What a Strange World We Live In- "Woman on the Edge of Time" by Marge Piercy

Source: Wikipedia

Marge Piercy creates a detailed portrait of a poor minority female who is constantly trying and hoping for a better life that never comes. For most of her life, Connie has been oppressed in every way imaginable. She has suffered at the hands of male and  government institutions. She has never known real power, not even over her own body.

During her second incarceration in a mental institution, visits from a time traveler become more insistent. At first, Connie is convinced the traveler is in her imagination, but as the visits transport her to an androgynous utopia in the future, the legitimacy of the traveler is indisputable, and it is the present which seems more like a surreal nightmare.

Luciente is the traveler that shows Connie another world, a better world. Luciente is described as a male, at least in Connie’s eyes. From Luciente’s movements, confidence, and attitude, Connie is sure she is dealing with a man. She even forms the beginnings of romantic feelings for Luciente, but they fade after she discovers Luciente is actually a woman.

While visiting the future with her time-traveling friend, Connie is confronted with other non-traditional forms of society. For example, men can petition to be mothers. Children in the future are no longer born, they are grown. As such, babies are assigned to those that request them, and men commonly request to be mothers alongside women. Each child has three mothers (male or female), and is separated from their mothers at age twelve to foster independence.

Towns are kept small, so as to remain self-sustainable. A town models itself after past cultures of a certain time. The town Luciente is a part of follows the traditions of the Wampanoag Native Americans, and different races are purposefully bred, with racism having been bred out of human beings.

Sexually, Luciente and her friends are quite liberal. Homosexual relationships are normal, as are polyamorous or monogamous relationships. When Luciente is recalling her most passionate relationship, she tells Connie it was with a woman, a concept Connie cannot grasp.

The separation of gender, especially through the eyes of the lead female character Connie, are analyzed throughout the novel. The validity of power structures in society (like police, social workers, and doctors) are also questioned, as all the structures Connie encounters only take advantage of her position in society as a female, low-income, minority citizen.

The capitalist life style Connie is on the fringes of seems barbaric in comparison with the rich and happy life Luciente exposes her to. Piercy brings a disconnect to the modern world, and certainly evokes Suvin’s infamous theory of “cognitive estrangement” in science fiction writing with Woman on the Edge of Time.

When Women Rule the World: Sherri S. Tepper's "The Gate to Women's Country"

Image found on
www.eternalnight.co.uk 

From the onset, it's hard to tell The Gate to Women's Country apart from The Shore of Women. Both are stories featuring post-apocalyptic settings in which women preside over great, peaceful cities, whereas men are left out to be warriors amongst each other. The differences between the stories are minor: instead of women not caring about giving up their sons (like in Shore), Tepper brings the reader through an emotional process that is very real. Instead of procreating with the aids of science (like in Shore), women and men meet twice a year at carnivals. In Tepper's world, men may return to the female cities at age fifteen if they choose.

Tepper creates a dual-natured gender society, one in which the balance of power appears to be equal between men and women, with perhaps a bit more power going to the men. By the end of the book, the big reveal shows the true balance of power to be entirely in favor of the women. After a nuclear war three-hundred years before, women decided to take over and establish new cities. Like Shore, they wanted to keep men out, but they also wanted to create an illusion to keep them happy. Part of the illusion is letting the men in the garrisons believe that they father children from women inside of Women’s Country. Really, all babies are born from artificial insemination. Sperm is carefully selected from those men who live within Women’s Country, as they have no desire for violence. Violence is a trait the women are set on breeding out of the men, even if it takes centuries to do so. Every fifteen-year-old male who chooses to return to Women’s Country then becomes part of the breeding pool.

The entire set-up of Women’s Country is a large breeding program, which the men are completely unaware of. The women allow the garrisons from different towns to go to war with one another, and they allow it to control the male population, or to get rid of undesirables quickly. The reader comes to understand how the men are puppets, much like the men in Shore. However, unlike Shore, the women in Women’s Country hope to reconcile with men eventually, by breeding out their violent natures.

The entire novel is themed around power. In the beginning, women appear weak, deferring to the men, loving men, giving into them. The men seem strong, protecting the women. One might argue Tepper set up a conventional dual-natured society, with proper male/female gender roles. Later, the women are seen to hold all of the power, and the men (the ones in the garrisons at least) are seen as pathetic, almost like children playing their little war games, unaware of the secrets and power the women hold over them.

