Gynotopian Fiction

Herland is probably the foremost classic of the "all-female society" genre. It's not exactly a good read; it's a didactic utopian novel, depicting an all-female society of highly competent women who dress in drab uniforms, have no interest in sex, reproduce by spontaneous parthenogenesis, and live together peacefully if dully in an agrarian communist paradise.
There are two main recurring themes in fantasies about all-female worlds, and the male explorers display both of them:
Jeff was a tender soul. I think he thought that country - if there was one - was just blossoming with roses and babies and canaries and tidies, and all that sort of thing.
And Terry, in his secret heart, had visions of a sort of sublimated summer resort - just Girls and Girls and Girls - and that he was going to be - well, Terry was popular among women even when there were other men around, and it's not to be wondered at that he had pleasant dreams of what might happen. I could see it in his eyes as he lay there, looking at the long blue rollers slipping by, and fingering that impressive mustache of his.

It's only fair that both of the 20th century's most murderous ideologies should get a nineteenth-century all-female Utopian novel, so someone wrote Mizora, hauntingly remniscent of Nazism. The disinterest in sex remains, but the women wear beautiful and elaborate clothes. Instead of agrarian subsistence, Mizora is technologically highly advanced; they synthesize most of their food from minerals, have cured most diseases, have flying machines, and their parthenogenesis takes place in a laboratory. Their planned economy, unlike every planned economy in real life, has created great prosperity for all. Everybody is blonde and blue-eyed. The Nazis did not invent their "master race" theory all by themselves; in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not only did many people take the pseudoscience of eugenics seriously, but there was a widely held theory that blue-eyed blonds were the highest type of human. The theory is discussed in depth in Joanna Pitman's fascinating book On Blondes.

Sultana's Dream
An Indian fantasy about a world where men are secluded in a sort of reverse purdah. "Men, who do or at least are capable of doing no end of mischief, are let loose and the innocent women, shut up in the zenana! How can you trust those untrained men out of doors?"

Click here to view scans from World's Finest #233, where Superman Jr. and Batman Jr. (don't ask, I have no idea) stumble across a mysterious town where there are no men.

Elseworlds: Created Equal Part I & Part II
In this graphic novel, all the men in the DC universe die of a plague... except for Superman and Lex Luthor. The author apparently couldn't figure out whether to be male chauvinist or female chauvinist. This is a sterling example of how many interesting psychological complexes bubble up as soon as people start writing about gynotopias.

Jo-Jo, Congo King, a Tarzan clone, meets a tribe of lilliputian women.

"The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
Like Cavendish's other play The Female Academy, this story depicts women creating a retreat from men and from the world in general. Safe from male domination and from the stresses of the outside world, the women enjoy beautiful pictures, soft bed-linens, delicious food, and companionship. Nor is the companionship altogether platonic; some of the women at times don male attire and pay court to others. One, a princess, courts the founder of the "convent" in most romantic terms and kisses her. At the end, it turns out that this princess was in fact a prince, and the founder marries him. Interestingly, this scene seems to have been written by Cavendish's husband!

When It Changed by Joanna Russ
Science fiction story. Centuries ago, a plague killed all the male members of a space colony. Since then, women have carried on, living in Lesbian relationships and reproducing by egg fusion. They're doing fine until an Earth ship full of males lands. Naturally the nasty males have caused Earth to have nuclear war and all those other bad things that Whileaway doesn't have, and the patronizing men compulsively assure the women that "sexual equality has been re-established on Earth". Written by a Lesbian-feminist, it's male chauvinist in a kind of backhanded way; though the women of Whileaway hunt big game and fight duels and are generally quite capable of looking out for themselves, all the tall, strong, confident men have to do is swagger in and the women of Whileaway instantly feel themselves intimidated and outclassed.

Y: The Last Man On Earth
PDF file of the first issue.
Interview with the author.
This is a highly intelligent series about a plague that instantly kills all of the males on earth except one. It does contain the anti-Republican potshots which are apparently required by law and perpetuates the myth of Israeli female soldiers (in real life, a woman in the Israeli army is called a "filing clerk"), but in most respects this is a convincing exploration of how women might fare without men.

