Why a 1980s Novel of Dystopian Patriarchy Still Speaks to Women Today

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

–Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”

Years ago I wrote a story about two sisters. One became a wife and mother, the other became—what? I remember looking for a word that didn’t exist, at least not in any language I knew. A word for a woman who lives happily on her own, without a spouse or children; who is passionate about work, art, sex, friendship, care-giving, politics; who is fully and fiercely alive. Spinster, freighted with its dreary connotations—dried-up, lonely, sexless, failed—didn’t come close. I grew up reading novels in which spinster characters were pitied or ignored. They crouched like feeble gargoyles on the narrative margins, their lives undeserving, it seemed, of real attention. The word bachelor evokes freedom, independence, and sexual license, yet English has no term for a woman fulfilled in her solo life.

What difference does it make, this hole in the language?

Patricia Anne Wilkins, born in Missouri in 1936, became the writer and linguist Suzette Haden Elgin. It can’t be an accident that she adopted the initials S. H. E.: her Native Tongue trilogy is an exuberant love letter to women and their resilience under a viciously regressive twenty-third-century patriarchy. A committed feminist for decades, Elgin nevertheless acknowledged the challenge of defining this identity:

My own definition of “feminist” is just as bad as anybody else’s. It has undefined terms in it, for starters. . . . And most of it is a chunk of meaning for which no English word or phrase exists—a lexical gap; that, I can’t fix. It goes like this: A feminist is someone-devoted-to-replacing-patriarchy-with Reality-O. Reality O is my cover term for a society and culture that can be sustained without violence; patriarchy requires violence in the same way that human beings require oxygen.

Lexical gaps also propel the invention of Láadan, the woman-centered language at the heart of the trilogy. Láadan promises to change the world by introducing nonviolent, egalitarian modes of perception and expression. In the first book, Native Tongue, this revolutionary tongue is under construction, hidden by linguist women in knitting bags and recipe cards. In the second, The Judas Rose, Láadan begins to spread, still in secret, to nonlinguist women.

These novels don’t imagine spinster life—or widow life, or postmenopausal life—as a tragic footnote; on the contrary, women without men are the luckiest women of all. I’m intrigued by Elgin’s utopian vision of communal life in the Womanhouses and the (awkwardly titled) Barren Houses, which she paints as a vibrant, nourishing alternative to the hetero-nuclear family.

Suzette Haden Elgin’s novels don’t imagine spinster life—or widow life, or postmenopausal life—as a tragic footnote; on the contrary, women without men are the luckiest women of all.

The critic who panned The Judas Rose in the New York Times wasn’t quite as intrigued. “I confess to a lack of objectivity concerning Suzette Haden Elgin’s antimale novel,” begins Gerald Jonas’s 1987 review. After a cursory plot summary, Jonas concludes: “The men are so crass, so stupid, so smug, so bad in bed, so unbelievably awful in every way that I began to feel sorry for them. Or was this simply a defensive reaction on the part of a male reviewer? If that is a crime, I plead guilty.”

Yes, Elgin’s tyrants can be ridiculous in their cartoonish misogyny. But then so can President Trump.

At a book festival in 2018, I heard Vivian Gornick reflect on her own history of feminist activism. She recalled going to meetings of the radical Left in the 1960s, where progressive women were expected to make the coffee and stay quiet. Their turn would come (the men assured them), but the revolution couldn’t let “wedge issues” like abortion rights derail its momentum.

“But we didn’t go away,” Gornick told the audience. “We gave no quarter. And we’re still here.”

Today, a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court and mounting state-level restrictions to abortion access pose a grave threat to reproductive rights. We are refighting a battle that many of us believed was over.

We’re still here.

Women are told, again and again—by advertisers, politicians, parents, pastors, guys on the street—that our bodies are the single most important thing about us. We are given the lie that our greatest value derives from our ability to incite sexual desire, to be thinner than other bodies, and to conceive and incubate future humans. Yet we also get the message that our bodies don’t belong to us. We don’t have final say over who touches them, who hurts them, what does or doesn’t grow inside of them. The patriarchal nightmare in the trilogy may seem hyperbolic, but what about the nightmare we face in 2019? A president who’s a bigot, bully, and sexual predator; sexual-assault survivors shamed or disbelieved; legislators calling for women who have abortions to be charged with murder . . .

We’re still here.

“Science fiction is not ‘about the future,’” says Samuel R. Delany in Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. “The future is only a writerly convention that allows the SF writer to indulge in a significant distortion of the present that sets up a rich and complex dialogue with the reader’s here and now.”

And as Donna J. Haraway observes in “A Cyborg Manifesto”: “The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”

Native Tongue, like any novel, is a product of its time. Though it takes place in the twenty-third century, technology hasn’t advanced beyond microfiche readers and “wrist computers”; the USSR is still intact, with American-Soviet competition as stiff as ever; gender is essentialized as a natural male/female binary; and we hear virtually nothing about race, disability, or queerness. These conspicuously dated elements made the reading experience more poignant for me. The trilogy may have been published starting in the 1980s—and it shows—yet it tackles some of the same issues we’re wrestling with today: bodily autonomy, reproductive coercion, toxic masculinity, feminist resistance strategies, and language as key to political change. Books like Elgin’s are a crucial reminder that women and nonbinary people were raising their voices against patriarchal violence long before #MeToo or the Women’s March, even if they wielded a slightly different vocabulary.

Women get the message that our bodies don’t belong to us. We don’t have final say over who touches them, who hurts them, what does or doesn’t grow inside of them. The patriarchal nightmare in Elgin’s trilogy may seem hyperbolic, but what about the nightmare we face in 2019?

In my own novel Red Clocks, set in a twenty-first-century America where abortion has been banned once again, a reclusive herbalist known as the Mender breaks the law by ending the unwanted pregnancies of her clients. The Mender is a link to the long history of fearing, punishing, or killing women because they didn’t do as they were told: women who fought back against enslavement, who did not shut up about voting rights, who did not want to become wives or mothers, who did not smile enough. Witches, bitches, stitchers, resisters. The characters in Native Tongue, likewise, occupy an imagined future that’s in direct conversation with our fraught present: in their world, Christian men dictate the fate of women’s bodies, eerily echoing the evangelical Christian crusade against reproductive freedom being waged as I write this sentence.

Seeing a role or identity represented in literature encourages a reader to envision herself inhabiting it. First made into language, then into idea. Without representation, an identity can seem insignificant, shameful, or simply impossible; which is why it matters that so few books feature a joyfully unattached woman in the starring role.

There was a saying in sixteenth-century Europe, cited by William Shakespeare in more than one play, that women who die unmarried must lead apes into hell. We’ve used the modern definition of spinster since the seventeenth century and of old maid since the eighteenth. Yet sexual harassment, for example, despite having been practiced for centuries, was not a legal term until the 1970s. As Audre Lorde reminds us, a word makes space for an idea, both in the individual imagination and in public discourse. If an idea has no name, it’s much easier to deny that it exists—and to take no action to stop it.

I am wildly grateful to the feminist writers of decades past who gave name to the nameless. Suzette Haden Elgin—alongside her science fiction contemporaries such as Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Margaret Atwood—broke a spectacular trail through a genre too often considered masculine territory. They join a vast and glorious constellation of artists whose language makes space for the ideas that save our lives.

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Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue, with a new introduction by Leni Zumas, is out now from Feminist Press.