For a good part of the novel, the men in the garrisons are convinced the women have secrets, but they don’t know what they are. Some of the men plot to get at the secrets, to control the women. The novel got me thinking about life, how men may believe women have secrets, or believe childbirth to be a sort of secret (or power). Considering all the anti-abortion measures state legislatures have taken, it’s possible the men of these states are uncomfortable at the thought of women controlling their own secrets, their own power. Even if their ideas about abortion are steeped in their religion, their religion is steeped in male-powered rhetoric.

At times during the novel, the comparisons between Shore and The Handmaid’s Tale would prompt the reader to believe Tepper wrote it as a further exploration of the elements in both of those feminist utopian/dystopic novels. Unlike Shore or The Handmaid’s Tale, Women’s Country is trying to change, trying to become better than the status quo, and as H.G. Wells tells it, the mark of a modern utopia is one that is ever-changing (9).

Tepper implies that a male-dominated world revolves around violence and competition, and the only end-game to such a cycle is destruction through war. According to Tepper, in history, those who suffer most in war (without any real say) are women and children.

In Women’s Country, women and children are spared from senseless death. Tepper describes Women’s Country as a world in which women have complete control, and the results are for better, or as good as they can be in a post-nuclear age.

Even as Tepper creates a sort of utopia, there are several dystopic elements to her story, such as the war games the women allow the men to play out. It is viewed as an activity the men need to do, to channel their aggression and keep their illusion of power intact, but when the men are dying on the fields, they are not allowed help for their wounds. The smallest wound can fester, turn to blood poisoning, and kill the man weeks later, a horrific death Tepper describes of one of the men. Also, the men in the garrisons are not allowed to have or create any technological advances, not just in weaponry, but everyday items that might create a better life for them are also barred. Because of the way the men are bred, most of them don’t care about advancing anyway (only a few do), but the females in the city, the perceptive ones, feel it’s wrong to intentionally hold the men back. It’s comparable to holding a dog in a cage.

The major dystopic element of Tepper’s world is the fact that from five years of age on, little boys get sent out of the cities and into the garrisons. They are separated from their families, and it can sometimes be a traumatic separation. Just like in Shore, the position of the women are elevated (and if it were the other way around, it would be just as wrong), and men (no, little children) are made to suffer for the power-swap.

A side-note: The Gate to Women's Country is a good book, nearly as good or even better than A Handmaid's Tale in my view. It's written with the same weird displaced timeline as The Dispossessed, and the writing in it feels more like poetry (at times). While The Shore of Women is great, too, I found the writing style to be a bit too romanticized. With The Gate to Women's Country, Tepper tackles the male/female romantic dynamic, but with a more objective eye than Sargent. Then again, I've also considered Sargent's over-use of romantic language and phrasing may have been on purpose, as a parody of the way women and men view one another.

Tepper, Stewart, Sheri. The Gate to Women’s Country. New York: Bantam Spectra, 1989. Print.

Wells, George, Herbert. A Modern Utopia. London: Chapman & Hall, 1905. Print.

The Idea of Gender Divides in LeGuin's "The Dispossesed"

The Dispossesed (1st Ed. Hardcover)
1974, Harper & Row Cover
Source: Wikimedia

Somewhere in a similar galaxy is a planet much like Earth, called Urras. On Urras, a group of settlers were sent to colonize the moon, Anaress. Cut-off from their home planet, the Anarresti built a different society than the one they came from, one in which there is no central government, no real form of currency, and gender equality isn’t even a thought, it just is.

Shevek, a theoretician from the colonized moon, is invited by a university on the home planet to come and study. When he does, his entire worldview is shaken, as he is exposed to alien concepts, like class divides, crime, money, and ego. Once Shevek understands that the home planet society is driven by profits (i.e. capitalism), he chews on his assumption “that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work--his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy--and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker […] The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.” (82). LeGuin is answering  a central question here about the details of a utopian society quite simply: if a citizen is given all they need by the State, they will not become lazy, because their own creativity will be their drive. She also answers the question about innovation in an utopian society, a concept assumed to stagnate in any imagined utopia, because only suffering can foster innovation (the need to make something bad into something better), but if creativity is its own reward, then even in a utopian society citizens will know of and promote innovation.

