This month’s Dystopian Book Club selection is Sherri Tepper’s 1988 post-apocalyptic novel The Gate to Women’s Country. Set three hundred years after a nuclear war, it describes a society where city-states are run by women, with male warriors living in garrisons outside the towns. I can’t make the session, so I’m sharing my notes here.
The book was a good counterpoint to one of the group’s previous reads, Demonic Males, a study of male violence through primatology. That book made the point that societal structures can improve or worsen violence. Tepper’s book set out, somewhat heavy-handedly, to describe a scheme for reforming society.
Tepper’s writing feels clumsy and unsophisticated in places, which makes the novel feel didactic. We’re essentially given a tour of Marthatown through the eyes of Stavia, with incidents through her lifetime. The weak plot and characterisation make the book feel more like a debating point than a story, with far too much exposition. There are also some troubling scenes featuring sexual assaults which I suspect would be very different were Tepper writing today.
The most interesting aspect of the book was the play that is excerpted throughout, Iphigenia at Ilium. This is described in places as a ‘comedy’, despite the script itself being grim, which produces an interesting irony. My knowledge of the classics is flawed, so I didn’t appreciate the reference to Euripedes’ The Trojan Women, but this worked well despite that.
There’s an interesting question as to whether Tepper (or, more fairly, the book itself) considers Women’s Country as a good thing or not. The deceptions at the heart of Women’s Country are ultimately the place’s greatest problem. To a contemporary reader, the book’s focus on biological essentialism and eugenics feels vile – including a notorious paragraph explaining how homosexuality has been eradicated in this new world. I didn’t feel the book was ironic enough to be condemning Women’s Country as strongly as it deserved.
For me, the most troubling aspect was the idea that the women would gladly pass their sons into an all-male society that was inherently unsafe and brutalising. Tepper is trying to deal with essential problems – how male-led militaries threaten to lead the world to ruin – but ultimately the book has no answers and misses the chance to ask the right questions.