Women in a Post-Apocalypse

[ysabetwordsmith]

Here's an interesting essay about the portrayal of female characters in post-apocalyptic scenarios.

This is, um, mind-blowingly narrow-minded.  Yes, it's a common scenario.  It is by no means universal.  Warrior women are another common PA trope, and there's matriarchal PA fiction if you know where to look.  Plus some oddball examples like Sarah Connor, who is kind of pre-post-apocalyptic and trains her son to survive the apocalypse before it happens.  

Then too, I'm writing in a post-apocalyptic setting, Torn World.  Its various remnants had a lot of different ways of dealing with population pressures shortly after the Upheaval.  Some places needed to push population up, while others needed to limit it.  In the current period, the Southern Empire has rebuilt a thriving society and they have quite good birth control, and citizens are required to practice reproductive responsibility.  The Northerners don't have that kind of birth control, and they are trying to keep their population up which is a challenge in their situation.  Childbearing is expected and respected, but still voluntary.  They've made some serious social adaptations to solve problems in ways that are least stressful; for instance, they practice serial monogamy rather than permanent marriages, and they have raisers to care for children so that people unsuited to parenthood can reproduce then return to their real work.  

Seriously, if people make a post-apocalypic setting suck more than is absolutely necessary, it's just another case of humanity being stupid.  There are saner ways to do things, and some people have used them.  I will say, if you're planning to write post-apocalyptic fiction, do yourself a favor and read some anthropology books.  It's a lot more fun to write about societies that find unusual solutions, rather than Yet Another Broodmare Fic or Five Millionth Story About Testosterone Poisoning.

Comments

[dunmurderin.livejournal.com]

I know of at least two examples of (fictional) disasters causing mass sterility in men and it leading to problems for repopulating the world. P.D. James's Children of Men (the novel) and Edward P. Hughes Masters of the Fist. In James's novel, all men become sterile and all frozen sperm die and children stop being born.And the world goes more than a little nuts. In Hughes' novel (which is more a collection of linked short stories), only one man in a small English is still able to father children and he and the village elders come up with a scheme to allow him to father children without letting the whole village know that all men are sterile.

And, while it's more a case of gendercide, there's also Y The Last Man, a graphic novel series about, well, the last man on Earth.