Consider Her Ways
Famous science fiction story. Was made into a Night Gallery episode.
A young woman wakes up in a future three generations after the men have been wiped out by a plague. There are four classes of women: Mothers, who bear children, Servitors who do menial work, Workers for hard labor, and the ruling class, the Doctorate, so called because it is dominated by the doctors, without whom reproduction is impossible. Men have been forgotten except by a few scholars. A historian tells the protagonist, "It was quite a dreadful state of affairs because although there were a great many women, and they had outnumbered the men, in fact, they had only really been important as consumers and spenders of money. So when the crisis came it turned out that scarcely any of them knew how to do any of the important things because they had nearly all been owned by men, and had to lead their lives as pets and parasites." She continues with standard feminist rhetoric, very prescient for a story written in 1956, despite the protagonist's desperate attempts to explain the joys of the man-woman relationship. In essence, this story is the feminist fantasy: the intellectual career-oriented women are able to seize power, do away with men, and relegate more traditional women to a subordinate role without its doing men any good because there aren't any.

Breathmoss
Science Fiction story.
"Once more, in that familiar welling, she felt sorry for him. Men were such strange, sad creatures; forever fighting, angry, lost...."
The point of this story seems to be that an all- (or mostly-) female society wouldn't be that much different from a bisexual one, except that divorcing sex (Lesbian sex occurs) from reproduction would erase the need for formally structured unions like marriage. Doing away with the institutions of marriage and the nuclear family, however, does not lead to some blissful utopia, just to a society without marriage. Children are raised in extended families called haramleks. There are only two male characters, who are regarded with wary tolerance.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr., pseudonym of Alice Sheldon
I'm not a James Tiptree fan, and this story didn't change my mind. It's well-written and interesting, but also rather sordid. The story opens with a nauseating account of a humiliating incident from the male narrator's adolescence, which I suppose is supposed to remind us that men can harbor hostility towards women, or something. The story is full of gratuitous profanities which quickly become tiresome. The three men who visit the all-female future display a couple of standard attitudes; one views the entire world as his harem, while another sees himself as a sort of Messiah come to rescue these poor lost women from celibacy and stagnation. Incidentally, stagnation is another theme of many gynotopian novels, including Herland and perhaps When It Changed and Consider Her Ways; the women in these don't put a very high value on technological prowess or on building or inventing things "because they are there". Arguably, without the strife inherent in having two fundamentally different types of people in the world, there might be less inspiration and drive to create new things. In Mizora, on the other hand, the women are endlessly inventive and curious. Anyway, eventually the women realize that males are evil and must be killed. You know, after reading these things, I find homosexuality very restful.

The Gate To Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper
This is a space colony that has lost contact with Earth in which men and women live separately. The women have cooperation and harmony and nurturing while the men are mean old Warriors, though there's not actually anyone else to fight with. Little boys are sent to live with the warriors at the age of five, where the men corrupt them into being horrible violent monsters, which would never happen if they stayed with their mothers. The main characters also spend some time with another society which practices a religion which is an obvious cypher for Christianity. It's equally obvious that the author hates Christianity; the occupants of Holyland, who worship the All-Father, are ignorant and dirty and constantly beat their women and are terrified of the thought of anybody enjoying sex. Oddly enough, no matter how often the enemies of Christianity promote this image of them, real-life Christians stubbornly refuse to start acting the way they are assured they do.

Ammonite

Angel Island
This novel does not really fit, but I have included it because it was on some of the lists I used in my research. It is about a few young men who settle on a deserted island and discover that lovely winged women visit it. The winged women apparently come from a mysterious land where everyone is winged, but whether there are men there or not is never explained. Certainly they don't seem to have any understanding of the male sex. The men capture the winged women, cut off their wings, and marry them, and all sorts of feminist metaphors ensue.

Gender Genocide by Edmund Cooper
Also published as Who Needs Men?
A masterpiece of sexism. Fascist Lesbian Amazons have wiped out almost all of the men on earth and are working on the few remaining. The Amazons reproduce by cloning. The heroine, Rura Alexandra, is a First-Class Exterminator of men... until she meets one, is raped by him, falls deeply in love with him, gets pregnant and follows her man to the ends of the earth.
"Rura spent her days learning to forget that she had ever been an exterminator, learning to become a woman. It was an exciting process. It was as if she were peeling away a superficial persona and discovering something quite different underneath.... She learned to sing the old songs that Diarmid loved, to do the things that would please him; she learned when to be passive and when to take the initiative, and how to respond to excite him. She began to feel proud of her swollen breasts and swollen belly. These were the outward and visible signs of the true nature of womanhood."
You know, I'm all in favor of heterosexuality (when it's practiced by heterosexuals, that is), but the above inspires me to date myself by reviving a phrase of my adolescence: "Gag me with a spoon."

