Dreaming of a better world has long been a pastime of humanity, and the utopian tradition in literature dates back as far as Plato's Republic. The awakening feminism of contemporary women has also had its effect on the literary utopia.

This page will discuss some recent trends in the criticism of utopian literature and the efforts of many women now working in the utopian genre. Often, there will be links to more information about the authors and/or the books. As Elaine Hoffman Baruch points out in the introduction to Women in Search of Utopia: Mavericks and Mythmakers, "In reading utopias by men, one often gets a sense that women are literally no place-- that they have no place in these places other than their old one. Despite some of the authors' disclaimers to the contrary, the women are shown as prisoners of sex; they have no future, for their anatomy is destiny." Women in Search of Utopia is largely a description of real attempts at utopia living, but it discusses contemporary literary utopias to some extent, and gives some attention to the idea of a lost matriarchal society that can be regainied.

In a recent critique, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, dealing most specifically with the 1880s through the 1950s, Krishan Kumar states that utopian ideas are not universal, but appear "only in societies with the classical and Christian heritage, that is, only in the West." In the final chapter, "Utopia in the Twentieth Century," Kumar declares the literary utopia a thing of the past. Other writers declare it "a thing of the women."

Peter Ruppert, in Reader in a Strange Land, says that our homogeneous society, standardized by mass culture, is not condusive to dreaming of a different world. He does find "pockets of utopian enthusiam" among women writers of the 1970s, particularly Ursula LeGuin and Marge Piercy. Thelma J. Shinn's Worlds Within Women gives even more importance to the utopian genre for women. And Natalie M. Rosinsky is responsible for a very good study, Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women's Speculative Fiction. Her chapter on the all-female utopia, "Battle of the Sexes: Things to Come," is especially strong.

Marleen S. Barr is perhaps the leading scholar in feminist utopias, and women in science fiction in general. She edited Future Females: A Critical Anthology, which provides essays on women in science fiction both utopian and other. It includes two articles very helpful to a study of women's utopias, Carol Pearson's "Coming Home" and "Recent Feminist Utopias" by Joanna Russ (herself a utopian novelist). Barr went on to edit, with Nicholas D. Smith, the excellent collection Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations, which is essential to any utopian collection. It considers a diverse selection of authors including James Tiptree Jr., Doris Lessing, and Suzy McKee Charnas. In 1984, Barr edited a special issue of Women's Studies International Forum (1982-) titled "Oh Well, Orwell: Big Sister Is Watching Herself: Feminist Science Fiction in 1984." Nan Bowman Albinski's 1988 work, Women's Utopias in British and American Fiction, traces the development of the genre from the nineteenth century to the present. Albinski gives brief synopses of close to two hundred novels, relating them to the social and political climate in which they were written.

Most studies of utopian writings will devote one chapter to women's writings. Ursula K. LeGuin is the subject of James W. Bitter in the anthology No Place Else. Mary Shelley's The Last Man is considered by both James Osler Bailey in Pilgrims Through Space and Time and Paul K. Alkon in Origins of Futuristic Fiction. Three studies from the 1980s document the work of nineteenth-century woemn. Barbara C. Quissell presents "The New World That Eve Made: Feminist Utopias Written by Nineteenth Century Women" in America as Utopia, edited by Kenneth M. Roemer. Jean Pfaelzer includes a chapter, "A State of Her Own: or, What Did Women Want?" in The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896. And "Women in Utopias" is the subject of Patricia Huckle in The Utopian Vision, edited by E. D. S. Sullivan.

Many books on women and technology include a chapter on women and utopia. Outstsanding among these are Sally Miller Gearheart's "Female Futures in Women's Science Fiction" in The Technological Woman, edited by Jan Zimmerman, which very clearly delineates the differences in feminist and mainstream utopian writings, and "What If... Science and Technology in Feminist Utopias" by Patrocinio Schweickart in Machina ex Dea, edited by Joan Rothschild.

Lyman Tower Sargent produced an excellent annotated bibliography, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1975, updated as British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985. Sargent provides brief (frequently one or two word) descriptions of all the books and short stories written in this genre. Some other bibliographies helpful in identifying utopian novels appeared in these books: Marleen S. Barr's Alien to Femininity; Critical Encounters, edited by Dick Riley, and Critical Encounters II, edited by Tom Staicar; Betty King's Women of the Future; Glenn Robert Negley's Utopian Literature: A Bibliography; John J. Pierce's Great Themes of Science Fiction; Betty Rosenberg's Genreflecting; Roger C. Schlobin's Urania's Daughters; Charlotte Spivack's Merlin's Daughters; and Patricia S. Warrick's The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction.

