ABSTRACT
In 1972 Joanna Russ published an award-winning short story with the apt title ‘When it changed’; a space mission from Earth lands on Whileaway, a women-only planet whose men have been killed in a plague thirty generations earlier. Russ’s title is significant and timely. Utopia also changed around this time, lifted from the dystopian path in which it seemed to be set by the arrival of feminist writers, some from the neighbouring genre of science fiction, who bring an infusion of optimism not equalled since the utopian golden age of the late nineteenth century. As the motive power for inspirational change in the nineteenth century, orthodox Christianity played a vital role. It has been replaced by a variety of spiritual and mystic beliefs, usually pantheistic, sometimes derived from the pre-technological matriarchal religions. Anarchism, a horrifying concept for most late nineteenth-century feminists, is the antithesis of the rigid organisation of modern dystopias.
