Here the keynote is freedom, and lesbian polyamory is the order of the day. The golden age of the genre, roughly coinciding with the era of second wave feminism, could scarcely be more different. The Herlanders also have no erotic or even romantic feelings for each other they have bred those dirty things out. In fact, many of the hallmarks of fascism are here: the paganism, the obsession with cleanliness, the emphasis on gymnastics, the eugenics. Much less charmingly, we’re assured the Herland women are Aryans, and their society is focused on the perfection of their race. Charmingly, the narrator says of the national costume: “I see that I have not remarked that these women had pockets in surprising number and variety.” Their babies never cry. Older women gain prestige instead of losing it the women are physically formidable and easily subdue their male captives.
The book then becomes a tour of the features of the women’s ideal society. With their aeroplane, they are able to land there, and are instantly taken prisoner by the all-female inhabitants. 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. But in its strict form as a single-sex utopia, it begins with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland of 1915. 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. Part of the story, too, is a growing opposition to the basic premise, a conflict in which my novel has been recently embroiled. I think the way that these contemporary novels diverge from their earlier counterparts tells us something useful about gender politics in the 21st century. 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.
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