Dette er et uddrag fra mit gamle RUC projekt på engelsk modul 3, som hedder "Coming Home to Mother". Emnet er udviklingen indenfor kvindelige forfatteres utopiske romaner (England/USA) set i forhold til tidens politiske idéer indenfor kvindebevægelsen. Hele rapporten kan lånes på Roskilde Universitets bibliotek. Fodnoter er ikke medtaget.

This is a short extract from a project I wrote during my English study at Roskilde University:"Coming Home to Mother". It investigates the development within American/British utopian science fiction written by women.

Introduction

Definition of utopias and feminist science fiction

Description of an ideal state were expressed as early as in Plato's Republic but the genre was first named after Sir Thomas More's novel Utopia written in 1516. The word utopia he created from the Greek eu topos which means "good place" and ou topos which means "no place". At that time it was considered to be a "present ideal state which man, who is by nature limited or, in the theological term, fallen, cannot achieve." (Keulen, 1991:16) After the nineteenth century the belief in progress has led to the idea that we can change society and that there is no static common nature of man, thus giving a new political dimension to the genre. Today the word has come to mean different things, there is e.g. the utopian thought, utopian communities and then finally the genre of utopian literature (either satirical, dystopian or eutopian).

There have been many (and different) definitions of what constitutes a utopia within the literary genre. The most short and precise I have come across is as follows:

"A utopia is the fictional representation of an ideal polity. It is political in nature, narrative in form, literary only in part."(Bammer, 1991:13)

A dystopia is then defined as an inverted utopia, "An imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible" as it is stated very simply in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The criticism of our present society will either be implicit or explicit. Sometimes a utopia also includes descriptions of a fictional dystopian society to serve as a contrast or a visitor from our time will make a comparison between the two social systems, be persuaded of the superiority of the utopian society and either marry one of the local girls (it is mostly a man!) and integrate in the society or return to his own country with new ideas for reforms. Whatever form is chosen "A utopia must contain a fairly detailed description of a social system that is non-existent but located in time and space. At least one of the foci of the work must be such a description² (Sargent, 1979: xvii) and it must describe ³all the major social arrangements an author thinks necessary and desirable for the good life"(Keulen, 1991:22)

Keulen divides utopias into those who are future oriented (positive about the use of technology), those who are past oriented (pastoral and anti-technological) and the modern utopias from the 1970s and onwards with a strong political argument which are then called social utopias. (Keulen, 1991: 22) I would argue that social utopias often manage to mix the two other categories.

Sally M. Gearhart has defined "a feminist utopian novel as one which: a. contrasts the present with an envisioned idealized society (separated from the present by time or space),

• offers a comprehensive critique of present values/conditions,
• sees men or male institutions as a major cause of present social ills, and
• presents women not only as at least the equals of men but also as the sole arbiters of their reproductive functions" (Rohrlich/Baruch, 1984:296)

This includes both the traditional utopian genre but also the recent sub-genre of feminist Science fiction utopia: During the 1970s the genres of utopia and Science Fiction blended so much that it will no longer be possible to label many works as either SF or utopian fiction. "Today the utopian novel exists almost solely as a sub-type of science-fiction", Lyman T. Sargent writes (Sargent, 1979:xvii).

Science Fiction has been defined by Darko Suvin as "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interactions of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author¹s empirical environment."(Keulen, 1991:24) Before the 1960 the genre usually described what could be the future consequences of innovations in science and technology, which Suvin calls the extrapolative model, and it was usually centered around the "hard sciences" (Keulen, 1991:24). Later the genre would insist less on empiricism, and this model he calls the analogic model where "the objects, figures, and up to a point the relationship from which this indirectly modelled world starts can be quite fantastic (in the sense of empirically inverifiable) as long as they are logically, philosophically and mutually consistent" (Keulen, 1991: 25)

The new genre borrows from as diverse genres as utopias, realism, myths, psychology, satire, political manifestos, the female Gothic, popular science and much more. Women search for their true selves like in fantasy, build up new societies as in the utopian genre, criticise contemporary society like in realism (often offering parallel societies/realities) and like in myths or dreams women merge with other life forms or enter other levels of consciousness. There is a tendency to focus less on technology and "hard science" as in "main-stream" SF and more on the soft ones (anthropology, psychology etc.) and even parapsychology (which is a science to some). The mixing of genres offers a whole range of new possibilities:

"By borrowing from other literary forms it lets writers defamiliarise the familiar, and make familiar the new and strange. These twin possibilities, apparently contradictory (but SF is full of contradictions), offer enormous scope to women writers who are thus released from the constraints of realism. The social and sexual hierarchies of the contemporary world can be examined through the process of estrangement, thus challenging normative ideas of gender roles; and visions of different worlds can be created, made familiar to the reader through the process of narrative. SF narrative can be used to break down, or to build up."(Lefanu, 1978: 21-22)

The problem then arises concerning what to call this new genre. Joanna Russ calls it "What if" literature, Marlene Barr "Feminist fabulation", Donawerth and Kolmerten prefer "literature of estrangement" and Natalie Rosinsky calls it "speculative fiction". (Donawerth, 1994:2) Throughout my project I will mostly use the concept feminist utopias to be able to include the entire development in the genre from the 19th century and onwards. And it is in that century that I will start the description of the development in order to put the two utopian novels in question into a broader literary perspective and later I will also include the historical context.

Utopias by American women in the 19th century

Daphe Patai has divided utopias written by women in the USA and Britain in general into two groups; one concerning traditional gender roles, militarism, chauvinism, racism, anti-communism and anti-feminism.The other concerns pacifism, egalitarianism, socialism and feminism. (Keulen, 1991:25).

1890-1912 was the period in which America saw a boom in utopian writing, however only a minority was written by women. The utopias were all very different but few could be considered feminist as such. Many were religious or advocated temperance or other political causes of moral reform. The most political not only stressed the need for female values and motherhood but also equal marriages, access to education, employment (not factory or domestic routine jobs but well-paid socially useful ones) and to get the right to vote (Albinski, 1988:62). Others were mere flight utopias to a pastoral Eden, or like in the 3 novels by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (written between 1868-1887) women can only find peace, equality and self-realisation in a heavenly afterlife, whereas in reality on earth all stays the same. Sometimes the vision of equality and reforms turned out to be only a dream like in Mary Griffiths' Three Hundred Years Hence (1836) or the experiment ended with death or the traditional marriage of the heroine.

While men often wrote of future metropolitan societies women wrote of either contemporary or near-future urban or rural settings which would not take many generations to develop, optimistic as they were due to the many community experiments and co-operative city settlements at the time (Albinski, 1988:45&51). However, even in the nationalist and socialist writings the emphasis was on the individual moral responsibility for change within a communal setting prior to political changes in national laws or forms of government - suffragette militancy never really entered the utopias as in Britain (Albinski, 1988:60-61&49). The hopes were set for technology, science and the process of evolution which would relieve physical work, increase female virtues and influence while reducing brutal force and competitions as remnants of past primitivism (Albinski, 1988:24).

Mary Bradley Lane's novel Mizora from 1880 is said to be the only American feminist utopia before Gilman's Herland, but closer to Social Darwinism. In the interior of the earth is situated a society where the "race of men" have been eliminated since women discovered the secret of life:parthenogenesis. After that children can be born without the previous sexual act which formerly degraded women so, and protective laws are no longer needed since the men caused all the violence. Great developments in science and by eugenics programmes have resulted in a superior technological civilisation and produced an aristocratic race of healthy white women with blue eyes. These well-dressed ladies of leisure spend their days in fine mansions, being served by a class of servants while they boast of how classes have been eliminated. They elevate intelligence and science as a religion and have no need or wish of being in contact with nature ever again (Albinski, 1988:50 & Keulen, 1991:26).

The development 1920-1970

This period saw a decline in the number of utopias written by women but an increase in dystopias. The hopes of the feminist movement seemed cooled down to a firm slumber from which it would first awake in the 1960s. Feminism faced a cultural backlash after 1925 resulting in internal quarrels and conservative elevation of motherhood and domesticity. The organised feminists feared losing all they had gained in legal changes and also to be identified with European "ills" such as communism and sexual permissiveness. Conservatives and anti-feminists (male as well as female) tended to write dystopias where manly women rule over men as a warning of what the "New Woman" could do if given too many rights (Albinski, 1988:108). Their utopias in turn depicted women as delicate and feminine and it was also common to use Freudian arguments for what was "women¹s proper place". All in all it seemed a return to the days of domestic virtues, but no one had any moral crusades to lead the way with any longer, no bright dreams for a better life for women. No gender problems were discussed as in the earlier period and neither was the culture/nature opposition as it was mostly national political themes discussed (Albinski, 1988:6).