There are many gender divides Shevek encounters on the home planet. He argues with many of the Urrasti about how they treat their women and why they feel the need to treat women differently at all. Several times, he asks the Urrasti men “Where are the women?” They are amused at the question, and they tell him that women make great wives, but terrible scientists: “[Women] can’t do the math; no head for abstract thought; don’t belong. You know how it is, what women call thinking is done with the uterus! Of course, they’re always a few exceptions, God-awful brainy women with vaginal atrophy.” (73).

When Shevek reveals that 50% of the scientists (and workers in all fields) on his world are women, the Urrasti men become very uncomfortable. They cannot imagine a world in which a man is not made to feel “manly” and a woman is not kept as a feminine object and an object alone.

At the end of one of these gender arguments, Shevek concludes “that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage. He had no right to tease them. They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed.” (74).

Soon, Shevek comes to realize that the very design of the planet Urras, and the syntax of the Urrasti speech, all help to maintain the binary gender divide, however unintentional (or intentional) the design might be. Aboard his first starship, Shevek notes that the curves and lines on the ship are soft, supple. Even his bunk bed on the star ship is soft and inviting, and he cannot help but have erotic thoughts of yielding women. The language of the Urrasti is as possessive as their nature, as they refer to things as “my hankerchief” or “my wife”, when an Anarresti would say “the hankerchief that I use” or “the woman I share life with”. Shevek does not know of a translation in his language for the possessive pro-nouns Urrasti people are so fond of using.

Overall, LeGuin uses the analogy of a visitor to an Earth-like world to illustrate the cognitive estrangement of Earth-like customs. Through Shevek’s eyes, the reader sees everything backwards, gender included. Everything that is “normal” is odd to Shevek, and the simple nature in which he explains his world makes it seem as real as the Earth-like planet of Urras.

LeGuin, Kroeber, Ursula. The Dispossessed. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Print.

Global Perspectives in the Development of Gender Studies

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are two names synonymous with women’s suffrage in history. They are two women who made a difference in the world of women’s rights, but at the same time, their experiences make up only a small part of women in society. 

When most people think of gender studies, they think of women’s suffrage. However, there are many other important facets of feminist history and societal impacts that make up gender studies; “The history of notable women is the history of exceptional, even deviant women, and does not describe the experience and history of the mass of women,” (Lerner, 1975, p. 5).

Gender studies was once referred to as women’s studies. However, many universities on an international scale felt the term turned students off and so women’s studies changed to gender studies. By using ‘gender studies’ as opposed to ‘women’s studies’, universities in Mexico and the U.K. were able to legitimize the study of gender and feminism, (Stromquist, 2001, p. 375). Stereotypes about gender studies have slowly begun to fade. While there are still many pre-conceived notions regarding the main points of gender studies (feminism, female history, and women’s roles), global perspectives have helped to change the field of gender studies.

            The term ‘global perspectives’ can be described as the collective voice of the international academic community on any given subject. For example, it is how the study of gender studies would differ in the U.S. and in Spain. Women are regarded differently in both countries; both countries have a different status for women, and show their expectations for women through media or cultural forms. Religious views in either country, along with the roles of high officials (queens, politicians) compared with that of other women (artisans, teachers) can produce new insights. When both the American and Spainish perspectives on gender studies are analyzed together, they can complement one another to create new schools of thought. Global perspectives in the field of gender studies has raised new questions and shaped new theories. 

As observed by Nelly Stromquist, gender studies were once generalized by the following sub-topics: family, work, motherhood, marriage, science, the state, power, law, social class, and ethnicity. In more recent applications of gender studies, it has become apparent that there are more complex sub-topics that made up gender studies. New questions have been raised and changes in gender studies include: “marriage and divorce, educational opportunities, economic struggles of working women, female sexuality, the subordinate position of women,” (Lerner, 1975, p. 7). A big part of creating new and varied perspectives on gender studies is  remembering that while women have been largely victimized throughout history, that should not be the central theme when relating their experiences, thoughts, and roles to society.