The Sex War by Sam Merwin, Jr.
This one is actually pretty fun. It's about a conspiracy of genetically superior women who want to take over the world and, once they have the technology to reproduce without them, do away with men entirely. Notice the blood on the lower abdomen of the man in the background. I don't recall any castration in the novel, but the cover's implication is pretty darn clear. This one is a good cheesy read and I recommend it for all fans of pulp.

Also published as

Futuristic all-female world in which one male is made as an experiment. This falls into the category of satire against radical feminism. Without men, the world becomes a stagnant dictatorship, although in this novel, the dictatorship functions reasonably even if it is dull, unlike in real life, where dictatorships are full of unrest and don't tend to last long.
"Well, who wants men, anyway?" she said with an attempt at nonchalance that didn't quite come off.
Crinila smiled in the darkness. "Why, nobody, Lycia darling. Not even the men themselves will want men. All they will ever want is women."

When Women Rule
A collection of short stories depicting various female-only or female-dominated societies.

Also published as Father of the Amazons. A spaceship crash-lands on a planet on which a lost colony of humans has been residing for centuries. Something in the environment makes many of the men sterile and makes most babies girls, and accordingly men are rare and a precious commodity. To ensure the survival of the society, men were forbidden to do any dangerous or strenuous jobs that might endanger them, and as a result, the women become female chauvinists, expecting to protect and shelter men.
As soon as our hero lands he is pressed into stud service, until he is able to figure out what is making most of the men sterile so they can be cured.

"They had never seen a man. They just knew this fascinatingly yucky creature couldn't be one!"
Only the female colonists ever arrived on this planet. When men failed to show up, they reproduced by cloning, turned to Lesbianism, and after a few generations deified men as godlike creatures who would one day come to their planet to make everything great. When one finally shows up, some are disgusted, some awed, some threatened by the challenge his very existence presents to the existing power structure, and a couple simply fall in love. A playful and somewhat sophomoric story.

A friend recommended this to me because of my interest in fiction about all-female or mostly-female worlds, but it's also just a really good read.
In many ways this novel is simply a reverse romance: the innocent but sensual young man hoping his family will arrange a love match for him, with swaggering Amazons being chivalrously protective towards their menfolk. What makes this novel stand out from other gender-reversal stories is that the system is made plausible. The pressure on unmarried young men to remain chaste, and the care with which families protect their sons' virginity, is explained by the fear of disease, which could spread throughout a family. In this fantasy world, some genetic anomaly means that far more daughters are born than sons, making sons very precious. In addition, this society operates on a sort of clan system. An entire set of sisters will marry one man. In real life, of course, this would be a recipe for jealousy and division, but Spencer makes the reader believe that in this world, it's actually a workable and loving system. The hero falls in love with every one of the sisters he marries, and the author makes this work.
In addition, the adventure as the feisty hero becomes a prize in a bid to steal the throne is page-turning. A very good read.

The War Against The Yukks by Keith Laumer
This short story (which is included in the anthology linked above) is an amusing addition to the "Lost Planet of the Love-Starved Women" genre. Two men land on one of Jupiter's moons (Callisto, suitably) and the women there have not seen men, which they call "Yukks", for so many thousands of years that they assume the men are simply flatchested women. (I found this an interesting counterpart to the oft-cited theory that the Amazons on antiquity were actually male warriors who were mistaken for women because they shaved their beards.) They all instinctively gravitate towards the men despite their total ignorance, and in spite of having been told all their lives and for countless generations that the things Yukks want to do to them are horrible, they all keep thinking "Strange" (heterosexual) thoughts. It isn't really very logical, but at least for a change the men rejoice at their good fortune instead of being horrified at the thought of spending their lives surrounded by sexually frustrated women in need of their attention. As always, their role in reproduction makes them politically valuable, but luckily for them, the women's ignorance about how it all works (a few millenia and you forget about these things) means that they get to be esteemed citizens rather than put under lock and key as previous commodities.

