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As an avid promoter of Evelyn Reed's book, Woman's Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family, I closely follow newspaper and magazine reviews of her book. One in particular fascinated me. In the Spokeswoman, reviewer Jill Sellers writes a fine piece about Reed's book, but it's combined with a review of another book, Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. Le Guin is a noted science fiction writer.
Neither knowing nor caring about science fiction, I was nevertheless curious about what a science fiction novel could possibly have in common with Reed's anthropological work.
It's safe to say that what The Dispossessed has in common with Woman's Evolution is: next to nothing. But, in its own right, Le Guin's book is fun, feminist, and intriguing.
The story unfolds through the space travel of Shevek, a physicist from the planet Anarres. On Anarres there exists an anarchist, egalitarian society. With neither the profit motive nor repressive apparatus, social judgment and pressure are the guiding principles.
Child rearing and education, as well as cooking and cleaning, are arranged communally-though always voluntarily. scientific theory he originated with wars, racism, and sexism.
free of oppression, "Where are women?" possessed."
Women are totally equal. They are engineers, scientists, philosophers, and everything else as well. It never occurs to anyone that it could be otherwise.
Shevek travels to Anarres's twin planet, Urras, to cooperate with scientists there in developing a Urras is a planet containing various social systems and forms of government. It is wrought Upon arrival in Urras, Shevek undergoes what you might call extreme culture shock. The most incomprehensible aspect of this society is its treatment of women. Born and raised in a society The cannot understand the degradation of half the human race.
After several days at a wealthy university, full of men, Shevek naively asks his fellow scientists, An exchange takes place, the Urras men becoming more and more horrified at the thought of a planet where women are totally equal.
"Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they ... contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage... They knew no relation but possession. They were
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We learn that Shevek's planet, Anarres, was settled by anarchist followers of Odo, a woman. The anarchists had led a rebellion on Urras against class society and, although unsuccessful, were then allowed to leave the planet and settle a new one.
There are several competing social systems on Urras. There's the nation of A-lo, a class society based on private property and the pursuit of profit.
There's the nation of Thu, revealed through its newspapers: *The Thuvian paper is much better written but it reports only those facts which the Thuvian Central Presidium wants reported."' There's Benbili, "*a backward sort of country. Always having revolutions."' Within all these countries, however, are groups of revolutionaries. Some are Odonians, some syndicalists, and some are .. Socialist Workers. The Socialist Workers in the nation of A-lo help in leading a mass demonstration against the draft, war taxes, and the rise in food prices.
But it's Odo's theories about social relations in a THE RIGHTS AND WRONGS OF WOMEN AVAILABLE from RED BOOKS, 182 Pentonville Rd., London N.I make the most possessed.
a therapy center." that of private conscience." classless society, as practiced on Anarres, that interesting reading in The Dis There is complete sexual freedom. "No law, no limit, no penalty, no punishment, no disapproval applied to any sexual practice of any kind, except the rape of a child or woman, for which the rapist's neighbors were likely to provide summary revenge if he did not get promptly into the gentler hands of Within this atmosphere people formed a variety of relationships, one of which was a "partnership."
"Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but This book is fun. Read it in addition to Evelyn Reed's book but not, by any means, instead of it.
—Linda Jenness WOMEN LOOK AT