For my writing this week, I would like to discuss the two part short story "Planet of the Amazon Women" and apply a feminist criticism to the story. The main topic I would like to discuss is how male and female roles are defined in this short story. The answer to that is, most plainly, there aren't any.
If you were to discuss most literature and narrative works, you would probably assume off the bat a sort of standard set of roles for men and women. There are "feminine roles" that are primarily occupied by women and occasionally men like mothers, sisters, teachers. Similarly for men there are roles like fathers and leaders, and those too can be occupied by the opposite gender. One could assume then that in a world where men don't exist, male type roles would be carried over in females. This short story has so many successes because that is not the case.
In this world without men, there are no more "roles" for genders; In fact, with only one sex surviving on the planet, one could say gender disappears altogether. These roles are unnecessary because they are trivial. The women on Hippolyta express themselves through their religion, culture, or however they please. They don't have any need to represent masculinity, or even femininity. I think that at a standard level, this is how people are. No one really fits into these roles without being taught them, and the women on the planet certainly survive well enough without having to be more or less like any gender.
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