This article needs additional citations for verification .(July 2016) |
Author | Sheri S. Tepper |
---|---|
Cover artist | Rafał Olbiński |
Genre | post-apocalyptic science fiction |
Publisher | Doubleday |
Publication date | 1988 |
Pages | 278 |
ISBN | 0385247095 American first ed. |
OCLC | 759887784 |
The Gate to Women's Country is a post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Sheri S. Tepper, published in 1988. It describes a world set three hundred years into the future after a catastrophic war which has fractured the United States into several nations.
The story is set in "Women's Country", apparently in the former Pacific Northwest.[ citation needed ] They have evolved in the direction of Ecotopia, reverting to a sustainable economy based on small cities and low-tech local agriculture. They have also developed a matriarchy where the women and children live within town walls with a small number of male servitors, and most of the men live outside the town in warrior camps.
The Gate to Women's Country is set in the future, 300 years after a nuclear war destroyed most of human civilization. The book focuses on a matriarchal nation known as Women's Country, and particularly the city of Marthatown.
Stavia, the novel's hero, is the younger daughter of Morgot, an important member of the Marthatown Council. The book opens with Stavia as an adult, heading to meet her fifteen-year-old son, Dawid. He has spent the last ten years living outside the city walls with the warriors, as is customary for Women's Country boys, and is now old enough to decide whether he wishes to remain a warrior or accept a life of study and service among the women as a servitor. At the meeting Dawid formally renounces his mother and chooses to become a full-fledged warrior. Stavia also renounces Dawid.
Afterwards, Stavia remembers when her younger brother was sent to live with the warriors. Much of the rest of the novel is told in flashback, following Stavia's life from childhood to adulthood. In the story's present, Stavia prepares for her role as Iphigenia in Marthatown's annual performance of Iphigenia at Ilium, a reworking of the Greek tragedy The Trojan Women [ citation needed ] that weaves through the novel as a leitmotif.
While still a child, Stavia met Chernon, the son of one of her mother's friends. Although Chernon lives in the garrison with the other boys and men, he and Stavia form a friendship. They meet at the twice-annual Carnival, the only event in Women's Country where warriors and women can mix freely and during which time boys who have not yet chosen to become warriors can visit their families. Stavia eventually agrees to smuggle books to Chernon for him to read, even though this is forbidden for boys in the garrison.
In fact, Chernon has been ordered by his commander, Michael, to learn more about the secrets of the women who rule Women's Country. After confessing to breaking the ordinances, Stavia is sent away from Marthatown for several years to train as a doctor. On her return, Chernon pursues their relationship again. When Stavia is selected for an exploration mission to the south, Chernon leaves the garrison (on Michael's orders), meets her there, and rapes her.
While away from Women's Country, Stavia and Chernon are captured by a band of "Holylanders", members of a struggling community to the south of Women's Country. They practice polygamy and a fundamentalist patriarchy with Christian underpinnings[ citation needed ]. The Holylanders are brutally misogynistic, treating women as slaves to their husbands, and children (both sons and daughters) are subject to severe corporal punishment which they term 'chastisement'. Chernon betrays Stavia after their capture, during which time she realizes she is pregnant by Chernon. She makes an escape attempt, and is struck a blow to the head and incapacitated.
Upon her return to Women's Country, she finally learns the secrets of the Women's Country Council and the choices they have made to preserve their way of life. The secret of Women's Country is that the council has been engaged in a selective breeding program with the population, using select servitors to propagate desirable traits through artificial insemination amongst select women; additionally selective sterilization has been used among the women. Chernon also is changed by his experiences, and returns to his garrison promoting the ways of the Holylanders as an alternative to their current societal structure. The Marthatown garrison is soon sent to battle against another Women's Country city, and no survivors return.
The story explores many elements from ecofeminism, which has been a hallmark of much of Tepper's writing,[ citation needed ] both in her feminist science fiction and in her pseudonymous mysteries.
The question of the causes of human violence is also a major theme, and in the novel Stavia's society hopes they are successfully breeding violence out of humanity. In the novel, violence appears to be biologically determined. By selecting only nonviolent individuals to breed, society is slowly increasing the number of such nonviolent members.
Tepper is careful to demonstrate that it is only unreasoning violence, not the ability to learn to fight and defend oneself and others, that is being bred out. For instance, she shows the servitor Joshua and Morgot as skilled fighters—so skilled they are able to defeat the men who have trained as fighters their entire lives. So it is clear that it is only certain personality traits—violence, especially in men—that is being weeded out. Women are also given hysterectomies and tubal ligations at the discretion of the medical officers.
The biological determinism of Tepper's world also controls sexuality, and the novel constructs homosexuality as a genetic and hormonal disorder which has been eugenically removed from the population. Jane Donawerth describes Tepper's approach as a "chillingly homophobic solution". [1] Tepper thus illustrates a world approaching a feminist utopia through the vision of a powerful leadership who impose rigid behavioral control on their society, and engineer the removal of those traits they consider undesirable (mainly violence) through forced sterilization. Their world remains vulnerable to ideological attack, as can be seen by the plots of the garrisons to take over the women's cities every generation and to force the women to serve them, as well as in Chernon's susceptibility to the violently misogynist ideology of the Holylanders. However, the Council's decision to interfere with its citizens' reproduction, without their consent or knowledge, is shown as a serious ethical issue—a "damned" choice as described by one of the leaders.
Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter the frequency of various human phenotypes by inhibiting the fertility of people and groups they considered inferior, or promoting that of those considered superior.
Misogyny is hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women or girls. It is a form of sexism that can keep women at a lower social status than men, thus maintaining the social roles of patriarchy. Misogyny has been widely practised for thousands of years. It is reflected in art, literature, human societal structure, historical events, mythology, philosophy, and religion worldwide.
In Greek mythology, Iphigenia was a daughter of King Agamemnon and Queen Clytemnestra, and thus a princess of Mycenae.
Selective breeding is the process by which humans use animal breeding and plant breeding to selectively develop particular phenotypic traits (characteristics) by choosing which typically animal or plant males and females will sexually reproduce and have offspring together. Domesticated animals are known as breeds, normally bred by a professional breeder, while domesticated plants are known as varieties, cultigens, cultivars, or breeds. Two purebred animals of different breeds produce a crossbreed, and crossbred plants are called hybrids. Flowers, vegetables and fruit-trees may be bred by amateurs and commercial or non-commercial professionals: major crops are usually the provenance of the professionals.
Sheri Stewart Tepper was an American writer of science fiction, horror and mystery novels. She is primarily known for her feminist science fiction, which explored themes of sociology, gender and equality, as well as theology and ecology. Often referred to as an eco-feminist of science fiction literature, Tepper personally preferred the label eco-humanist. Though the majority of her works operate in a world of fantastical imagery and metaphor, at the heart of her writing is real-world injustice and pain. She employed several pen names during her lifetime, including A. J. Orde, E. E. Horlak, and B. J. Oliphant.
A Door into Ocean is a 1986 feminist science fiction novel by Joan Slonczewski. It is the first book in Slonczewski's Elysium Cycle. The novel's themes include ecofeminism and nonviolent revolution, as well as Slonczewski's own knowledge in the field of biology.
Iphigenia in Aulis or Iphigenia at Aulis is the last of the extant works by the playwright Euripides. Written between 408, after Orestes, and 406 BC, the year of Euripides' death, the play was first produced the following year in a trilogy with The Bacchae and Alcmaeon in Corinth by his son or nephew, Euripides the Younger, and won first place at the City Dionysia in Athens.
A girl is a young female human, usually a child or an adolescent. While the term girl has other meanings, including young woman, daughter or girlfriend regardless of age, the first meaning is the most common one.
Violence against women (VAW), also known as gender-based violence and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), is violent acts primarily committed by men or boys against women or girls. Such violence is often considered a form of hate crime, committed against persons specifically because they are of the female gender, and can take many forms.
The Killing Machine (1964) is a science fiction novel by American writer Jack Vance, the second in his "Demon Princes" series.
EngenderHealth is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., with a focus in sexual and reproductive health (SRH). The organization operates in nearly 20 countries throughout Africa, Asia, and North and South America.
Hildegard Goss-Mayr is an Austrian nonviolent activist and Christian theologian.
Compulsory sterilization in Canada of individuals deemed mentally unfit or "socially inadequate" was widespread in the early to mid-20th century. The belief was that by preventing these individuals from reproducing, society would be protected from the perceived negative impact of their genes. This led to compulsory sterilization of thousands of people, many of whom were Indigenous women, individuals with disabilities, and those deemed to have "undesirable" traits.
Eugenics, the set of beliefs and practices which aims at improving the genetic quality of the human population, played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States from the late 19th century into the mid-20th century. The cause became increasingly promoted by intellectuals of the Progressive Era.
Grass is a 1989 science fiction novel by Sheri S. Tepper and the first novel of the Arbai trilogy. Styled as an ecological mystery, Grass presents one of Tepper's earliest and perhaps most radical statements on themes that would come to dominate her fiction, in which despoliation of the planet is explicitly linked to gender and social inequalities.
Humira Saqib is an Afghan journalist and women's human rights activist. Through her writings in the magazine Negah-e-Zan and in Afghan Women's News Agency, she has been protesting against extreme forms of harassment against women in her radically Islamic country. She has pleaded for parliament to enact laws for the elimination of violence against women. Saqib pursues her efforts to further women's rights by working for the women's news agency as a writer and editor.
Misogynist terrorism is terrorism that is motivated by the desire to punish women. It is an extreme form of misogyny—the policing of women's compliance to patriarchal gender expectations. Misogynist terrorism uses mass indiscriminate violence in an attempt to avenge nonconformity with those expectations or to reinforce the perceived superiority of men.
Beauty is a fantasy novel by Sheri S. Tepper published in 1991 that won the 1992 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife is a post-apocalyptic feminist novel written by American author Meg Elison, published in 2014 by Sybaritic Press. This novel is the winner of the Philip K Dick Award. It is the first novel in her The Road to Nowhere Trilogy.
During World War II, Jewish men and women in concentration camps faced sexual violence, due to the wartime discrimination, antisemitism, and genocidal beliefs held by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Regime. This sexual violence and discrimination happened throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, including in Jewish people's homes and hiding spaces as well as in public and at designated killing sites.