Retreat: As It Was
This novel is set in the distant past when there were no men, just women who lived in peace and harmony. They all fly around in spaceships being sisterly (and occasionally more) and understanding of each other, mystically in tune with nature and growing spiritually and all that stuff.
Then a radiation mutation causes: "You and all the women on the Eulalia suffered a slight change in one chromosome. One tiny leg of an X was chopped off. The effect on Jarre and all their offspring..." well, you get the idea. They mutated into men, and that was when all the trouble began.
If you believe that the world would become a paradise if there were no Y chromosomes in it, this book is for you.

Wanderground by Sally Miller Gearheart
You know it's going to be a bad book when you flip through it and find made-up words like "earthtouch". These women live in "the Hills", that is, out in the wilderness, where they talk to trees, live in perfect peace with each other and are far more in touch with their feelings than anybody ought to be. Not far away a normal (that is, with men and women) society lives in a place called "the City". Naturally the City is a horrible place full of technology and competition where nobody talks to trees. In the very first chapter the author tells us that men are just too full of hate and violence to be fit to live and just need to die out, which these compassionate, in-touch-with-nature kindly and compassionately watch them do.

The Female Man
The virulent hatred of men exhibited by feminists who boast endlessly about how compassionate and nurturing they are is the most tiresome thing about feminist-Utopian gynotopias. This badly written and ideologically asinine novel has for some mysterious reason garnered wide acclaim. Among the author's embittered potshots at the male gender are a scene in which a man (a Marine, of course) consults a book called WHAT TO DO IN EVERY SITUATION when a woman rejects his advances and follows its instructions: insult her and "Girl backs down - cries - manhood vindicated." Gee, real subtle there.