In literature and other forms of mass media, women’s roles have been generalized. At times, it is hard to set women apart from their described roles in media from their actual lives. Though mass media is an ethereal part of life, it can sometimes infiltrate conceptualized versions of reality.  In the Victorian era, society’s expectations of women dictated a woman’s place.

Mass media is not the only hindrance to gender studies; racial inequalities in gender studies can create generalizations as well. White women do not have the market on gender studies, nor do African Americans. There are other marginalized groups like Native Americans, Asians, and Hispanics that were almost ignored in relation to gender studies up until the 1990’s (Dubois, 2003). Marginalized views are necessary to the diversification of gender studies. At the same time, Ellen Carol Dubois feels there is a danger in creating a narrow lens that focuses on the racism of early white feminist, and how feminism can be inherently racist in and of itself. Again, that is an unfortunate part of gender studies, (much like women’s suffrage and victimization), but by no means should it become the core of any gender studies curriculum.

            
One more assumption of gender studies that has been renewed is the belief that U.S. gender studies have been internationalized successfully. Dubois strongly believes that that is not the case. She believes that U.S. women’s history has failed to include anything beyond our own national interests. Dubois feels that scholars in continents like Europe, Asia, and Africa will shape the perspectives needed to open up American gender studies to a fuller extent.

Gender studies is still a new field, even though it was introduced into the university system in the 1970’s. Forty years for an academic interdisciplinary field is not that impressive when traditional disciplines like history, philosophy, and literature have been part of the academic world for centuries. Given that gender studies is still in its infancy, it is changing everyday and global perspectives has a lot to do with said changes. When society is analyzed from only one nationalized perspective, the study itself becomes severely limited. In the United States, there are so many classes to be studied, both by race and class. There is much to be gained by looking at gender studies through the kaleidoscope of a larger worldview. The understanding of women evolves as each international school of thought is added to the mix. Gender studies will continue to adjust to the changes brought on by global perspectives and marginalized voices.    

Dubois, E, C. (2003, May 16). “Three decades of women’s history”. Women's Studies, 35(1).

Retrieved on July 17, 2011 from the Utrecht American Studies Network.

Lerner, G. (1975, Autumn). “Placing women in history".  Feminist Studies, 3, (1/2), 5-14.

Retrieved on July 17, 2011 from JSTOR Database.

Stromquist, N., P. (2001, June). “Gender studies: a global perspective of their evolution,

 

contribution, and challenges to comparative higher education”. Higher Education, 41,

 

(4), 373-387. Retrieved on July 17, 2011 from the JSTOR Database.  

Feminism Through the Eyes of Woolf and Loy

Feminism was never better defined than it was by two women: Virginia Woolf and Mina Loy. Both women wanted more freedom and independence for women during a time when women were still held back by the confines of society. However, both women differed in opinion on the definition of feminism and how said independence should be obtained.

Virginia Woolf defines feminism as a woman that could secure financial means for herself, effectively gaining a space for herself, or, as the title of her famous essay suggests, "A Room of One's Own", (Greenblatt et al, 2006). In her collective narrative, she tries to come to terms with how it would be possible for a woman to be financially independent, because women could not own property and were considered property themselves.

Mina Loy believes that woman should not only have their own money and place to live, but that they should own the entire world. She wanted women to "be brave and deny at the outset--that pathetic clap-trap war cry woman is the equal of man---she is not!" (Greenblatt et al, 2006). To Loy, women and men are equal; women are above men and should shove their way to the top.

Woolf asserts her standpoint quietly, while Loy presents her ideas with passionate abandon. Loy seems almost angry at times during her manifesto, and perhaps she has a right to be. Woolf may have been angry internally, but her writing style is objective, if not a bit depressed.

The sometimes tedious diction of Woolf made it hard to follow sometimes. It is as if she wrote down her thoughts themselves, and as thoughts do, her sentences became run-on sentences that had many different avenues for the reader to follow. Loy's style made it a bit easier to read, because she was so direct. There was no mistaking her views, or her disdain for all men.

One thing that both of the writers seemed to agree on was the "effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer," (Greenblatt et al, 2006).

References:

Greenblatt, et al. [Eds]. (2006). The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic

Period Through the Twentieth Century [vol. 2] (8th ed.). New York,

NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.