”—in 1935. She is perhaps best known for her semi-autobiographical work of psychological horror, “The Yellow Wallpaper."
Herland tells the story of a three-man expedition that discovers a lost world of women, a place that the men come to call Herland. The women in this culture didn't start out to create an all-female society: their ancestors were cut off by war and geography from the rest of the world 2,000 years earlier. Genetically as well as physically isolated, the women eventually mutated and became capable of asexual reproduction. The world that they build is really a remarkable one, fueled by scientific understanding of not only technology, but also botany, biology, and the social sciences. For example, the women of Herland possess understandings of the theories of language and education that are quite sophisticated even by today's standards. These women are physically fit, mentally sharp, and possessed of a remarkably long-term view of their own efforts, from the genetic engineering of plants for their foodstuffs to the rearing and training of their young.
What I think is particularly interesting about this book is the way that portrays the three men who encounter Herland. All three are welcomed, treated as honored guests, and eventually brought on board as husbands to Herland wives in order to re-introduce sexual reproduction into this isolated community. One of the men becomes thoroughly convinced of the superiority of Herland, not only because of the gender equality that is shown there, but also due to the elimination of problems such as poverty, illiteracy, warfare, and even cruelty to animals. At the end of the book, he elects to stay.
Another of the characters has a very difficult time adjusting to the idea that the attributes he had thought of as naturally feminine or womanly were actually cultural conventions of his particular time and place, quite likely more imposed than naturally evolved. He is eventually banished from Herland for attempting to rape his wife. The third man, the narrator, is sort of an everyman who falls between the extremes of the other two characters. It is particularly poignant when he finds himself increasingly embarrassed while trying to describe the world from which he came, when he finds it falling short of the unpolluted, non-violent, intellectual world of Herland. The book ends with him preparing—reluctantly—to take his wife back to the world that he had left.
followed up Herland with the book With Her In Ourland (1916), the sequel, in which we follow the woman from Herland into our world. By immersing the reader first so deeply into Herland, manages to make the sequel a very vivid dystopia, in which the reader feels almost like a sociologist studying an alien species, when in fact the reader is actually encountering our own world. And I think it's an important point to make that a lot of the concerns Gilman underscores in both of these books, from education to the environment, are still relevant today.
And so we see women authors of the late 18th and early 19th centuries taking on politics through science fiction, discovering lost worlds, delving into a hollow earth, or even going to Mars in order to create utopias that would shed light not on worlds that could be, as much as on the worlds that the authors themselves experienced. Two of these works are still in print: Mizora by , and Herland by . I hope you've enjoyed my whirlwind tour of five classics of early feminist utopian science fiction.
Amy H. Sturgis (http://www.amyhsturgis.com) is an author, editor, scholar, educator, speaker, and podcaster with specialties in the fields of Science Fiction/Fantasy and Native American Studies. She lives with her husband, Dr. Larry M. Hall, and their best friend, Virginia the Boston terrier, in the foothills of North Carolina, USA. This essay originally appeared in the science fiction podcast StarShipSofa, The Audio Science Fiction Magazine, No. 58, January 7 2009 http://www. starshipsofa.com/, and appears here with the author's permission.
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