The Gate to Women's Country

The Gate to Women's Country (ISBN 0-553-28064-3) is an English language post-apocalyptic novel by Sheri S. Tepper written in 1988. It describes a world set three hundred years into the future after a catastrophic war which has fractured the United States into several nations. The protagonists of the story are located in Women's Country, apparently in the former Pacific Northwest. They have evolved in the direction of Ecotopia, reverting to a sustainable economy based on low-tech local agriculture and the like. They have also evolved into a nominal matriarchy where the women and children live within town walls (so-called women's country) and most of the men live outside the town in warrior camps. At the age of five, each young boy leaves his mother and joins his father in the warrior camps. Later, he will be offered a choice: he may remain with his father in the garrison and become a life-long warrior, but he must accept the warrior life, and he will never receive any education or training beyond the art of war. Otherwise he may return ignominiously, through the gate back into women's country where he can be educated and learn any craft he likes, but will become a servitor to the women and be scorned and hated by the warriors. It is rumoured among the warriors that the returning boys are castrated.

Plot introduction
Morgot is an elder and physician in Marthatown, one of the communities within the larger Women's Country; Stavia is her daughter. The story is primarily told from their perspectives.

To the south of Women's Country, tribes of extremely misogynist fundamentalist Christians (with an admixture of Mormon elements such as polygamy stirred in) have been staging raids into Women's Country. The novel explores the events that ensue. A reworking of the Greek tragedy The Trojan Women called Iphigenia at Ilium weaves through the story as a leitmotif.

Plot summary
The Gate to Women's Country is set in the future of our own world, as many of Tepper's books are. The world as we know it has been destroyed by a nuclear war that left vast "devastations" (areas devoid of life and still deadly) - and the resulting civilizations that form from the small pocketed remnants of humanity are usually vastly different although not entirely separated from the world we know.

The book focuses on a small nation known as Women's Country with the main setting of the story being Marthatown, one of the earliest of the towns among the many that form Women's Country.

The book begins with Stavia, the main character. She is heading for a meeting with her fifteen-year-old son, Dawid, who has spent the last ten years living outside the city walls as a warrior, as all boys do. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five he must make a choice; to return through the gate to women's country, renouncing the warriors and living his life as a servitor, studying rather than fighting, or to renounce his mother and live outside as a warrior, returning only twice a year for Carnival (the only time women and warriors meet in an intimate manner, although they may talk over the wall at other times). The servitors are looked down on by the warriors, and some are even attacked by their century (warrior age mates) as they return through the gate. It is rumoured among the warriors that the returnees are castrated. It is thought that the servitors never father children, since every son is brought to a warrior father (a daughter's parentage is not discussed unless she seems to be becoming involved with a close relative).

While the women spend their lives learning, rediscovering the knowledge that was lost, and growing food, the warriors spend their time in ceremonies, games (with sports similar to our football/soccer), and, of course, in battles with other garrisons. No man is tested in battle until the age of twenty-five. Warriors are not allowed to study. The founders of Women's Country decided that wars must be fought in hand to hand combat and refused to allow warriors to learn techniques that will enable them to attack cities, to kill many people at a distance, and so on: A warrior must see the face of the man he kills. Therefore when a garrison goes to war to protect its city, no women or children are killed; only men who have chosen to fight do so.

As growth occurs, the towns divide when they reach the point where they are unable to support themselves on the land nearby, sending a portion of the town and the garrison to form a new town.

Major themes
The story explores many elements from ecofeminism and ecotopian fiction, which has been a hallmark of much of Tepper's writing, both in her feminist science fiction and in her pseudonymous mysteries.

The question of the causes of human violence is also a major theme, and in the novel Tepper's society believes they are successfully breeding violence out of humanity. In the novel, violence appears to be both biologically determined and sex-linked to males: By selecting only nonviolent males to breed, the society is slowly increasing the number of such nonviolent males.

The biological determinism of Tepper's world also controls sexuality, and the novel depicts homosexuality as a genetic and hormonal disorder which has been eugenically removed from the population. Some readers have interpreted this as homophobic, arguing that the presentation of homosexuality as genetically determined is oversimplified and inaccurate. More critically, readers have suggested that presenting the elimination of homosexuality as scientifically plausible, in conjunction with the attempt to eliminate violent tendencies, suggests that homosexuality is undesirable. However, others have suggested that this was merely homophobia on the part of Tepper's fictional society but not Tepper herself, or simply a thought experiment. Other readers have suggested that whatever Tepper's views may or may not have been when writing Gate, numerous works written and published since Gate present sympathetic portrayals of homosexual characters.