Can anyone imagine a world where women are not oppressed?

May 25, 2019 7:33 PM

[Bookfilter] I would like to read fantasy books set in a world where women have never been oppressed. Do they exist?
posted by pH Indicating Socks to Media & Arts (29 answers total)

The classic example of this is probably Herland? It's been a while since I read it so I'm not sure how it holds up (it was written in 1915) but it certainly answers the request.
posted by cpatterson at 7:49 PM on May 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

Woman World
posted by 1970s Antihero at 7:50 PM on May 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

Tanya Huff has some books (starting with Sing the Four Quarters) set in a world where it seems she's just decided that gender doesn't matter. It's not made a big deal - just that it's vaguely medieval without the sexism or gender segregation in roles.
posted by jb at 7:52 PM on May 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: To clarify, I'm not looking for books that are obviously a reaction to women's oppression in the real world, or that have no men in them, and definitely not plucky heroines becoming the first female whatever against great opposition -- I'm looking for books in which men and women live in the world together without the men stepping on the women. It seems like fantasy authors can imagine worlds different from our own in every possible way except this. Please prove me wrong.
posted by pH Indicating Socks at 8:22 PM on May 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I just finished the Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein, and it was refreshing in exactly the way you request. The main characters are women, and the books seem to very pointedly ignore gendered expectations and decline to make anything about gender into a theme. Women fight, have adventures, lead, etc. alongside men, who are doing the same things ... and it is treated as entirely unremarkable.
posted by Metasyntactic at 8:25 PM on May 25, 2019 [19 favorites]

Foz Meadows wrote a series of portal fantasy starting with An Accident Of Stars where the heroine is transported from modern London to a world where women and POC are not oppressed. It’s explicitly discussed early in the first book between her and another person who chose to live in that world to escape the oppression here, but becomes somewhat more implicit as the series continues. The writing is a little uneven in places, but it scratched this exact itch for me.
posted by zinful at 8:49 PM on May 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

It’s been awhile since I read it, but God’s War by Kameron Hurley may meet your criteria. IIRC, pretty much *everyone* was oppressed, regardless of gender. A very interesting and unique book.
posted by doctor tough love at 9:50 PM on May 25, 2019

Egalia's Daughters is fantastic, but instead of a world where no one is opposed, it essentially reverses our patriarchy into a matriarchy. Not sure if that is what you're after.
posted by twirlypen at 10:03 PM on May 25, 2019

The TV Tropes entry for Gender is No Object may be helpful. I've read a few of the series there and find their relevance plausible, but some are possibly understated enough on gender issues that it's hard for me to recall for sure.

A recent book popular on /r/Fantasy that belongs on that list is Sufficiently Advanced Magic, which has a cis-male protagonist but world-building and character development that I think is just low-key accepting of differences in gender and sexuality. The odd thing to know about it, though, is the plotting is sometimes reminiscent of reading a role-playing game manual to try and find rules hacks to solve puzzle dungeons. If you're up for that, the author definitely wants to be inclusive.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:07 PM on May 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" may work
posted by askmehow at 12:37 AM on May 26, 2019 [8 favorites]

Have just gotten through the Broken Earth trilogy after several recommendations on here (possibly from the same user? but still =D ). Was excellent and does I think fit the bill.
posted by ominous_paws at 1:09 AM on May 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Martha Wells' The Murderbot Diaries and Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series (starting with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet ) are both in the same vein as how Metasyntactic described the Steerswoman series above. Women are featured in leadership roles and having adventures but I don't remember any pointed discussion about gender. The fact that they are women has little bearing on the stories. The Wayfarers series is interesting in this regard because it features humans descended from Earth - just far in the future.
posted by John Frum at 4:00 AM on May 26, 2019 [10 favorites]

Great question!
Ian M Banks' culture novels may work for some values of "world".
The culture is basically a post scarcity utopia with no repression, but is juxtaposed against primitive/other worlds that are far more recognizable in their social structure. Sometimes gutwrenchingly so.
So we have a gender and ethnicity agnostic protagonist society with no real concept of class interacting with sometimes downright sadistic caricatures of gender- ethno- and class oppressive societies.
posted by Thug at 4:30 AM on May 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

Ancillary Justice and two sequels by Ann Leckie leave you unclear, for the most part, about who even is a woman, because the protagonist and narrator is from a place with no gendered pronouns, gender is mostly irrelevant, and everyone is referred to as "she."
posted by evilmomlady at 4:36 AM on May 26, 2019 [18 favorites]

I'm not certain if Max Gladstone's craft sequence (starts with three parts dead) qualifies. On the surface level the society in the first book doesn't treat men and women differently.

Buuut a male abuser features prominently, and his named victims are female. The abuse is abuse of power/trust, between a professor and students, and it is assumed to cross gender lines (stealing souls being a gender-neutral evil), but, again, only female victims are emphasized.