In 1994, Jane L. DOnawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten edited Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, which they believe is the first "to argue that these fictions historically speak to one another and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place." They present a collection of writings sometimes presenting an overview of the utopian writing of a time and place, and other chapters that deal with individual authors in more depth.

The nineteenth century saw many utopian writings, by both men and women, as well as a multitude of attempts at utopian life. An early utopian novel by a woman is Mary Shelley's The Last Man, first published in 1826 and reissued at intervals since, most recently in 1985 with an introduction by science fiction author and scholar Brian Aldiss. Set in a republican England of the future, the novel traces the attempts of Lionel Verney (whom critics say is modeled after the author) to establish utopia on earth, and it describes his successes until plague takes over the world. At the novel's end, Verney believes himself to be the last man on earth. In Shelley's novel, women are largely in subservient roles; and, although the central character is patterned after the author, the character is portrayed as male.

For most utopias written by women in this period, the issues were educational and religious. In many, women assumed traditional sex roles and equality with men was not sought. Most of the authors were middle-class Christians, frequently Roman Catholics, and their strongest criticisms stemmed from their Christian commitment. Violence and material greed were most strongly deplored. Charles J. Rooney's Dreams and Visions and Daphne Patai's article "British and American Utopias by Women" are especially good on this subject. Lyman Tower Sargent's short annotations in British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1975 also support this conclusion.

Some of the best-known works of this period are Mary Griffin's Three Hundred Years Hence, which focuses on peace and prosperity, and Mary E. Bradley Lane's Mizora: A Prophecy, a woman-only utopia based on science and education in which men have become extinct while women have found the secret to eternal life. Later in the century, the sex-role reversal novel captured the public's attention, with Annie Denton Cridge's Man's Rights; or, How Would You Like It? and Mrs. J. Wood's Pantaletta as classic examples. In Cridge's work (as in the 1977 Norwegian work by Gerd Brantenberg, translated in 1985 as Egalia's Daughters) the men are slaves to fashions that inhibit free movement and require almost constant attention while the women go about the important things in life. Wood's work, which is anti-feminist, shows the disaster that would befall society should women be allowed to compete with men.

The period 1890 to 1920 saw the first truly feminist envisionings of utopia. The short story collection Daring to Dream, edited by Carol Farley Kessler, shows the diversity of women's thoughts on the ideal world, and their problems with the one they inhabit. The masterpiece of this era is Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, originally serialized in Gilman's magazine The Forerunner during 1915 and first published separately in 1979 to strong readership. Herland is a women-only world where everyone lives peacefully under the guidance of an intellectual aristocracy. Herland's peace and harmony is interrupted by the arrival of three American explorers who attempt to respond to these women, unsuccessfully, based on what they know of women in their homeland. The narrator, one of the explorers, provides a reasonable voice in contrast to the macho and romantic stereotypes of his companions. Gilman continued this story, also in The Forerunner, in With Her in Ourland as a woman from Herland marries the narrator and they set out to explore his world. An earlier work of Gilman's Moving the Mountain (1911) is a socialist utopia set in the United States in 1940. Daring to Dream was updated in 1984 to include utopian fiction before 1950. Included here are excerpts from Five Generations Hence, written in 1916 by African-American utopian Lillian B. Jones, Mildred Carver, U. S. A., and a short story "A Visitor from Venus", written by Gertrude Short in 1949. Kessler includes an "Annotated Bibliography of U. S. Women's Utopian Fiction, 1836-1988.

Another work from this period, Sultana's Dream, by Begum Rokeya (Rokeya Sakhat Hossain) first published in an India-based English periodical, has been reissued, together with selections from another work, The Secluded Ones. Some of the many real life attempts at utopia during this period are recounted in Women in Search of Utopia, edited by R. Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch.

Sally Miller Gearheart, in her article in The Technogical Woman, gives a very thorough and concise introduction to contemporary feminist utopian writing. As she relates them, the differences between feminist utopian traditions and those of the mainstream are many. First, there is a movement toward collective values, with empathy and identification among all society members. Decision making is generally consensual, rather than hierarchical, especially in the more recent works. There is not a leader in most of these societies; indeed, there is not an individual hero in most of these books-- there is a heroic group or the role of protagonist is shared among seevral characters. The technology in these women-oriented worlds is much different from what we find in our own. In most cases, it is deliberately low tech, often to the point of hand tools and domesticated animals rather than motors and mechanisms. In virtually all cases reproduction is controlled by the women.

