The Shore of Women by Pamela Sargent

I have now read at least three books that are about a world without men. Or rather, if not a world without men, a world where women are the safekeepers of civilization, and men are exiled to short brutish lives in the wilderness. There's a distinct women/urban centers/civilization vs. men/wilderness/savagery vibe to most of them. (The third, to be precise, is about a world where a plague killed off all the men. Oh, and of course, there's Y: The Last Man as well. So, four.)  With the exception of the graphic novel, the three others were written by women in the late 1980s to early 1990s.

Leaving aside Leona Gom's The Y Chromosome, The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper and The Shore of Women, by Pamela Sargent, are remarkably similar in setting. After men have almost destroyed the world, the women have become separatists, exiling the men to live low-technology lives and only summoning them to the cities to impregnate the women, while the women have had many generations to consolidate their power and that of their daughters.

It's been long enough that some of the daughters question what is going on, the overall plan, and whether or not men are irredeemably hopeless. (To be precise, in Tepper's novel, there are a few men who are allowed to be in the city, but they are believed to be sexually uninterested in women. They live with the matriarchal families almost but not quite as servants. There's more to this, but for that, go read that book.)

What's interesting to me is that Tepper's book (if I'm remembering it correctly, I read it a long time ago) comes to the conclusion that the experiment, as it was structured, was and is a success - and indeed it's the only way women could ever be truly safe. (I haven't gone into all the details, so believe me that it's a bit more complicated than I'm presenting it here.)

Sargent's book comes to a very different conclusion. Not only does she end up arguing that the world it creates is less than optimal for everyone, in the end, it is the separatism that makes it even harder, perhaps even impossible, for men and women to be anything but at war with one another. Peace between the sexes  might be difficult, but domination of one by the other makes any moment where both sides see the other as human (in more than just individual cases) impossible. (No, these books do not at all go into anyone who doesn't conform to a gender binary, so there's obviously large swathes of the human condition that are being left out).

The Shore of Women is told through three viewpoint characters, so here's more proof that that narrative trick didn't just come into being in the last ten years, thank you very much. We have Laissa, the daughter of a woman who delayed sending her second son out to his father far later than is commonly allowed, and only ended up doing so under pain of exile. Laissa distanced herself from her mother to avoid sharing her disgrace and punishment.

Second is Birana, whose mother killed her lover (or lover's lover?). Mother and daughter were exiled together because Birana did not run for help at the critical moment. Her mother dies shortly after they leave the city walls, and Birana expects to die quickly herself.

Third is Arvil, Laissa's male twin, who has grown up most of his life outside the walls, in the company of a small band of men, who take on the roles of father/uncles, lovers, rivals, etc. He is quick and clever, but has no education or access to education. The reason that men are still living in such conditions after centuries? The cities of women seek out and destroy any attempt to settle or innovate, keeping the men tribal and nomadic.

Arvil is the only one left alive after such an attack, and in the wake of this, he finds Birana, who expects to be raped and killed. (Rape is frequently in the background, but never foregrounded. The threat, however, is very present.)  Over a very long period of time, in which Birana masquerades as a man to save her life, she and Arvil become closer.

Let's take a second to talk about sexuality. The men outside the walls take lovers amongst each other, but they are kept sexually attracted to women by mind links to the city in which the women feed them erotic dreams featuring the different aspects of "The Goddess," which is supposed to keep the men worshipful and subservient. Inside the city, women pair with women, and the idea of sleeping with a man has become utterly repugnant and taboo. So taboo that no one seems to have a kink that way, which...I find a little hard to believe. Not that culture would affect sexuality, but that no woman would have transgressive sexual thoughts. I'm not sure that's how that works.

At any rate, after surviving another attack, and Arvil being instructed by the city to kill Birana because otherwise, the men might discover she's just a person instead of a goddess, the two strike out on their own. They discover a remote tribe that has sheltered a woman for decades, at the cost of her sexual availability, although she's still seen as divine. Later, they find an even further tribe of men who have discovered their wives and daughters are humans, and therefore treat them as subhuman, and are slowly dying of inbreeding.

In the middle of this, Birana gets pregnant, as she and Arvil have managed to start a relationship that is fairly equal, in which he understands that she is a person, and eventually manages to understand why the cities have treated men the way they do. But this is fragile, and localized to two people, and the distance between men and women has been created to be so vast, that it seems like any reconciliation on a wider scale would be nearly impossible.

Laissa comes back into the story at the end, having bucked the system enough to get permission to go out and get stories of the men, look for some redeeming features to see if they should revisit the experiment. Of course, she runs into Birana and Arvil and their new daughter.

There is no neat resolution to this story, just a feeling that women's society has become stagnant in their attempt to not go down the paths of war, men's society is brutish and short, and never the twain shall possibly meet. The overwhelming sense is that this experiment means that there will never been a way for men to accept women as equals, once they've seen them as goddesses. If humanity were revealed, subjugation begins again.

Are there more books on this topic out there in the land of science fiction? Let me know!