The novel Wicked Thomasin Carey was published in 1943 and the title page assures us, "This book is produced in complete conformity with the War Economy Agreement."
For nearly two hundred pages I thought this was going to turn out to be one of those books that actually shouldn't have been in the gynotopian category. It's a conventional, downright mawkish adventure novel in which a virtuous, impoverished girl's efforts to support herself after her father is rooked out of his property somehow leads to her and her sweetheart's being pressed into service on a slaving ship and then sold into slavery themselves in Africa. Also, standard methods of preserving the heroine's virginity are used: a half-Arab chieftain buys the "white girl" as a novelty slave for his favorite wife. The heroine, Thomasin, is the typical saccharine superwoman of the time; no misfortune, however horrible, can daunt her pious devotion to her father and sweetheart.
Finally, on page 191, she wakes from an illness that killed several of the tribe she had been with to find herself in "The Valley of Women". The Valley Women, whose skin is café au lait with a lot of lait and who have Greek names, found her and healed her, and then comes a wonderfully bizarre origin story:
Many centuries ago, so the legends held, a party of people with white skins, who were in disgrace in their own country, in the North, sailed to this land, Africa, in ships. Their leader had been a saintly woman who had come under the influence of a strange new teacher in the East, and she had the dreams of waking, visions, so that though the land was unknown and uncharted, she had knowledge of their destination which was denied to others. The ships had sailed to a river mouth and then been rowed inland. At a certain part the people had disembarked and the ships had been destroyed so that no one might weaken and wish to return. After many days of journeying they had come, as the leader had promised, to this valley. And there they had stayed.
"There were men amongst us in that time," said the old woman, "and soon dissensions broke out. Men quarrelled over the women and women contested amongst themselves for the possession of the man of their choice. And the family life militated against the good of the state; the women would say, when required to work in the fields or the quarries, that they must return home and cook the meals for their men, or tend their children. [Notice that it's assumed that of course women are obligated to neglect their own families for The Good of the State. Just who would be cooking for the family, or taking care of the children, is blithely unspecified.] Moreover, as soon as a settled form of life was established the men forgot that the women had taken their turn in the rowing, the marching and the building and sought to subjugate them as their mothers and all the women in the old land had been subjugated to the men. Some of the women, resenting this treatment as unworthy, appealed to the leader, now an old woman and little regarded. But vision and wisdom were within her still though her heart had been broken by her failure to make a state upon the pattern of the teachings of the holy man whom she had met in Jerusalem. The old leader called together the midwives, who, being women themselves, and mostly old, listened to her bidding. Gradually there began to be a dearth of male children. They died at birth, unaccountably at first; but in the second generation, when women had attained the ascendancy and the power it was allowed to be known that the old leader, now dead, had instructed the midwives to place their hands upon the nostrils of the newly born males and stifle out the life that had hardly been begun. The women, dubiously at first, but elated by their new freedom and the progress that was made in a community where jealousy and sexual competition were dying out, gradually became resigned to the death of their male offspring. Since then the valley has been the Land of Women."
So there we have it: early Christianity somehow leading to mass murder of males. I have read enough gynotopian fiction that I think I can say with certainty that this is an absolutely unique excuse. Also notice the standard premise that "jealousy and sexual competition" would vanish if there was only one sex. Of course, when this book was published, no one could talk about homosexuality openly and many people didn't even know it existed, but anyone who knows anything about prisons or single-sex boarding schools can testify that it wouldn't have taken the inhabitants of the Valley of Women long to figure it out. The "sexual competition" would continue right on.
For reproduction, every twenty years one male is allowed to live. When he is twenty years old his predecessor, now forty, is killed and he is pressed into stud service. A few girls become infatuated with the male, and if they do not cease this unseemly behavior after a reprimand they are put to death. But aside from killing all males and all women who see males as something more than livestock, it's a peaceful and nonviolent society. /sarcasm
Now and then the man dies ahead of schedule and they have to acquire a man from outside the valley, which is how the café got into the lait. They're racists, though, so when they find out about Thomasin's boyfriend they set out to capture him; their breeding stud died of an infection recently and a white man is a huge stroke of luck for them. But thanks to her steadfast bravery and some improbable strokes of luck, his virginity is also preserved so that they can escape and return to England and live happily ever after.
The Valley is a democracy ruled by a Council with twelve elected members. Also, they are fairly technologically advanced, though of course without steam or any other kind of power, and even invent things. Like many gynotopias, it's pleasant, but dull: It was, in many ways, a perfect state. There were no classes, no poverty, no overwork, no buying or selling, no idleness. By what system the work was divided Thomasin never quite understood, but she saw that the heavier field-work was done by the young and lusty, things like weaving, spinning and cooking by the elderly and infirm.... In theory it seemed to be an almost perfect state - but, as her knowledge of it grew, the English girl decided that it was completely soul-less. It was all as orderly, as clean, well-regulated and soul-less as a hive of bees. Nobody was ever hurried, cross or rude.... Here where the one sex ruled, all the imperfections and injustices beneath which poor mankind had struggled for centuries had been abolished. There were no ill-doers, no punishments, no crimes. However, Thomasin decides that, without romance (men), all this beauty and abundance is flat, empty and sterile.
This description sounds like the one some of my teachers tried to give us of the Soviet Union, which still existed then. They glossed over the planned famines, the secret police, the gulags, the salt mines, the universal poverty and oppression. Instead they would say that one of (one of!) the "pluses" of communism is, no unemployment! But one of the minuses is - mass murder? Nope. Being tortured? Nope. Totalitarian dictatorship? No, no, it's that the lack of competition makes people less motivated. Just a psychological quibble, you understand. In short, like my teachers (all of whom, by the way, were idiots; it's now very hard for me to respect any member of that profession because all of mine were morons of low moral character), this novel assumes that the communistic system could work, it would just be stagnant and dull. At least the nineteenth century novelists who did this, like Charlotte Perkins Gilmore and Mary E. Bradley Lane, had the excuse that there hadn't yet been a practical demonstration of the disaster that trying to eliminate innate human behavior like competitiveness, possessiveness, acquisitiveness, hierarchy and sex inevitably leads to. /rant On the whole, even though it's fun to read old novels about daring straight-arrow heroes discovering mysterious lost cities whose inhabitants preserve ancient wisdom and stuff, I prefer the modern gynotopian stories where the main difference is that the means of reproduction, whether it's a tiny number of surviving males or else technology that only some are privy to, is of great political importance, but otherwise people behave pretty much the way they always have even if they are all female. An all-female society would behave somewhat differently. But the older gynotopian novels assumed that men and women were so different that once men were out of the picture, human nature would be a thing of the past and Everything Would Be Different. Men and women are different, but it's a matter of degree, not kind.

In this futuristic science fiction novel, women are the majority on this matriarchal planet. The founder of the planet's society genetically engineered its inhabitants so that heterosexual intercourse usually triggers parthenogenesis. This novel falls into the "pleasant but stultifying" category of gynotopian speculation. It's also well written and a good read.
"Their aim wasn't to stop science as such, but to prevent a certain kind of scientific fever. A cultural madness, if you will. The sort of epoch in which questioning becomes almost a devotional act. In which all of life's certainties melt, and folk compulsively doubt old ways, heedless of whatever validity those ways once had. Ego and 'personal fulfillment' take precedence over values based on community and tradition."