Angelika Bammer gives a good introduction to more contemporay writings in her book Partial Visions. After reviewing the historical perspective, she focuses on precisely ten years of writing from 1969 to 1979. Most of the recent utopian novels have come from the science fiction genre. Ursula K. LeGuin has been responsible for inventing many other worlds. In The Dispossed, she contrasts two societies Anarres and Urros. In the utopian Anarres she presents a society of anarchists, where the primary directive is for each person to develop his/her own life to the fullest and thereby move the whole of society on to perfection. Both men and women are encouraged to develop the traits that our society has assigned to one gender or the other, and people are encouraged to work to their potential in whatever direction it may lie. In an earlier novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin created a society where the residents were generally asexual, with the freedom to become either men or women when they chose to reproduce. Here, as in The Dispossed, there is no division between weak and strong, dominant and submission, or active and passive.

Another widely read author with strains of utopianism surfacing from time to time in her work is Doris Lessing. In the utopian genre, she has authored the "Canopus in Argos: Archives" series: Shikasta: Ree, Colonised Planet 5; The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five; The Sirian Experiments; The Making of the Representative For Planet 8; and Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. Lessing originally intended Shikasta as an independent work, but became obsessed with the world she created and wanted to spend more time in it. Again, the values are humane, and the society is supportive of the growth of the individual. The constant expansion of human awareness brings about a better life. Her Memoirs of a Survivor presents three levels of society, narrated by an aging woman who has survived the breakdown of civilization.

Feminist utopias entered the mainstream with the appearance of Woman on the Edge of Time by popular novelist Marge Piercy. Piercy presents a contemporary Hispanic woman in America-- in a mental hospital for much of the novel-- who travels through time to the utopia that is to come, with one brief sojourn into a future dystopia. In Piercy's future world, Mattapoisett, groups of three individuals decide together to parent an infant born from a test tube. There is no distinction in role between male and female. Indeed, Piercy's character from our time initially believes her visitor from Mattapoisett to be male, since she has never known a woman with such freedom.

The best-selling book in the genre is Margaret Atwood's novel of dystopia The Handmaid's Tale, which has also received much critical attention. Atwood projects the success of the religious right and the antifeminist movement, coupled with continued abuse of the planet's resources, to a future Republic of Gilead with carefully proscribed and strictly enforced sex roles for all. The handmaid of the title exists for the purpose of procreation. The society is on the verge of collapse, because of pollution of the air, land, and sea, and at a near constant state of war. The technological advances have fallen upon harder times, but there is no movement to a softer technology in this male-dominated world.

Suzette Haden Elgin (whose other works in the genre include Judas Rose and At the Seventh Level) tells the same historical reality as Atwood, but in Elgin's case the logical consequence is a utopian world. In Elgin's Native Tongue, the women are set up in separate houses so the men do not have to be bothered with them, but they take advantage of their separation from men (except when needed for sexual duties) to create a language that names all of the concepts and qualities that the man-made languages of the known universe exclude. As the women have a proper language in which to speak, they find that the world in which they speak beomes more balanced and gentle.

Many writers have tried to envision a world without men. In the ground-breaking novella "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", James Tiptree Jr. tells of a space expedition that encounters a manned space vehicle that has been lost in orbit since our present day. The story describes the problems of the men in adjusting to an all-female world. Several women authors in the 1970s and 1980s have created all-female worlds. In most, the women have separated from the men to live in sparsely populated areas where they can redesign society.

Suzy McKee Charnas sets up the world that is to be left behind in Walk to the End of the World, and then she shows the new women's society in Motherlines. The "motherlines" of the title refer to the descendents from the original members of the band. Reproduction is by parthogenesis stimulated by a form of ritualized mating with horses. Women live in extended family "tents" and recognize that the activities of one of them affect the whole, and they make decisions accordingly. The overriding philosophy of the residents is that we are here to take care of things, not to change them.

In The Demeter Flower, by Rochelle (or Shelley) Singer, the women also separarte from the men, discovering along the way the demeter flower, a plant that will accomplish conception. Another novel of the type is Sally Miller Gearheart's The Wanderground. Culture here is advanced by maintaining a reverence for women's history, both good and bad, with decisions made by clear consensus. The Daughters of a Coral Dawn of whom Katherine V. Forrest writes are the descendents, all female, of an alien mother and an earthling father. Several generations of these women (all highly educated and each talented in a different essential field) leave the earth on their spaceship, the Amelia Earhart, to colonize an unpopulated planet.