I don't remember enough of the later books (each set in a different society) to remember which qualify more or less.
posted by Cozybee at 5:34 AM on May 26, 2019

I just reread Jo Walton's The King's Peace, which is an Arthurian legend retelling set in a slightly different and more magical world. The primary societies it's set in are fairly egalitarian (the Lancelot analogue is female) although not all societies are in that world and it does come up. I find it very refreshing. (Content warning: there is a brutal rape very early on.)
posted by restless_nomad at 6:02 AM on May 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

Nthing Ancillary Justice and Murderbot.
posted by thelastpolarbear at 6:07 AM on May 26, 2019

Actually I don't know that the narrator in Murderbot can be considered reliable on this front. Things like "women are expected to perform additional emotional labor" and "it's harder in these subtle-but-devastating ways for women to advance in certain careers" are exactly the sort of thing that'd be overlooked or dismissed, plus why is Murderbot generally dubbed "he" by the unmodded humans if there's no sense that violence is associated with men?
posted by teremala at 6:38 AM on May 26, 2019

It's more sci-fi than fantasy but Dark Eden by Chris Beckett might fit the bill. It's set in a small, isolated community ruled by matriarchs.
posted by Limivorous at 6:38 AM on May 26, 2019

Have just gotten through the Broken Earth trilogy after several recommendations

That is definitely a great series, but I would caution the OP that it is pretty explicitly about opression, and the long-term psychological effect it has on a society. It definitely features several women in places of command but there are also abusers and bigots. (Also, the society depicted has a caste system where one of the caste is Breeder, so...)
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 6:49 AM on May 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

Came to recommend Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (and its two sequels) but evilmomlady beat me to it.

Reading those books (especially the first) really opened my eyes to some of my own subconscious gender expectations in sci fi.
posted by heatherlogan at 7:26 AM on May 26, 2019 [3 favorites]

Within the society of the protagonists in Martha Wells' Raksura series, where most of the action takes place, I believe this is true. It's long and I've only read through it once but there's no reason women would have been oppressed, since they're explicitly cast as being as able as men and the society on the whole is matriarchal. However, I think I recall that outside of that society, among other species, an seemingly-effeminiate male protagonist is mocked for being womanly at least once, and I'm not at all sure it's possible to separate enforced cisnormativity from the oppression of women.
posted by teremala at 7:37 AM on May 26, 2019

@teremala, I don't remember Murderbot ever being referred to as male. Both my wife and I independently pictured Murderbot as more female, but I'm pretty sure it was written explicitly as non-gendered. See halfway through this interview where the author talks about writing a genderless character.

I actually suggested Murderbot because many of the supporting lead characters, like Dr. Mensah, are female.
posted by John Frum at 8:13 AM on May 26, 2019

Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars series. It is fairly classic high fantasy in many respects so it's not free of violence or sexual violence, but women are not oppressed in the same way - e.g. the powerful priesthood is open to both genders. I also second the Jo Walton series mentioned above.
posted by posadnitsa at 8:57 AM on May 26, 2019

The Le Guin Ekumen stories get close, but gender equal societies in those stories achieved it after struggle or were biologically engineered in such a way that it was no longer an issue.

Writing believably about a world where humans never had gender oppression is a pretty tough task; it would change so much.
posted by emjaybee at 12:50 PM on May 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

I think Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire space fantasy series fits these criteria. It starts with Ninefox Gambit. It is about oppression and violence, but not of women by men.
posted by esker at 1:43 PM on May 26, 2019

I'm 3/4 of the way through the Murderbot books and while I, as a cis male, tend to picture the murderbot as male, that's just me, not the fault of the author. The character seems pretty explicitly non-gendered.

Two characters in the third book are introduced with no gender-specific description; their profession in our world would be associated with one gender more than the other, but it comes out very gradually that they are the opposite. It's actually a very nice bit of writing.

Highly recommended.
posted by lhauser at 8:08 AM on May 27, 2019

I recently finished Sara J. Maas's Throne of Glass series. It's pitched as Young Adult for some reason, but I didn't even realize that until I was a couple of books in. It doesn't entirely fulfill your request because it involves multiple societies, where some have histories of oppression of women (these are treated as backward), while the protagonist's society and some other major ones do not. In the series, the heroes are mainly women (and they are heroes based on different skillsets), with a few men thrown in who are powerful but also support the women leaders. Also, one of the main villains and a host of much more ambiguous characters are also women, which makes for a richly textured world where women are represented as powerful, beautiful, intelligent, cunning, deadly, brutal, evolving, kind, etc.

The series has some downsides (the last book, while it ties everything together in a satisfying way, is somewhat weak, and throughout the male characters sometimes come off as fantasies), but I found it a pretty thrilling read for the other reasons above. Also, it's high fantasy, so there is magic and fantastic beasts and other things I enjoy.
posted by CiaoMela at 7:54 AM on May 29, 2019

Just saw this trailer yesterday. It may not be exactly to your specifications, but the set-up is wild:

Motherland: Fort Salem is an upcoming FreeForm series which posits an alternate history where:

1) Witches and magical powers are real
2) The Salem Witch Trials apparently began a kind of Stonewall-esque rights movement where witches advocated publicly for public recognition and respect
3) Fast foward to the present, where the country is run by women, magic still exists, and witches now train their powers in the military to prepare for some vaguely defined threat.

That... is a premise. That is a lot of premise. I have no idea whether it will be a soapy, insulting trainwreck or not, but I'm going to try it out.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 1:26 PM on May 31, 2019