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.
[Read more: no spoilers yet and no plot spoilers at all]