After the first World War the world saw what totalitarian states could do and therefore it was no longer possible to deal with the utopian theme with the same innocence and optimism as earlier, and certainly not the faith in the eugenics movement which earlier utopias boldly had promoted. Man had proven to have unforeseen evil and uncontrollable characteristics that could be released against fellow human beings, we were no more ruled by logic and self-control than the wild savages evolution claimed to have superseded. In Britain women had a fear of totalitarian states where women were used as breeders and where eugenics and science were used to control women's reproduction in a civilisation in ruins and class division. The same fear was not prevalent in the USA to the same degree, there the world that the British women feared as dystopia would constitute conservative totalitarian utopias for Americans. (Albinski, 1988:111) In the pulp science-fiction of the 1920s and 30s women kept on dreaming of technological wonders in future high-tech worlds. It was not until the 1950s and the threat of nuclear power that science was looked upon as evil in the USA. But the 50s was also the time when science fiction began to take over the role of the classical utopia/dystopia and when a "back-to-nature" nostalgia returned.(Albinski, 1988:124)

In the period in general there were the same conservative, anti-socialist and anti-feminist trends in the US as in Europe but also a continuation of the spiritualist ideas of the previous century, turning into a sort of religious escapism. The female dream of a sacred space for the chosen virtuous ones was kept alive as an undercurrent in society (Albinski, 1988:6).

The characteristics of feminist science-fiction utopias in the 1970s

As expressions of women's utopian dreams gradually were transferred from the classical utopian genre into the genre of science-fiction the authors faced the same obstacles as any minority entering a new field - a long tradition of enmity and neglect. Just as with male/anti-feminist writers of traditional (utopian) literature so have male SF writers always taken for granted the traditional sex-roles in their imaginary future spaces. "But because within the genre women are commonly identified with nature, and because nature is both the object of the rational hero¹s conquest and the obstacle in his way, women often carry a special charge of menace in SF" (Barr, 1981:53) In the same category are aliens and robots, symbols of fear of other races, nationalities or classes.

Joanna Russ noticed in the early 70s that the women writers of SF at that time tended to imitate the male tradition and value system, much like the first female writers of fiction in general . Often they had male protagonists or wrote under a male pseudonym. The women's personal or family lives were not seen as important and no gender roles were challenged.

Joanna Russ says there are 3 kinds of sex roles in main-stream SF and I think that we can just as well include utopian writing in this category

a) those that support status quo

b) role reversals (usually seen as evil - anti-feminist)

c) equal roles where "crucial questions about the rest of society (e.g. personal relations and who's doing the work women usually do) are not answered"
(Barr, 1981:72-3)

Feminist utopias are different in that they try to answer these questions about the role of women, the division of labour and personal relations. Feminist writers from the 1970s and onwards have consciously used and expanded SF to include topics of social change usually reserved for classical utopian literature. It is as if they continue where the first wave feminists stopped, only now more was at stake than female rights to work, vote, educate and divorce - the entire survival of the globe was suddenly at risk. Other races, classes and the environment were discovered as allied instead of enemies in the struggle against the common enemy - patriarchal capitalism and the military industry. With the renewed interest in psychoanalysis the subconscious and sexuality should be freed and no longer fought. Inspired by the discussions within the developing feminist movement female writers found these neglected topics about women to be the most central and engaged in a dialogue with each other on how we could live with each other if only...

This new sub-form called feminist SF utopias did not arrive until the emergence of works by e.g. Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, Marge Piercy, Suzy McKee Charnas and Sally Miller Gearhart. Yet, even if their topics have very much in common on the surface (and I will list them below) they also contain differences on a deeper level due to the continuation of the struggle between the two strands of interpretation of social or biological determinism within feminism. Women agree on how they would not like to live in a world so increasingly repressive of women and nature (the criticism that ecofeminists have directed against our present paradigm) but then they do not agree on the question of biology versus socialisation and about men and their possibility for "rehabilitation" which of course reflects the split within the women's movement between the socialist and separatist fractions.

