Feminism, apocalypse, dystopia, and the blessings of civilisation
I was remembering this post as being about feminist post-apocalyptic fiction of the 80s-90s, whereas in fact it's feminist dystopias (actually, the dystopias themselves aren't feminist, quite the reverse), but these two categories do tend to overlap insofar as the dystopias are often the product of some major collapse of civilisation if not actual apocalypse.
And I was thinking about this and then thinking, 'but wasn't that also going on in feminist dystopian/post-apocalypse/end of civilisation stories of the 20s and 30s?'
E.g. Cicely Hamilton's Lest Ye Die - total war reduces humanity to a stage of primeval savagery. Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night - the 1000 Year Reich keeps women as breeding animals. The future-vision at the end of Naomi Mitchison's We Have Been Warned - fascist coup in the UK. Barbara Wootton's London's Burning - society falls apart.
(I'm not sure that Charlotte Haldane's A Man's World - a sister and brother in an apparently utopian future find that they don't quite fit - or Storm Jameson's In The Second Year - another 'UK has fallen to the fascists' plot but from the pov of a male academic who is, as I recall, physically disabled in some way - quite fit with where I'm going here.)
All the books in the last paragraph but one seem to me to have the subtext that the gains women had made rested on fragile foundations, and that the collapse of civilisation would bring about conditions of oppressive brutality, not exclusive to, but resting particularly heavily on, women.
Writers such as Mitchison and Dora Russell were also, in their polemical essays, pretty harsh about the primitivism being advocated by D H Lawrence and others, often operating from a belief that civilisation itself was effete/effeminate, enfeebling, etc.
I'm probably a bit too sleep-deprived to make effective sense of this, but it seems to me that there is a recognition in these works that civilisation is a good thing for women. One should probably compare/contrast more utopian depictions by women and to what extent those are about civilisation rather than state of nature; even if non-urban, not primitive (if sometimes a bit hippyish) - e.g. the Mattapoisett (?sp) potential future in Piercy's Woman On The Edge of Time.
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