1 Marleen S. Barr, Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992) p. xiii. Marleen S. Barr, Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory, (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987).
2 Barr, Feminist Fabulation, p. xiv.
3 Margaret Keulen would call these sorts of things "critical utopias." See: Margaret Keulen, Radical Imagination: Feminist Conceptions of the Future in Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy and Sally Miller Gearhart, (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 23.
4 Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 12.
5 As is clear, Tepper owes much to Plato's Republic with several key differences. First, she advocates each person having more than one skill whereas Plato wanted specialization. Second, women are not warriors in women's country while they could be in Plato's Republic if they so chose. Third, the philosopher kings are all "queens" in this society. I am sure the differences go even deeper, but this is another paper topic.
6 Harry Harrison wrote a book entitled Make Room! Make Room! which projected food shortages and overcrowding. However, he looked at this life from the perspective of the poor, not the more privilege characters in Piercy's novel.
7 Susan H. Lees, "Motherhood in Feminist Utopias," in Women in Search of Utopia: Mavericks and Mythmakers, Edited by Ruby Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch, (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), p. 219.
8 Ibid., p. 119.
9 Ibid., p. 119.
10 Lees, p. 231.
11 There is an interesting critique of this myth by Stephanie Coontz in which she argues that the modern image of "family" that has been made into an image we long for nostalgically never really existed in the past. See: Stephanie Coontz. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
12 Tepper, p. 365.
13 Bradley, p. 86.
14 See: Marge Piercy, Women on the Edge of Time (New York: Knopf, 1976); Suzy McKee Charnas, Motherlines, (New York: Berkeley, 1978); Elisabeth Vonarburg, The Silent City (London: The Women's Press, 1981); Joanna Russ, The Female Man (New York: Bantam, 1975); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (New York: Pantheon, 1979).
15 Minna Doskow, "Herland: Utopic in a Different Voice," in Politics, Gender and the Arts, Ronald Dotterer and Susan Bowers, Editors, (London and Toronto: Susquehanna University Press, 1992), p. 53.