About The Book
A post-Hitlerian dystopian classic where women, as we know them, have been eliminated.
My Thoughts
Set 720 years after the Nazis won WW2 and several years before WW2 had started, Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 novel imagines a future in which all historical records have been destroyed and a strict caste system has been imposed, with the current Führer at the top, supported by a knightly caste who separate him from the German men. Below German men come foreign men, and at the bottom of society lie the women and the unrepentant remnants of Christianity. Originally published under the pseudonym Murray Constantine (an irony not lost), this is a book about misogyny and racialism run rampant. No women (and no men without technical jobs) are literate, and women are cattle, held as chattel for reproductive use.
A feminist novel with no important female characters, because there are no important females in the world of the story, this is a grimdark dystopia in the extreme. I do wonder if Burdekin being female, socialist, and willing to point out that all totalitarianisms are inherently misogynistic has something (maybe everything) to do with why this novel is a footnote to feminist literature instead of the world-acclaimed classic status accorded to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four published 11 years later. When you are selling books by men to men for men, perhaps pointing out that all dictatorships begin in woman-hate is not as easy a sell - not as comforting a fable - as dictatorship is a bad thing the baddies over there do badly until we fix it.