Three young men journey up the Amazon in search of a rare black orchid. On the way, they encounter the Amazon warriors Sir Walter Raleigh reported seeing. Most of the women are over six feet tall, while the men are smaller and weaker; men do the cooking and cleaning while women rule, hunt and fight. There are no weak or elderly people because they are euthanized when they are no longer robust enough to do productive work or bear strong children. This adventure yarn deserves credit for resisting the usual temptation of having any of the Amazons fall in love with these dashing men from the world of patriarchy.

Dr. Traprock's memory book;: Or, Aged in the wood by George S. Chappell
The title character amuses his friends by telling outrageous tall tales. One is about an Amazon tribe in the Andes called the Bearded Ladies of Quilaquil who kill most of their male offspring, only keeping enough alive to sire the next generation. He claims he met them once and that they were extremely beautiful, despite their long red bears. It's interesting that he should claim these Amazons were bearded; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many feminists claimed that only social conditioning prevented women from growing beards and that if women had equal rights, we would also have equal facial hair. I am exceedingly relieved that they have turned out to be wrong about this.

When Loneliness Comes by Geo. A. Glenn, M.D.
Published in 1940, this book is chiefly a pseudo-scientific defense of what was then called "free love" - he talks about things like "congestive pathology of the ovarian glands". Much of the book takes the form of the author relating how he lectured various people who consulted him about how important it is to have lots of sex, and complaining that men are not trained to be good in bed. He also indulges in the usual nonsense, derived from Margaret Mead's discredited research, about how happy "savage peoples" are made by their alleged promiscuity. He claims to have journeyed through the jungles of Peru and encountered there a tribe of white Amazons. They declared him God of the Moon and assigned him an exceedingly beautiful High Priestess named La, to whom the book is dedicated. I remind you that this is presented as a factual account, not a novel. With the help of an herbal aphrodisiac, he and another white American man, who has been declared the God of the Sun, service half a dozen women a day.
In between stud service sessions, he explains to the God of the Sun that he has been looking for the plant from which the aphrodisiac is made, because it will cure the effects of advancing age. The God of the Sun replies, "Were I to allow you to reveal this discovery to civilization... you would be crucified! The prudish religious forces of your land would denounce your claims, inasmuch as they have repeatedly opposed anything that stimulates sexual organs, regardless of the fact that the vital characteristics of man and woman are primarily generated by the sexual glands. Likewise your notoriously politicoreligious-controlled Press would either ignore or openly besmirch your findings." And much more in the same vein. Isn't it an amazing coincidence that both of the white men who were captured by this remote Peruvian Amazon tribe should see things exactly the same way?
The Amazons, it turns out, are quite above such civilized corruption as romantic love or family. Mothers feel no connection between themselves and their children, who are turned over to "the general nursery" - exactly what communists planned, before a generation's experiments in that direction proved it disastrous even by their standards. (This has not prevented their intellectual heirs today from continuing to advocate dragging children away from the influence of their parents as young as possible.) Not surprisingly, these Utopian Amazons have a communistic form of government: "Thereby, as the collectivity owns the national wealth, we do not penalize the individual."
The God of the Sun also explains that the habit of these Utopian Amazons of killing their sons and the men they occasionally kidnap for sex is all right because they don't enjoy it; it's only men who enjoy committing murder, therefore it's all right to kill men. This anticipates radical feminists by several decades. It's actually quite honest: every human attempt at Utopia has involved killing a lot of people. The good doctor is so impressed by hearing all this that he offers to return to civilization long enough to get the scientific equipment needed to fertilize women with the eggs of other women so that the Amazons can reproduce without fathers or sons. This, remember, is technology we still do not have today, but he talks as if it were the simplest of matters.
The story concludes with the author declaring that he has written this book to expose the horrible truth: that medicine is nothing but a racket to keep people sick (by telling them not to have sex) in order to get paid to make them well.

The Day of the Women by Pamela Kettle
The back cover of this British pulp novel really says it better than I possibly could:
A female Prime Minister... human stud farms run by women... mass rallies at Buckingham Palace to celebrate the day of the dominating women... all this and more in a take-over bid of the Seventies that turns to high-heeled fascism, a dictatorship of unbridled power lust.
A female elite has taken over England. Led by their 'mother', the sleek Diana Druce, they perform an economic miracle - and put the jackboot through the idea that women are the weaker sex.
Author Pamela Kettle paints, in mercilessly naked detail, a picture of the near future that is not only possible, but probable...

