Are you ready for a summer vacation? I sure as hell am, but since we’re all confined to our yards, let’s take a trip to paradise, to a female utopia that is plague free, where the men are timid (and excellent cooks), and Calcutta is a garden paradise governed by sensible women. Let’s get the heck outta Dodge and visit…
Along the way to Ladyland, let’s take a quick look at the other vacation destination options along the way.
The Blazing World: The history of the female utopia is varied and stretches back to 1966, when Margaret Cavendish blazed a new world where women ruled and science informed philosophy.
Herland: In the Western world, the next appearance of the female utopia on the map is Charlotte Perkin’s Herland, published in 1915, a woman-only land where reproductions is accomplished by parthenogenesis, resulting in an ideal social order.
Wonder Woman: In 1941, another vacation destination opened up for travel — William Marston’s Themyscira, the Amazonian populated paradise and Wonder Woman’s home.
Left Hand of Darkness: 1969 gave us a cooler summer holiday destination, the icy world of Gethen, where heterosexuality and an inability to change genders leaves Genly AI, the Terran envoy, an outcast.
The Female Man: Shortly thereafter (1975), Joanna Russ invited us to journey to Whileaway, a world where all the men died in a plague.
Door Into Ocean: 1986 gave us one of my favorite resorts, the water planet Shora, also ruled by women who use peaceful methods and genetic engineering to fight off an empire determined on industrialization.
The Gate to Women’s Country: And in 1988, Sherri Tepper guided us through The Gate to Women’s Country, another segregated society, where masculine gender conventions are upended.
All of these are wonderful places to visit, full of empowered women.
White women. Even when they’re blue or green, they’re all Western.
But the universe of Speculative Fiction has so much more to offer, for everyone, which brings us today to Ladyland and The Sultana’s Dream, a (brief) utopian creation by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Muslin feminist, writer, social reformer, and school founder, published in 1905 in the Madras-based English periodical The Indian Ladies Magazine.
Both The Sultana’s Dream and Hossain’s lesser known (but longer and more fully realized) Padmarag (Ruby, not translated until 2005 by Barnita Bagchi) describe female-led countries in which science and technology are inexorably linked to female education, resulting in peaceful, pollution-free paradises in which men are confined to the mardana (men’s quarters).
The mardana, of course, is an inverse of the zenana and the forced purdah of women, and nicely points out the absurdism of one of the world’s fallacies — that women should be taught to stay safe and isolated, rather than men being taught not to rape.
And Ladyland is a delightful land indeed; a mosquito-less paradise where disease epidemics are things of the past, machines perform the majority of day-to-day chores (women’s work), the streets of Calcutta are verdant gardens, solar power is abundant, schools are open to all races, and the land is ruled by sensible women.
And the men are all pretty and good cooks.
(If you’d like to see a vision of Ladyland, check out Chitra Ganesh’s illustrations published by Durham Press.)
Rokeya’s vision of Ladyland (The Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag) shows Hindus, Brahms, Muslims, and Christians; black women and white women; free from the burden of patriarchal oppression and thoroughly educated according to the principles of science; and rid of the burden of colonialism.
Rokeya did more than just create a fictional Ladyland for our enjoyment and edification. In 1909, with money bequeathed from her dead husband, she founded the Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School, the first school in Bengal for Muslim women. In 1916, she founded the Muslim Women’s society to fight for women’s education and employment, becoming one of the most influential feminists in the world.
The revolution in Ladyland has occurred off-screen, before the events of both The Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag. And, it’s a dream, this utopia of Ladyland, right?
There’s surely no way we could do the following:
- Power society with renewable resources
- Put the burden of social behavior on the perpetrators, rather than the victims
- Universal free education
- Health-care system for all that reduces the risks of pestilence and provides needed equal care regardless of income or race
- Clean water and air
Right? There’s no way. That’s just flat out impossible. Because certainly, none of these are at all feasible or within our technical grasp. Everyone knows men don’t make good chefs, after all. It’s a genetic thing.
We have the technology right now to make every one of her possibilities concrete. We could turn the streets into productive communal gardens, travel by air (ok, so that one’s a bit further off, but still), utilize solar power for all of our needs, join together in equality of education and healthcare. We could create Ladyland — or rather continue Rokeya’s work and complete the vision.
But until then, let’s at least go on vacation — in Ladyland!
Ray, B., 2013. Early Feminists of Colonial India. 2nd ed. Oxford; Oxford University Press
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