“When men imagine a female uprising, they imagine a world in which women rule men as men have ruled women” -Sally Kempton
Is it true that male authors generally take this tack when it comes to speculative stories about this subject? Do female authors do the same thing as a rule, or is there a difference that can be seen in how they approach the subject?
I have more experience with fiction with matriarchal societies, rather than the uprising and the aftermath. Would that be ok?
Dunno. The only novel like this I can recall off the top of my head is Thomas Berger’s Regiment of Women. That book was meant to be broadly satirical, so you can’t exactly use it as evidence of anything. The Norman Lear sitcom All that Glitters featured a world with sex-reversed roles, but, again, its purpose was satirical – it was highlighting the inequality of the sexes, so women acted as men do and vice versa.
It’s not as if the people responsible couldn’t imagine any other type of society – they were pointing out flaws of the existing one, so they posited it that way.
I’d rather we didn’t go that far afield at the very beginning of the thread, Sunny Daze. I am talking about stories where there is a recent uprising because I want to see if there is trend of male authors thinking that females are not actually fighting for equality, but for superiority.
I am having a lot of trouble thinking of a single example let alone one of each to do a comparison and map a trend.
Let’s see. The only one off the top of my head is General Jinjur’s revolt in “The Land of Oz”. Her army of girls equipped with sharp knitting needles conquered the Emerald City and made the men do all the washing and cooking and diaper changing, while they sat around combing each other’s hair and making fudge.
Funnily enough, this revolt was easily put down by Glinda’s army of girls armed with halberds.
I read the OP meaning of “ruled” as meaning “dominated and suppressed”.
I’m also having a hard time coming up with examples of “female uprisings” as a large-scale thing. But when I think of Milan Kundera and how he portrays noncompliant women it is not as suggested by Ms. Kempton. Sabina (Unbearable Lightness of Being) simply refuses to be yoked. She doesn’t want to oppress or be oppressed, manipulate or be manipulated, she just wants to be Sabina (she is clearly a metaphor for 1968 Czechoslovakia) and to live and let live. It is an uprising of sorts in that she refuses to conform to what society says a woman should be and how a woman should act, but in doing so the only real aggression she shows is disregard for such a role, and disregard for the feelings that might get hurt as a result of her refusal. In short, if anyone gets hurt as a result of a female uprising, it’s their own damned fault for expecting any concession more than reflected respect.
Similarly, from what I can recall of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting rebellious females are those more prone to eschew artificial roles & behaviors imposed by a society seeking to feminize them (in the sense of making them more attractive, as opposed to simply more female).
So, based on that limited sampling, I’d say Ms. Kempton is just projecting how she would write strong-willed women if she were a man. My god she’s sexist.
I think the earliest example of this genre would be Lysistrata, the classical play by Aristophanes. The women there certainly don’t use the same techniques of control as men do, rather mostly controlling men by controlling their access to sex.
Ammonite, by Nicola Griffin, is the closest thing I can think of. It’s not about a gendered uprising: humans colonize an alien world, but some aspect of the planet’s ecosystem proves fatal to anyone with a Y chromosome, leaving the world inhabited solely by women, who can still reproduce with each other because… magic, I think? It’s been decades since I read it, but I remember this part being really hand-wavy.
Anyway, centuries later the world has regressed to roughly the iron age, but still features war, slavery, and genocide against the planet’s aboriginal sapients. (One of the books villains makes a side profit selling coin purses made out of their scrotums.) The point of the book was, I think, a bit of a satire on the genre of lesbian utopianism in general, by showing a world where human society is violent and unfair, despite the removal of all the men and any advanced technology.
Not exactly what you’re looking for, in that it’s not about women trying to overthrow an oppressive system, but rather, how a society of only women still features the same flaws inherent to any human society, regardless of the gender breakdown.
Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue books depicts a women’s “revolt” in that the linguist women are engaged in a power struggle with the men who are oppressing them. But there is very little outward violence, the struggle is to be treated as equal rather than subhuman, and the tool is a tailored language which is meant to channel the minds of everyone in society (men and women) into a state where it comes naturally to treat both sexes equally and with respect.
Again no exactly what you’re looking for, but I always liked The Disappearance (1951).