Worlds of the Imperium
This anthology has a short story titled "The War Against the Yukks", about astronauts discovering a lost colony that is all female. Yukks are men, which have become creatures of legend: "The Yukks are evil beings who tried to enslave all Girlhood, once, long ago, before we were driven out of the Heavenly Garden. They were great big ugly creatures, with hair growing all over their faces, and huge, bony hands - six of them, I think - and whenever they could catch a poor, defenseless girl, they'd.... They'd do Strange Things to her."
This propaganda isn't doing much good, though, as many of the women find the legend of the Yukks sinfully compelling. In addition, the artificial insemination technology they've used to reproduce is no longer efficacious. Accordingly, the two men who stumble upon this planet offer their, ah, assistance, knowing that half the children they sire will be "Yukks" and that in a couple of decades the society will be able to reproduce properly. Meanwhile, our heroes intend to enjoy themselves.

The Holdfast Chronicles by Suzy McKee Charnas The Conqueror's Child: Book 4
On her website, Miss Charnas discusses the history of gynotopian fiction: "the masculine version of the 'female planet' was shown up as everything from well-meant nonsense to hateful rage." The problem is, the feminine version of the "female planet" has also been shown up as everything from well-meant nonsense to hateful rage, and Miss Charnas's series is no exception. She claims not to hate men, but when you read her fictional history of how those nasty men destroyed the earth, killed off most of our species in massive wars, and then enslaved all women, even contemplating raising women for food, it's kind of hard to believe her. (Incidentally, Miss Charnas vehemently opposes the current wars in the Middle East that have unseated dictatorships which treat women almost this badly, and of course similarly opposes Western civilization, in which women have been better treated than in any other society in history.)
Facing dwindling reproduction, the men devised procedure by which genetically altered women could be fertilized by horse sperm. Aside from the scientific improbability, I found this rather interesting, since according to Greek legend, horses were extremely important to Amazons - many Amazon names incorporate the Greek word for "horse" - and there were predictable jokes and speculation that their horses took the place of men in, ah, various ways. I don't know if the parallel is deliberate.
In any case, able to reproduce without men (because of technological advances made by men), these women escaped and became roving Amazons. This leads to the most worthwhile book in the series, The Furies, which Miss Charnas says upset many readers who were hoping for a more conventional feminist fantasy about how everything turns into fluffy bunnies without any of those big bad men around. Instead these Riding Women become just as brutal to men as men had been to them. This makes The Furies the most realistic novel out of the series; an hour of reading child abuse case histories will eradicate any notion that women are not capable of being violent or cruel.
The final novel, The Conqueror's Child, centers on the daughter of a hero of the Riding Women - a daughter who she abandoned as soon as she was born, following the model of real-life feminists. The story is about how the matriarchy finally wipes out the patriarchy for good, and how some women were magnanimous enough to allow some men to live. Miss Charnas claims to envision a society where the sexes are genuinely equal and both have all human options open to them, but her own story belies this: "The sponsorship of men and boys is a way of providing them with what amounts to a family of sharemothers, who show them how decent people behave and require that they themselves do so," Miss Charnas burbles happily, describing this as "an alternative to enslaving the men or keeping them permanently on the stick". We are asked to believe, in defiance of all of human history, that the men submit to this. I do not have the space here to dispute Miss Charnas's definition of "decent behavior", but I will point out that apparently killing or enslaving men is not excluded from it.
But we can hardly expect the author to have a realistic view of human nature when we see in what denial she is about animals: "Any fool can see what makes a reasonable society by looking at who rules a band of horses or a flock of goats." Please pause for a moment to digest that sentence. She is asking us to take four-legged grass-eating animals as a model for government. I think "fool" is the right word here. She continues, "Despite noisy male pantomime of mastery, the chief invariably turns out to be the queen doe or the lead mare, not the randy, hysterical buck or the stallion with the arched neck and rolling eyes." Gracious, she does hate the menfolk, doesn't she? Well, I have never studied horses, goats or deer, but I have invested considerable time into studying our close relatives the apes, and male dominance is universal among them.

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