The dystopian societies

Dystopias have always been part of the political debates as mentioned earlier, either as conservative warnings of what would happen if for example women or communism came into power and later, after the two world wars, increasingly warning against fascism and other kinds of totalitarian states. Feminist views of what constitutes a dystopian state have become increasingly political following the radicalism of feminism. It is interesting to note that what men have traditionally seen as utopias, women have seen as dystopias.

These dystopian societies are all: urban, totalitarian, militaristic, sexually repressive, patriarchal and repressing both women and nature. Women are limited to roles as mothers or whores and they have lost power over their own reproduction. They are often isolated from each other or fight amongst themselves and never get into contact with nature, often because it has simply been exterminated. Often society has been devastated by wars (sometimes nuclear or biological wars) and ecological disasters.

What is most important is that technology when retained by a patriarchal elite is used to control all the categories of people that are considered different, deviant and therefore dangerous. This kind of "logic of domination" which the ecofeminists talk about, force women into narrow biological functions as mothers or sex objects, either by the use of genetic manipulation and surgery. This is enforced by the use of planned regimentation of the citizens from an early age, as in Hitler Germany or religious fundamentalist states.The industry, the military and religion go together in creating a rigid and total web of control in all these patriarchal states.

We can recognise the dystopian fears of the writers in the 30s and 40s and further ahead, as mentioned above. Only now it has been enforced by the increased fear of ecological, nuclear disasters and religious fundamentalism. More than ever there is a feeling of a regular war being led against women and nature in particular. Conservative forces have always used religion to justify oppression and attack gains made by Women's Movements, and with the Moral Majority and the New Right's crusade in America especially, this is no coincidence.

Feminist utopian societies

What is most important is that whether or not these utopian societies are based on androgyny or separatism Russ finds that most of them are alike in the sense that they are all:

• communal
• quasi-tribal (in family structure and feeling)
• ecology minded
• classless without government (anarchistic)
• there are no big violent wars, only ideological or in self-defence.
• sexually permissive (not to break taboos but "to separate sexuality from questions of ownership, reproduction and social structure."(Barr 1981:76), there are no monogamy or nuclear families, an acceptance of homosexuality, often bisexuality as the norm.
• there is physical mobility (women can move where they want to with no fear)
• women have full access to work/the public sphere
• there is a theme of "the rescue of the female child" around puberty, offering her a new kind of ritual initiation (like in native cultures) giving her a chance to discover her own powers but also giving her free access to the public activities afterwards. Puberty is not just waiting to be awakened by a man and then closed up forever "the children therein are sexual beings, certainly, but the last thing (say the tales) that matter for the adolescent girls is that she be awakened by a kiss; what is crucial is that she be free."(Barr, 1981:80) instead they find themselves and their place in the web of creation.
• there is no material greed, competitiveness, scientific triumph or pursuit of status

The anarchistic and tribal-like organisation of most of these utopias tries to merge the democratic with the rights of the individuals, like a big extended family where none holds dominance over the others and agreements are reached through local negotiation where each individual has a voice. Personal relations are not restricted by institutions of marriage or biological family but are based on choice and equality. This goes both for the androgynous societies of e.g. Marge Piercy and the separatists. As mentioned earlier the difference between those in favour of biological determinism and social determinism lies mostly in the question of whether the values required to run them are innate to both men and women (it takes a political change and activism in our everyday lives) and consequently men and women can eventually live together peacefully or if these values can only be held by women. In that case the consequence is separatism and war between the sexes, not as a dystopian threat but a reality.

Another difference is the relation to technology. In the Piercy/Russ utopias the relation to nature and technology is based on a balance between the two, science only used for ethical purposes for the good of the entire society and if the ecological balance is not damaged. The more extreme separatists like Gearhart's The Wanderground and partly Charnas' Motherlines reject science of the traditional kind as male and dangerous. Ideology/religion in all of the societies (except Piercy) is pagan, worshipping a sort of female Goddess spirit or the general powers in nature but in a very spiritual or trandencendental manner, where one merges with nature directly without any priests as intermediates. In the following chapters I will explain more of the historical background for the development of feminist utopias in connection with the descriptions of Herland and The Wanderground.