Philip Wylie has the Earth unexpectedly split into two separate dimensions, with all the men in one, the women in the other. One world still has all the science and technology, but they immediately start dropping nuclear bombs on each other and killing in the streets over minor disagreements. The other is severely deficient in physicians and food-producers, and scientists and engineers are near non-existent; constant struggle to avoid famine, plague, and to keep the sewers running, and producing electricity.
It’s not a “Battle of the Sexes” novel, but a “Oh god, without the other gender around, we are SERIOUSLY FUCKED. Also, not fucked” story.
Lotsa fascinating and memorable small nuances, too. One of the Alpha women is propositioned by a submissive-type female; looking at the expression on her face, the take-charge chick thinks “Whoa…this is what we look like to men when we say ‘yes.’”
On a lower scale, there are the Ellen Jamesians in The World According to Garp. Men, like myself, have no quibbles with this portrayal of Feminism gone off the rails, but the women I’ve discussed the book with sure don’t see themselves in that stew. I wonder if modern trans people see themselves in Roberta?
Egalia’s Daughters supposes such an uprising in the past, IIRC: women are firmly in control. Due in part to mens’ natural aggression and superior strength, men are encouraged to be weak and docile, and any sign of strength or aggression from a man is punished severely by the women in power.
At some point in the book, the protagonist, a key figure in the new masculinist movement (that burns their penis-lifting undergarments in protest), writes a satire of his world, in which men are in charge and women are subordinate, in an attempt to show everyone how foolish their own sexist world is.
I read it in the early nineties. Pretty good stuff. The society as imagined by the female author is pretty repressive of men, but that’s the entire point: she’s satirizing our world to show how foolish it is.
Who is Sally Kempton, and what was the original context of the quote? A quick Google indicates that most prominent person with that name teaches and writes about yoga and meditation, and (rather surprisingly) this quote does seem to be attributed to her and not some other Sally Kempton. I’d guess that she may not have been talking about male authors of speculative fiction at all but rather reactions to feminism or something like that, but I didn’t do any further investigation.
As for your actual question, I’ve read works of speculative fiction that were about societies ruled by women, but off the top of my head the only one where this was the result of a “female uprising” was Lysistrata (already mentioned by Chronos). That’s not only a comedy, it’s a comedy that’s nearly 2,500 years old, so I wouldn’t attempt to generalize about men today based on that. However, the women in Lysistrata do take over the treasury and abandon their housekeeping and child care duties.
I haven’t read Naomi Alderman’s recent novel The Power, but I know it involves young women all over the world suddenly gaining the ability to produce deadly electric shocks, sort of like electric eels. I assume this leads to some sort of female uprising, so that may be a better example of the sort of story you’re looking for.
Come to think of it, I remember another example, but don’t remember the title. It’s a science fiction story about a world dominated by women, who do it by giving men everything they think they want. The men all live in castles and get lofty titles and spend all of their day in sport, while the women get all of the education and make all the actual decisions and in general carry on the business of living. I think it might have been LeGuin, but that’s probably just me conflating it as the sort of thing that she’d write.
Not to disparage this interesting thread, but isn’t the quote in the OP about personal gut reaction rather than well thought out fiction? (Yes, I’m too lazy to look into the context myself.)
No. Not unless you interpret this differently from the way I do:
That’s not asking about a gut reaction. That’s asking how an author tackles the issue in writing a book or a story, which generally takes a little time.
The Gate to Women’s Country by Sherri S Tepper doesn’t show the women’s uprising itself (it’s set hundreds of years later), but her woman-dominated society doesn’t do the normal “invert all the stereotypes” that male authors normally do. The men are mostly belligerent warriors. The women’s influence is subtle – they’re basically practicing gradual eugenics by only allowing less-belligerent men to reproduce. If the men get too troublesome, some pretext for war is created, and they’re sent off to die doing what they want to do.
That sort of setup is right in Tepper’s wheelhouse. I think Six Moon Dance has a planet where the women secretly keep the gender balance at 90% girls, 10% boys. Tepper is more traditional in that set-up: the men are kept as playthings and breeders by wealthy women, who otherwise own everything.
What the OP asked about is quite obvious, I was asking about the intent of the quote from Sally Kempton used in posing the question.
I finally found the book I was thinking of which I didn’t mention because it’s not quite a women’s revolution. It’s about an off world colony that is female dominated, with successful female clans reproducing by cloning, less successful ones by the old fashioned method. Glory Season by David Brin