Donna J. Young's Retreat, As It Was! tells the tale of a world before men. In some of its descendants an x chromosome is damaged, resulting in offspring with malformed sexual organs and a more aggressive nature. E. M. Broner gives an account of a group of women trying to establish their own community in the face of much opposition in contemporary Israel in A Weave of Women. In all of these, when violence is introduced it is from an outside force, These women can defend themselves when they need to, but they do not assume the role of aggressor.

Quite a few of these novels describe attempts to create utopia out of the aftermath of nuclear destruction. In Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake, the main emphasis is on healing, both of individuals and the earth itself. Snake, the central character, is a travelling healer, whose medical tools are a variety of snakes. Again here, there are no special "male" or "female" roles. The message of McIntyre's work is wholeness, which is gained from cooperation and trust. Those groups of individuals who try to protect themselves by isolating themselves from others endup destroyed. Margaret Elphinstone's The Incomer shows men and women living togther in small villages, but the men have surrendered the power of decision making and the dispensation of justice to the women, since this power in the hands of men led almost to total destruction in former times.

In Pamela Sargent's The Shore of Women and Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country, the women live within walled cities and are in total control of the government, science, and education of the world, while the men live in bands outside the walls and are chiefly involved in combat with competing bands. Tepper's world allows noncombative men to choose to live within Women's Country, and looks forward to the day when all men and women can again live in peace. In Sargent's world, men are shut out at a very yoing age and have little hope for survival and no hope for return. The men in The Gate to Women's Country foolishly believe the women to be their servants, while those in The Shore of Women are deluded into worshipping all women as aspects of the Goddess. Pamela Sargent has also explored utopian themes in her novels Venus of Dreams and Watchstar.

In Solution Three, by Naomi Mitchison, homosexual love and the cloning of individuals with desirable characteristics are originally used to preserve a peaceful balance in the population until more immediate problems of survival are solved. Towards the novels end, heterosexual love is rediscovered, and the resulting children further the society's recovery through the superior characteristics of these new members.

Dorothy Bryant has created a most pleasant world in The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (originally published as The Comforter). In this universe, which is parallel to own our but with a differnet rate of time, the residents live for the dream. Their eating, drinking, activity and rest are designed for optimal dreaming, and from their dreams come the physical and social structure of their world. The narrator comes to this world after murdering his girlfriend and nearly losing his own life in an automobile wreck. In the alternative universe he learns a gentler life-style, learns to respect women as equals, and in the end decides to return to our world to share his new knowledge and make amends for his past deeds. In Mary Staton's From the Legends of Biel, the journey is also to expand the borders of human thought and the society also uses the dream as a powerful tool. "Times past, present, and future are simultaneous. Space is nothing more than that through which time passes. Space is the wake of time."

More difficult to categorize is Joanna Russ's The Female Man, which gives the lives of four women, three from different periods of American history and a fourth from a parallel utopian world. All are actually aspects of one another and as their lives intersect, all find things to learn from the others. And Chaos Died is another utopian work by Russ. Starhawk, feminist, peace activist, and one of the leaders in the neo-paganist/women's spirituality movement presented a utopian novel The Fifth Sacred Thing in 1993. Starhawk contrasts two societies, one that has advanced technology and lost all view of self, and another that has turned inward and in nourished by the power that all people find within themselves.

A relatively new trend that is closely related to the feminist utopian novel is the feminist historical romance, reconstructing pre-patriarchal times. One widely read example of this genre is Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which takes the classically utopian tale of Camelot, and retells it through the eyes of the women characters. In her version, Camelot fails because King Arthur has turned his back on the Goddess and Her forces and embraced the Christian God. Others in this genre are Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's Reindeer Moon and Cecelia Holland's Pillar of the Sky (which tells of the building of Stonehenge). In both of these books, society begins to deteriorate when men and women begin to live in nuclear families rather than in supportive single-sex dwellings. Linda Lay Shuler agains develops this them in She Who Remembers, the first of this genre to consider prehistoric life in America. Moyra Caldecott's "Tall Stones" series-- The Tall Stones, The Temple of the Sun, Shadow on the Stones, and The Silver Vortex-- also tells of a time when women held more power in society.

Utopia is very much alive in the writings of contemporary feminists. Past, present, and future are being analyzed for weaknesses and strengths, and women are providing alternatives for each period. The writers discussed in this paper have shared their insights, have made suggestions for the improvement of society, and have pointed out dangerous trends in the present that they think should not be ignored. They have also given us many hours of pleasurable reading. I am interested in hearing from you, about your favorite woman-made worlds. Please e-mail me at msmoontiger@hotmail.com.

This page is hosted by