Lady Fiction #13: Where Are the Men? Same-Sex Societies in American Literature

In light of the pending rollback of abortion rights by the US Supreme Court's conservative majority, Stefanie Schäfer and her guest Judith Rauscher turn to a world without men--as imagined in literary texts from the turn of the 20th century. Reading feminist utopias such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915) and Mary E. Bardley's Mizora. A Prohpecy (1880/9), they discuss literary representations of an ideal same-sex state, whiteness, beauty standards, and the interlacing of progressivism and conservative views of womanhood in the US at a time when women fought for suffrage and civic equality.