The Gate to Women’s Country (1988) is post-apocalyptic SF about gender roles. It’s probably the best book in the subgenre of SF where the women live in civilized cities and the nasty rough men live outside. I talked about my problems with this kind of eighties feminist SF in my post on Native Tongue:
[Books like this are] taking the position that women and men are like cats and dogs who live together uneasily. These are all eighties books, and I think they were all written in reaction to and in dialogue with not just second wave feminism in general but Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (post) in specific, and I think there’s a way in which they’re all picking at the wrong end of The Female Man. The Female Man and The Left Hand of Darkness (post) both ask what worlds would be like if everyone was human and there was only one gender. Because Russ did that by killing off all the men, these eighties books write about men and women as different species, as natural enemies.
The Gate to Women’s Country is an effective distillation of the memes of this subgenre, and it’s a good story. It’s centrally a story about people, which is what keeps me reading, but it’s also playing with some very odd ideas about what people are, and especially what men are and what is possible for them. It constantly teeters on the edge of caricature but always stays on the right side, largely because in this novel Tepper appears to have empathy for her male characters. She gives us a set of conflicted characters in a world where the dice are loaded against them, characters who are constrained by the world they live in to be the people they are. And she puts them in a story that leads you through—there’s a kind of story where there are questions raised and you want to keep reading to find out the answers to those questions. When you re-read a story like that knowing the answers it’s a very different experience. Some books don’t hold up at all, others develop more resonance. This is one of the latter.
The Gate to Women’s Country begins with Stavia being summoned to the men’s side of the wall to hear her fifteen year old son repudiate her. We then return through Stavia’s life from childhood, always returning to the ongoing present time, as we learn the events that led to this repudiation by her son. Along the way we discover the world these characters take for granted, and then we discover that the world really isn’t the way most people think it is.
Tepper is a very good writer, and even when I bitterly disagree with her philosophy I generally find her books extremely readable. She can be heavy handed but she’s terrific at conveying both world and characters. Even books of hers I hate (Beauty, grr) I remember really well years after reading. I frequently want to argue with her ideas while really caring about the characters. This is very much the case here. There are things I really enjoy about The Gate to Women’s Country—the wonderful re-write of Women of Troy as Iphigenia at Ilium, Stavia, seeing herself as two people, one who watches and one who acts, and Chernon, torn between expectations. Tepper is terrific at making me feel completely immersed in the people and the story. Even if I’m not enjoying it, I never question the reality of the world until I step away from it.
What’s annoying is that it’s much easier to talk about the irritating things in The Gate to Women’s Country than it is to talk about what makes it good. It’s good because it’s an unputdownable story about interesting people in difficult situations in a world that only science fiction could have made. But nobody ever talks about that, whereas they have long conversations about how irritating it is for a whole host of reasons, not least because the whole premise on which these people have deliberately and wilfully constructed their society is completely insane.
Serious world spoilers coming up, and part of the pleasure of reading this is definitely to discover how the world works!
The women of Women’s Country are breeding humanity for docility, consciously and intentionally, without the knowledge of most of the citizens of either gender. Leaving aside all issues of morality, the strange thing about this is the crazy way in which they are going about it. To start with, they have most of the men—eighty percent—living outside the walls as warriors, in a culture of honour and glory and bronze weapons and no medical care. Then they send their five year old sons to the warriors, and lead the warriors to believe they are the fathers of these boys. From five to fifteen the boys are forced to stay outside the walls, and from fifteen to twenty-five the boys are permitted to return home, if they are “dishonourable” enough. After that they are full warriors, old enough to be risked in battle and with no hope of return.
Aside from the way in which this breaks the mothers’ hearts and all of that, this seems to me like the world’s worst way to get civilized people! They are proud they have increased the returning percentage from five to twenty. They are convinced they have done this purely through eugenics—sons of returnees return at twenty percent, sons of warriors at only five. It’s insane! I’m not saying nature doesn’t have something to do with the way people behave, but so does nurture, and if you’re thrusting little kids into a militaristic culture like that they are going to be seduced by it, whereas if you kept them at home and taught them things then you’d have much less of a problem and less of a need to have manufactured wars to kill them off. Even if you grant the idea that men are inherently violent and awful, which I don’t for a second concede, indoctrinating them with barbarism so as to breed from the ones in which it doesn’t take seems like a completely mad idea.
