ABSTRACT
The legendary nation of women offered a desirable model of women’s autonomy, although, of course, some aspects of Amazon life were either tempered or ignored. Irene Clyde’s considerably later Beatrice the sixteenth moves away from contemporary problems. Her nation of women, Armeria, is located somewhere in Asia Minor. It is a slave-owning monarchy ruled by a queen, whose women fight with sword, javelin and dart, and who speak a language compounded from Greek and Latin. Rather than male-dominated science freeing women, it equates them with animals, thereby reducing them to that ‘natural’ state subservient to science. In Frances Power Cobbe’s future the suppression of all humanitarian values is symbolised by the coming death of the world: the ‘newspaper’ reports the death of the sun, and a new Ice Age. However, most of the earlier works dealt with a world in which women have gained the vote, and women politicians have gone into action.
