They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.

Mary Beard describes the opening of this novel, and because of that I decided to read it. Phew…first off, beware the audiobooks of this one. It’s a public domain book and even though it wasn’t presented as a Librivox production, my edition had like five different narrators, and it was rough going.

Anyway, this is a funny book. It’s presented as an adventure novel ala Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World, or even the parodied films in UP. It’s about three explorers who stumble about a lost civilization entirely made up of women. It’s a country of three million which has through various means subsisted on much smaller set of resources, completely revolutionized motherhood, education, and medicine.

AND THE MEN DON’T LIKE IT!

It’s a funny and preachy book that is often a mix of wonderful and interesting, and then completely artless at times. And like a lot of “progressive” politics (meaning the progressive movement, not progressive as a descriptive), it’s often over the top (think the preachy left’s inability to see the world in nonutopian terms a lot of the time~~~PS I am a Leftist in my own ways).

So the men first think the women are the vanguard and the men are in the back, then they think the women are savages, and then finally that the men think that the women are awful. It’s a complete misunderstanding of course that the women just don’t regard the men at all. And so because the men are telling the story but are not centered in the lives of the women, they can barely comprehend it.

(Photo: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/charlotte-perkins-gilmans-radical-feminism-still-challenges-us-today_b_9568134.html)