Women’s Liberation: amusing and endearing?

 

To start, the cover of this book was a bit deceiving. It’s just a really odd cover with the woman floating in a nighty. Anyways, besides the cover the book was compelling and frightening. The more books I read concerning futuristic societies the more concerned I am about the marginalization of women now and in the future. This novel (and previous novel from our course) have made me think in a more divisive way, because men and women are different, and it shows how in the course of history women have been subjugated for so long that it’s almost foolish to believe that it couldn’t change back just as easily or that men and/or government couldn’t just take back whatever power women held. Many of the authors in this course have discussed this topic but I think this novel really struck me right between the eyes with a possible future.

 
This novel has continued with the future as it might possibly be, it does not lose all technology like The Slave and the Free. Things are pretty similar to what people would assume of the future, flying cars, aliens communicating with earth, better medical attention etc. However in this future women have been forced back into an extremely submissive position, one in which they have no power and are ruled by the men. The government called the 20^th century “an aberration in cultural science that led briefly to such bizarre phenomenon as women practicing medicine, sitting as judges—even as a Supreme Court Justice, incomprehensible as that seems to us today– and filling male roles throughout society, can be rather easily explained. Men are by nature kind and considerate, and a woman’s eagerness to play at being a physician or a Congressman or a scientist can be both amusing and endearing; we can understand, looking back upon the period, how it must have seemed to 20^th C. men that there could be no harm in humoring the ladies”(72).

 
Elgin begins each chapter with some glimpse of the period using advertisements from the period (like that of the trained wife), government briefings, definitions of women’s areas like gynecology, and then she also adds poignant feminist writings from the 20^th century. These are interesting insights into both the future she is depicting and the past which they have moved away from. By portraying history in this way, Elgin really brings reality to her story, and I think it’s the most well done portrayal of this that we have seen so far. Using these fictional briefings and random essays etc. Elgin’s work seems realistic and logical.
Really, this novel made me contemplate a future in which women could be put back into the submissive role, and simply put, it is a terrifying possibility. However, this novel did not look at the rest of the world, instead focusing on North America.

p.s. The whole disposable babies and ‘volunteering’ your children (without their mother’s permission) was fairly disturbing, especially that they couldn’t even describe what happened to the babies. Oh yeah and drugging babies with LSD to try and make them able to speak some alien language. Creepy and possible.