The women reproduce via cloning and consider men to be comical. The society lacks stereotypically "male" problems such as war and crime, but only recently resumed space exploration. James Tiptree Jr., a woman writing under a male pseudonym, explored the sexual impulse and gender as two of her main themes in her award-winning " Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (collected in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever), she presents a female-only society after the extinction of men from disease. It is governed by "Aphrodite's Law", which states: "Penalty of death to any man attempting to set foot on Themyscira." īritish sci-fi writer Edmund Cooper explored the subject in several of his novels, including Five to Twelve (1968) and Who Needs Men (1972). Themyscira, the home island of DC Comics' Amazon superheroine Wonder Woman, was created by William Moulton Marston to allegorize the safety and security of the home where women thrived apart from the hostile, male-dominated work place. In this woman-only world, human males are considered mythical creatures-and a man who lands on the planet after centuries of isolation finds it difficult to prove that he really is one. Poul Anderson's " Virgin Planet" depicted a world where five hundred castaway women found a way of reproducing asexually-but the daughter is genetically identical to the mother-with the result that eventually the planet has a large population composed entirely of "copies" of the original women. In John Wyndham's Consider Her Ways (1956), male rule is shown as being repressive of women, but freedom from patriarchy is only possible in an authoritarian caste-based female-only society. In literature ĭuring the pulp era, matriarchal dystopias were relatively common, in which women-only or women-controlled societies were shown unfavourably. The societies may not necessarily be lesbian, or sexual at all-a famous early sexless example being Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
In speculative fiction, women-only worlds have been imagined to come about, among other approaches, by the action of disease that wipes out men, along with the development of technological or mystical method that allow women to reproduce parthogenically. There is a long tradition of female-only places in literature and mythology, starting with the Amazons and continuing into some examples of feminist utopias.