Feminists

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Female_Man

"Whileaway" is a world where all the men died of a plague hundreds of years ago. The world is populated entirely by females, who learned to conceive children through fertilizing one another's ova. Russ describes Whileaway as a somewhat utopian world but there are negatives, too. It's a highly structured society where people have very specific roles and responsibilities depending on their ages. Women are allowed to be with their children until they are five years old, at which point the children are separated from their mothers and sent away to school, where they are taught to survive in the wilderness. Adolescent children roam the earth proving their skills at hunting and sometimes engaging in fatal duels with one another. Once they reach adulthood, they choose mates and settle into a life of work, rotating through various kinds of jobs. It's mostly agricultural. Women who refuse to work are executed, we learn toward the end of the novel.

The book was written in the early 1970s and follows four women whose worlds literally collide - it's science fiction, so the women drop in and out of one another's worlds and meet one another. These different worlds and lives present four different perspectives on the roles of women and challenges they face - including the feminist/lesbian women of Whileaway and another character, a female assassin who lives in a world where men and women are literally at war with one another. A third character lives in a highly sexist world where the Depression never ended and there was no women's movement of the 1950s+. The fourth character - named Joanna and clearly representing the author herself - lives in the world of the 1970s and tries to cope with sexism and misogyny while struggling to retain her identity as a woman.

I was a child in the early 1970s and I remember each of these four perspectives on the roles of women being topical at the time - some women were "becoming" lesbians and retreating to agricultural communal living, some were engaged in a very hostile "war" with men, while many women were continuing the traditional roles and gendered responsibilities of women, and some were questioning the whole thing and trying to figure out the best approach. My mother I would put in that last category - she's the same generation as the author Joanna Russ and I recall her struggling with the limited but still somewhat confusing options available to women in the early 1970s. Do I go back to work after having children, or stay at home and be a "proper" wife and mother? What are the economic consequences of my not working? What are the social consequences of my working outside the home? Will my children suffer emotional harm? Will I suffer emotional harm if I ignore my own needs to fulfill myself outside traditional gender roles?