So this is the one central absurdity of the novel. If you can either believe this or suspend your disbelief in it—or I suppose grit your teeth and roll your eyes a lot, which is what I do—then you can start to explore the morality and the characters and the questions Tepper’s actually interested in.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two poetry collections and nine novels, most recently the Hugo and Nebula nominated Among Others. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
I’ve always liked Sheri S. Tepper’s books although some can be very difficult reading. Will you also be doing a review of After Long Silence and Grass?
Not right now, but maybe eventually.
It’s been a long time since I read this, but as I recall it, the eugenics project of the women was a secret, carried out under the noses of a militaristic male culture that thought that it was running the show. Sending the male children out to be indoctrinated etc. were concessions that the women had to make in order that this secret could be preserved. Or do I remember it wrongly?
I loved this book. To me the point of it was that any smaller group who tries to shape humanity’s future to their vision without the rest of us knowing is inherently shortsighted, selfish, and immoral and should not be supported. I feel like she showed that at the end when we find that a small number of people walk away after finding out the truth. The people who leave such machinations behind are to me the whole point of the book.
Everyone focuses on the society/gender portrayals and the conflict between their personal POVs and the ones in the novel, when to me that’s inconsequential next to the fact that no one is right, nor has the right, to do what is done within it.
The way I remember it was that exposing the boys to the militaristic culture was a deliberate part of the forced evolution process, so as to select only for those children that could resist it.
I read this book quite a while ago but I remember being royally pissed at the big reveal. “Let’s breed men until they are more like women because men are stupid apes!” I agree that Tepper is a good writer and I’ve read several of her books and enjoyed them to a point but there is a serious man hating vibe in everything of hers I ever read. I always wondered if something happened to her in her past to make her feel so nasty about guys.
When I see the name Sherri S. Tepper I always think of the old Tom Petty song Refugee “Somewhere, somehow somebody must have pushed you around some.”
Raskos: The “under their noses” genetics program is right, but then it’s explained that the women deliberately set up the whole thing including the warrior culture, including at first using women to pretend to be the warriors in the first generation until they’d raised some boys. They needn’t have done that!
MadLogician: Yes indeed, but that seems to me to be not only cruel but also stupid. I’ve raised a child and been involved in the lives of other kids, and that’s not how you do it.
FesterBestertester: I have also found that in some of her books, and indeed a dislike of the whole human race in some, but this one has much more sympathy for all the characters than many of her others.
Whenever I read a Sheri Tepper book, I spend the first ten to twenty pages being blown away by the beauty of the writing, and the rest of it being repulsed by the quality of the thinking. With this one, I did not at all feel, as shellywb did, that she was trying to tell us that what the women were doing was wrong. I think she approved of it, just as she apparently approved of the way the spirit of the Earth, or whatever, just gobbled up people’s “excess” children in The Family Tree.
…On the other hand I’d still rather read something by Tepper than a Heinlien sex scene. ;)
I enjoyed this book at the time I read it, but found it disturbing. Her flawed premise is the same as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Free Amazon solution to having sons – let their father have them at age 5. Why bother trying to raise civilized human beings, when they are only boys? Let’s take these little innocents that we’ve nurtured and reject them. If they are truly worthy, they will come back to us. It also presupposes that only women have nurturing instincts, which is also a flawed concept. Tepper is a fascinating writer, but definitely not escapist.
Jo, neither I nor Google can find your post on The Female Man — which I’ve been half-meaning to reread. Can you please post a working link?
Didn’t care for (or finish) Gate, sorry.
Pete — I have never written about The Female Man, what I liked to was Brit Mandelo’s post no idea why that didn’t actually link, sorry.
Coming rather late to this, but I’ve only just read the book- like Walton I was rather disturbed by the severity of the nature over nurture basis of the Damned Few’s plan, although it did put some other issues I had with the society into perspective. As a way of preventing male aggression from being a problem in the short term, “Give all the male children to be raised in a society that prizes aggression and physical dominance,” seemed like a poor plan (and look! It’s apparently not uncommon for the men to plot forcible overthrow of the women’s society).
As an evolutionary death trap for genes coding for aggression, well, with the starting assumptions about nature vs nurture discussed above, it makes a certain amount of sense, if not morally.
The description of the women carrying out this project as the Damned Few and the observation that they have little hope of entering the heaven of the merciful makes this a fairly rare example of Hard Women Making Hard Choices- one sees Hard Men rather more frequently, occasional with a token female character along, but I can’t think off the top of my head, of another case where the folks making the immoral choice at the cost of their souls (literal or metaphorical) for the good of society were primarily female.