British female utopias

In Britain the victorian utopias written by feminists tried to reverse the role usual given to women and so they () everything that linked women to nature and to the domestic sphere. Instead they emphazised their rationality and discipline so they could be included in the male sphere of politics and science. They used arguments from social biology (just as Gilman would later) to explain their rights as the moral guardians of the future race. Their utopian vision were more dealing with urban and technological experiments in socialism/more moral capitalism and legal changes bettering the conditions of women. They were optimistic about the promises of the industrial revolution and science. Home and marriage was not a topic they would deal with much since it all belonged to the stereotypes they were eager to escape. Therefore nature was to be mastered and children to be raised strictly and efficiently, even if they saw no alternative to marriage. The reforms they had in mind were rights for unmarried women, to get the vote, equal pay and better divorce laws that made financial independence easier to obtain.(Sargent in Barr; Future females, 93) Basic class and gender structures were never questioned, they did not wish to challenge men at all, not on the job market either (paid work was immoral) - they just wanted to become MP¹s as the ultimate goal. The women have the same evolutionary ideas as the men, but their version of eugenic control was a bit more humen and socially minded.(Albinski 27)

Sometimes the utopias were just a reversal of the Victorian society and with women ruling instead of men, like in Mrs George Corbett's New Amazonia in 1889 where the strict totalitarian (and capitalist) Mother state is ruled by celibate women using advanced technology to control of nature and eugenics. When men wrote of sex-role reversed societies it was presented as a dystopian perversion of nature to show what would happen if women really had the power they wished.(Sargent in Barr, 94) Men used the myth of the Amazon as dystopia (uncontrolled threatening sexuality, allied with nature, bad at governing), but the women used Amazons as a positive ideal, but just the opposite parts of the myth (strength, dignity, good health, freedom from men) but they refutet the part include aggressivity, sexualty and rural tribalism. (Albinski 22) As we will see later on this is just the sides to the myth that radical feminists will emphazise in the 1970's.

Lady Florence Dixie would use the Amazon myth in her Gloriana (1890) where education, discipline and physical excercise prepares women for political leadership (Gloriana becomes Prime Minister) and bring them on level of men. The women make a noble new race with moral courage and physical strength through eugenic planning, military drills, riding, shooting and studying. They have no interest in household duties but only want political suffrage and to improve the race, not to conquor anything.

The socialist utopia by Jane H. Clapperton called Margaret Dunmore (1888) reminds in her reform darwinism much of Gilman in her insistence of eugenic arguments for helping evolution on its way by disciplinary child education and natural selection where women choose only the most manageable husbands to breed with when she feels she has educated him to a proper moral stage.

There were also religious, anti-feminist or anti-scientific utopias/dystopias. Their fear of the way science and materialism could pervert society, nature, women¹s rights and the welfare of animals is well-known in our eco-feminist movement today, especially Frances Power Cobbe¹s fear of what could happen with male controled science reflect the that of contemporary feminist dystopias as e.g. Margaret Atwood. (Albinski 27)

The right role for women in Victorian male utopias were still as mother and wife since it was regarded a basic fact of life. Men could imagine all changes but a disposal of marriage as an institution. Women were seen as already living in a utopian world of guarded domestic motherhood, so how could they possibly ask for more than perhaps better education to support these sacred roles? (Sargent in Barr, 90) British female utopias peaked in the 1880's but faded out as nothing happened politically and the suffrage activity turned more desperate and militant. (Albinski 19/29) Without the vote there would be not utopia.

American utopian experiments

In the USA women had after all had more legal rights, better education and a long tradition of political activities where they gained experience in organisational work (from the Revolutionary war, the founding of the new republic etc.). Here most utopias concentrate on women as the moral guardians of society. Therefore utopias are more often religiously based and concentrating on social and community based transformation of society instead of political and national transformations. Many are anti-communists fearing that the curse of Europe will spread (Bowman Albinski 5).

