It all starts with a birthday party: Madalena, a stay-at-home mother, organises a birthday party in the park for her daughter Rosa, with an incredible homemade cake and lots of other delicious food. Madalena is waiting for her partner Andrea, who has an important job at the ministry, but Andrea is late. Suddenly, a thunderstorm blows everything away, the wind breaks the cake, and everything goes wrong.
The couple is in crisis. Madalena feels asphyxiated by family life, and Andrea works too much. Andrea is pregnant with the couple’s second child — and the non-carrying mother feels quite disconnected from the baby. As we follow what seems like an intimate tale of a relationship between two women, and how they deal with motherhood, readers come to understand something deeper: these two women live in a world where men make up only 25% of the population. This is the plot of A Segunda Mãe (The Second Mother), written by São Paulo journalist and author Karin Hueck.
In other words, the novel is a dystopia, which immediately reminded me of the great Ursula K Le Guin, who imagines a gender-free world in The Left Hand of Darkness. But Hueck told me in a telephone interview that she was inspired by the work of Margaret Atwood, the Canadian writer and author of The Handmaid’s Tale, and the Japanese/British writer Kazuo Ishiguro. Regardless of the literary influences, what is fascinating is where the plot takes the reader.
Fictional worlds controlled by women…
“It was very pleasurable to imagine a world without men,” said Hueck. “I think every woman has imagined that at some point, right?”
In the book, men are confined to government-controlled housing to help with the reproductive process and are not allowed to go anywhere. The book touches on a revolution during which women got rid of men in an effort to reduce violence. In schools, girls are taught about the horrible times of the past when women were routinely raped and killed by men — something that does not happen in the society where men have been marginalised.
Still, female society has power games, violence and social tension between the poorest and the richest. As Madalena starts working in a beauty salon, a colleague involves her in a movement to support men’s human rights — going against Andrea, who gets a high-ranking position in the government’s security ministry.
“The book was initially just a work of fiction of a world without men, of a couple who love each other but have difficulties,” said Hueck. The novel developed out of a short story she wrote for a magazine in 2016. But then she got a fellowship to research parental leave models and family policies at the Gender and Diversity Department at Freie Universität in Berlin, and her story became deeper.
“There are no heroes or villains, there are no women who are better than men per se. I became very interested in how we manage to create stories relating multiple forms of oppression in all layers of life, and inequalities even between equals,” she said.
For example, in the book, there is one character who lives in poverty. She becomes a surrogate mother because it is a well-paid service — but she becomes depressed when she realises she wants to keep the baby, and the government services come in to repress her.
… and real-world matriarchal societies
There is a long tradition of female-only places in literature and mythology, starting with the Amazons, a group of female warriors and hunters in Greek mythology who only had brief encounters with men for reproductive purposes and returned the sons to their fathers.
Matriarchal societies where men’s roles have been minimised have also been widespread around the world — though they are now in decline. For example, the Mosuo tribe in the southwest of China, where children traditionally lived in the mother’s family home and were raised by their mother, grandmother, aunts, and uncles under one roof. There were no marriages nor nuclear families, and women held more power when it came to decision-making. This is slightly changing as the community has opened up to tourism and the youngest are keen to follow the country’s traditions of nuclear family, as this article points out.
There are also other rare experiments, such as the Umoja village in Kenya, a women-only sanctuary for women who have escaped domestic abuse, sexual violence, early marriages and female genital mutilation. Men are not allowed on the property, and boys who are raised in the community need to leave when they are 18. But, as Faith Mwangi-Powell, global director of The Girl Generation in Nairobi, says in this article, the Umoja village is too isolated an experiment: “We need to figure out how this change can cascade to the entire community so that the girls growing up in the village remain safe when they leave the village.”
Indeed, even if these experiments are somewhat limited, I love the thought process they provoke. And that’s where literature excels most. A good friend of mine gifted my children a very thought-provoking book, The Real Story of the Bonobos Who Wore Spectacles by Italian author Adela Turin.
It tells the story of male bonobos who lived in a forest eating the food that the females gathered. One day, four of the best-looking males went to Ireland and returned with suitcases filled with glasses and four new words. Everyone who learned the new words was given glasses except for the females, who eventually decide they have had enough, and go off with their little ones to set up a better society — where males are not allowed. At the end, some males do join, when they see that things are better — but the rules have now changed.
Dystopias, just like children’s books, can help us imagine a different world, but also help us understand that today’s problems are not the product of one gender, or of people born with one set of genitals, but of deeper structures of power.
