Rediscovery: The Shore of Women by Pamela Sargent

[james_davis_nicoll]

The Shore of Women — Pamela Sargent

Comments

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I keep thinking that the Eymorgs must, at some point, get Spock's brain to keep their society running.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

Brain and brain! What is brain!

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Would Wylie's The Disappearance count? The disaster was the split between the world of men and the world of women, and the societies were too separate to be unequal.

Was there a disaster that produced the society in Glory Season?

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Haven't read that since I was a kid, wonder how it would read now. I had a lot more tolerance for the sort of omnipresent sexism you tended to find in 50s and 60s works, so wondering if my memory of it being relatively non-sexist would hold true. I.e., women were the technologically worse off not because they were dumber but because they had far fewer trained people in various key fields.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Well, he is also the guy who wrote that infamous essay on "Momism."

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

Glory Season was a product of intentional societal engineering. It was one part feminist separatism, one part mad opportunist scientist, one part unintended consequences and another over the top species-ist ideology as the plot driver.

It was a book I liked.

It is also a book with nontrivial problems.

[juliacolerating.livejournal.com]

nice one!

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

I have always conflated Sherri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country (1988) with Sargent's The Shore of (1986)Women. Partly it's mine own weird form of dyslexia, part of it is that the matter, treatment and titles are so similar, the third part is they were published so close together and the fourth part is that I read first - imprinted on The Gate to Women's Country.

Love, C.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

"consigned to life as short-lived hunter-gathers,"

Why oh why must hunter-gathers be assumed to be short-lived?

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Isn't the most common form of premature death among hunter-gatherers other hunter-gatherers?

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

I think, historically, that infant and child mortality were the high-runner cases for premature death in hunter-gatherers. After that point, I think the next high-runner was child-birth, but that would be irrelevant in this case.

But, as I understand things, if you made it out of childhood, life expectancy was quite reasonable, and generally higher than in an agricultural society.

Of course, there may be biases in this particular society that change things -- but there still seems to be such a widespread assumption.

Yes, if you look at life expectancy data, the life expectancy of a hunter-gatherer was noticeably less than a modern western democracy (e.g. Sweden), but as I noted above, most of that shortening was at the front-end; if you made it out of childhood, your life expectancy went way up.

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

I have no idea if I want to read this or not....