The American spirit of pioneer societies, religious/moral movements and the many democratic reforms in the 19th century can probably explain that difference. Progress happened so fast that the citizens had a feeling of influence and () in the creation of the New World Garden. In itself, this myth of America as the new begining I would argue is one of the main reasons why it is American authors that has experimented the most with ideas of alternative ways of living and been the most optimistic about the possibilities for realization of these ideas. The mythical inheritance weighs heavily in each novel, it seems to me, utopian or not. In fact the utopian thoughts started even before America was discovered in the European explorers' fantasies and legends. Later it can be found with e.g. Crévecæur's "Letters from an American farmer" and Jefferson's Republic. Man is reborn in nature which in turn gives him virtue and good fortune. It enables them to design a community in the image of a garden, an ideal fusion of nature with art. The landscape thus becomes the symbolic repository of value of all kinds - economic, political, aesthetic, religious. The American myth of a new beginning, then, may be a variant of the primal myth: a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return. (Fryer, quote Leo Marx; The machine in the Garden p. 228)

As opposed to Britain the Americans had the opportunity to act out the utopian and pastoral visions in their communal experiments (communitarianism) .On a literal level pre-and post-Civil War utopians attempted to re-establish the actual Eden state in the many experimental communities which flourished across the country, especially between 1840 and 1880, or wrote utopian novels begining with Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888, which are actually schemes for the socialist reformation of America. (Fryer 4)

There were both religious communes, like for example the Shakers and Mormons or various socialist communes, but few of them lasted very long, as dreams seldom do when confronted with reality. Socialists like Charles Fourier (1772-1837) in France and Robert Owen (1771-1858) in England wrote about their utopias and these directions were followed by various communities in USA in the beginning of 19¹th century, like Owen's New Harmony 1825-27 and the Fourierist colonies. The Transcendentalists had communes at Fruitlands (1848-4) and at the famous Brook Farm (1840-47) and there were also an urban settlement movement .

In the begining the utopian experiments really thought they could create something new, also a new role for women, starting in the pre-Civil war period as mentioned earlier.
In these Edenic schemes, actual or literery, there was a new role for Eve; she was released from her confining roles of doll, wife and mother by the condemnation of sexual pleasure as Œimpure, the abolition of monogamous marriage or by the abolition of private property.(Fryer16). However, the fine ideas could seldom be transplanted to a sociey where its members were brought up along the usual patriarchal lines. All these communities had problems with making theory into practice, and the members often ended as child-like dependents on a single cult leader (almost always male) or fighting about wordly property. If they experimented too much with new sex roles and ways of living the surrounding society would soon put pressure on them to conform. America is in general not in favour of communities.

It is striking that in all the communes, regardless of theoretical ideology, the women were always stuck with the children and housework no matter if they were celibate or practised free love. The role as culture carrier and nurturer was still the same. The only improvement was the fact that they shared the work amongst themselves. Only the Shakers and Oneida were close to sexual equality, more things were in common and both were fairly isolated and couldn't care less of what people thought of them. Shakers had the best opportunities for women, as they lived seperately, in celibacy and could leave anytime they wanted to. Since the Shakers belived in a bisexual God they saw no ideal of one sex trying to dominate the other. They were used as examples in many novels afterwards, just as the many city settlements where women founded centers to help the immigrants.

The theories behind the failed experiments did nevertheless also influence both literature, politics and feminists like Cady Stanton who could use her experiences later in her reform work. The trandencentals' experiment with anarchism, decentralization, anti-materialism, free love and the conceptof the divinity in our souls and in nature was a kind of ecological pioneers. Some of these ideas we can find in the utopias/sf in our decade, just as they inspired Ghandy and King politically.

American utopian novels by women

Even though the period up to the turn of the century had a boom of utopian writing, very few were by women and most are not feminist at all, with the exception of Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora from 1890. In many ways it resembles herland, only it is far closer to some kind of "domestic fascism" even if such a term does not exist. The strong blond aristocratic women have by new inventions found the secrets of life and eliminated men. Science has relieved them of diseases and superstition. Even if they claim to live in a classless socity ruled by intelligence and will, they spend their lives in leisure and glamour thanks to their servants, like some Roman emperors.

Novels were often based on religious isolation, depictions of failing utopian communities or the utopias turn out to be a dream as Mary Griffith's Three Hundred Years Hence (1836) where women lead reforms.

It is the period that Elaine Showalter has called the feminine phase,() characterised by imitations and a need to be accepted by male standards. If women are part of an isolated utopian society, they are only appendixes to their husbands or on something resembling a summer camp Eden, where one can relax away from the busy world of changes.