P.S. A Segunda Mãe is not out in other languages yet, but if you are a translator, or know of any translators from Portuguese, do point it out to them!
P.P.S. I am moderating an online panel on how journalists can report ethically on children in crisis zones, with Syrian journalist Hadeel Arja, who will present her Children First guide, and Dr. Kate Porterfield, a consulting psychologist at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. We will be addressing some of the questions I raised in a previous newsletter, starting from the coverage of the war in Gaza. The webinar is taking place Wednesday 7 August at 5 p.m. CET (11a.m. EST), and you can register here.
What I’ve been reading
Imagine needing a parental figure so much in your life that you go online to look for one. Well, this is happening a lot on social media, with users asking each other for parental advice on subreddits r/MomForAMinute and r/DadForAMinute. But in China, virtual parent roles have gone a step further. This interesting story in Rest of The World digital magazine looks at Chinese creators Jiang Xiuping and Pan Huqian, a viral duo on the Douyin social network, who act as fictional parents or digital parents. “The videos, which depict an idealized image of middle-class families, appeal to the unhappy children who have grown up without the same parental support,” explains reporter Viola Zhou.
In rural China, tens of millions of “left-behind” children are typically raised by their grandparents, as their parents migrate to the cities for work. A preference for sons has led to daughters growing up under discrimination. The tradition of parents exercising absolute authority over their offspring also contributes to strained relationships.
What I’ve been listening to
Ezra Klein did two episodes of his podcast on the idea of natality. In the first one, he interviews demographer Jennifer D. Sciubba, author of 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World, and focuses on how birth rates are plummeting worldwide, even if families have more buying power on average. Sciubba says that government policies to increase natality have not worked overall, except in more authoritarian states — like in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu, and even there they did not last once the Communist regime fell.
The companion episode focuses on the United States, and how the country has policies that are hostile to families, with no guaranteed paid parental leave and no subsidised early childhood care. This conversation with Caitlyn Collins, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, looks at ideas of intensive parenting and how a lot of younger women are starting to dread the idea of motherhood, as there is a lot of negative discourse around them.
What’s been inspiring me
I am very excited that the Paris Olympics, which are starting this week, will have the first-ever Olympic Village nursery. This means that athletes who are also mothers of young children will be able to spend time with them on site – being able to play and breastfeed. U.S. retired track and field athlete Allyson Felix, an 11-time Olympic medalist and mother of two, launched the nursery. Felix has been an activist for women athletes’ rights since she struggled to get back to her work while breastfeeding.
With love and care,
Irene
📣 The First 1,000 Days is edited by community member and friend, Shaun Lavelle.
📸 Sandra Jasionowska on Unsplash, a peaceful park scene with a wooden bench featuring black metal wheels, surrounded by tall, leafless trees. In the background, a small red-roofed structure, a green fence, and a wooden ramp are visible under a clear blue sky.
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One thought on “What would a world without men look like?”
I loved this piece from top to bottom! So much interesting info. First, I am really intrigued by the Hueck book. As a fan of Atwood, it’s really intriguing to think about the inverse scenario… I must admit I have often dreamed of a world without men and all that testosterone, anytime I see headlines about bombings or wars, or even when the average streetfight breaks out randomly on the subway platform in NYC. I think, WHY? Why did we have to take it this far? To violence? I wonder what nature’s intention was. If that force/action/outward motion could be channeled towards protection, creativity, or other positive outputs that would be lovely, but the tendency towards domination, aggression, even destruction seems to be privy mainly to men…
I wonder whether that tendency was always culturally conditioned, through rituals, religion, or through media and video games via the repetition of men in certain types of roles?
And yet, as a heterosexual woman, I don’t want a world without men. Not completely:) And to reduce men to a particular stereotype is simplistic, and doesn’t reflect the reality around me, of many types of male personalities and tendencies. Adopting a binary way of thinking (male vs female) is so limited, and we know now that gender is so varied and complex.
I’m really eager to read the Hueck book – if it can find a translator! – and see what others have to say here.
Thank you for the shout outs about the Olympic nursery (very cool to learn!), and the Ezra Klein episodes (I’m mainly a fan of his – though sometimes I get a certain vibe of arrogance or get irritated at why the Times doesn’t have another female or LGBTQ Opinion writer with their own podcast. – and I need to take a break. LOL.
I wonder if Hueck’s book or thought process touched at all upon homophobia, or how she imagined male sexuality…