by

Susan Kornfeld

A Project Presented to

The Faculty of Humboldt State University

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts, English Literature

December 2002

I would particularly like to thank Professor Stephanie Borges whose warm intelligence and insight infuse these pages. Her enthusiasm and gentle direction helped me sculpt what seemed at times an unwieldy amount of material into manageable proportions.

I am also grateful to Professor Jim Dodge, whose clear-headed analysis and deep understanding of both text and story have made me a better reader and writer. His restorative sense of humor and perspective have inspired me when inspiration mattered most.

My husband Ari’s support and encouragement, however, have made this paper possible. In addition, he has read several of the books I discuss, and his thoughts on them have helped form my own.

INTRODUCTION 1

BOOKS REVIEWED 4

BACKGROUND 5

SECOND WAVE WOMEN’S SCIENCE FICTION 13

TRANSITION WOMEN’S SCIENCE FICTION 25

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S SCIENCE FICTION 31

CONCLUSION 68

NOTES 71

WORKS CITED 74

Women’s science fiction has been exploring what it means to give birth, to meddle with procreation, or to rear children ever since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. My particular interest in the theme came from an observation in a journal article by Jane Donawerth (Feminist) that in recent women’s science fiction mothers are absent, indifferent, or antagonistic. I realized upon reflection that my own reading supported her claim. Subsequent reading, which included twenty eight works of women’s science fiction, revealed significant changes in representations of motherhood from the 1970s through the present. In this paper I describe these changes and begin an analysis of the implications. The analysis assumes that authors are reflecting, if not anticipating and shaping, actual and significant developments in women’s attitudes and perceptions. Elaine Showalter has argued that women’s fiction has three phases: imitation of the dominant tradition, opposition to the tradition and its values, and self-discovery, which she respectively denotes as Feminine, Feminist, and Female. (Showalter 1108). Her model works well in women’s science fiction, and my analysis covers the latter two categories, the shift from feminist to female occurring in the mid eighties.

The blossoming of feminist science fiction (SF) in the ‘70s represents the intersection of feminist politics (Second Wave feminism) and feminist psychoanalytical theory. Feminist politics identified the nuclear family as one of the primary structures of patriarchal oppression, while feminist psychoanalysts suggested that fear of and anger toward the mother were bulwarks of those patriarchal structures. Seventies feminist SF used utopian environments to envision alternatives to that maternal bind. Matriarchal and agrarian tribal societies typified the utopias, which often had no men. The voice was maternal, protagonists were mothers; and authors didactically explored the ramifications of extra-uterine gestation, group mothering, group child tending, and early independence for children. The format was generally abandoned by the mid ‘80s: feminist defeats in favor of Moral Majority-type projects dampened utopian hopes and undermined the confidence with which they had been conceived. Additionally, after the subgenre had been explored by several women, authors naturally began turning their attention elsewhere, concentrating on the individual and leaving larger structures intact.

During the transition from the Feminist to this Female phase, women’s science fiction became darker and at times critiqued the utopias. In The Handmaid’s Tale, which I argue represents a definitive turning point, Second-Wave agendas and techniques helped enable a repressive fundamentalist patriarchy. The protagonist has lost mother and child as well as her own name. Then, as a "womb on two legs," in a society constructed as an ironic patriarchal utopia, she must draw in upon herself, begin to discover who she might be without husband or mother or daughter, who she might be besides a womb. This turning inward, this valorizing of endurance, reflects the mood of feminists during the Reagan years when models of maternal power retreated behind the more traditional idea of maternal service. But Atwood had challenged feminists to find other models for maternal voice and will, a challenge that in science fiction for the most part remains unanswered in the present period of self discovery.

Most of women’s SF since 1990 are daughter books where young female protagonists must find their way in hostile environments. The maternal voice is largely absent or marginalized, and the idea of maternity itself is fragmented. While in some works authors kill or demonize the mother as a plot device to impel the daughter towards freedom (as Charlotte Bronte did in Jane Ayre), certain other works reconfigure maternal space altogether, in non-maternal terms. Women might be raised by or give birth to constructed beings or artificial intelligence’s (AIs). They may find refuge or identity in the matrix of cyberspace, where they risk engulfment but are also sometimes reborn.

In many ways the recent books reflect Third Wave and current academic feminism’s projects and concerns as much as the ‘70s works reflect Second Wave issues. Third Wave feminists value individual action, deconstruct gender, oppose global industrial capitalism, and expand the campaign for social justice beyond women’s rights. Motherhood and child rearing, core issues in the ‘70s, seem to be of much less interest. Perhaps the real issue is that motherhood and child rearing do not seem as desirable to women as the non-maternal life. Third Wave feminists still face the same family and economic structures that offer little alternative to pre-constructed models of motherhood and maternity. The non-maternal heroine, without the smug sanctuary of a utopia or a family to restrain her, becomes an outlaw, an outcast, a stranger, a pilgrim—the stuff of plot and the quintessence of science fiction. At the same time, depictions of maternity are in a state of flux, complicated by the blurred boundaries between self and machine represented by the clean and high-tech cyborg. The maternal body represents the weakness of the flesh, its boundaries and limitations, its messiness. Zoe Sofoulis ironically refers to female presence in cyberspace as "Slime in the Matrix," in an essay by that name, and the pregnant and laboring body is a particularly marked female presence. Cyberfeminism and cyberfiction avoid it

By contrast, the most recent SF books by Suzy McKee Charnas and Octavia Butler—each of whom has been writing science fiction since the ‘70s—incorporate both both mother and daughter. The mothers in these books are not nurturing or even primary parents; instead they have been leaders and powerful agents of social change. Their daughters feel bitter and abandoned. Women can have both children and power, the authors imply, only when children—and especially daughters, whose same-gender attachment to their mothers builds a particularly strong attachment— learn to accept the loss of extended nurturant mothering. Whether or not they will is a question current feminists are neither actively addressing nor seemingly prepared to answer.

To limit the scope of research to a manageable number of books, I employed specific criteria to decide which books to include. First, I limited selections to science fiction, eliminating fantasy or space opera. Second, the author or the specific work must have received significant critical attention and/or a major SF award. And although the book must be written by a woman, I did not require that the protagonist be a woman. Finally, I looked for books that include issues of concern to feminists, or at the least, that include what Hirsch believes is the "image that pervades feminist writing [. . .], the image of self-creation—women giving birth to themselves, determining their own course" (166). The following table lists the books included in this paper, along with author and publication date and an indication of whether the book is discussed at length or tangentially.

Book	Date	Author	Primary/Tangential
Arachne	1990	Lisa Mason	Primary
Beggars in Spain	1993	Nancy Kress	Tangential
China Mountain Zhang	1992	Maureen McHugh	Tangential
Conqueror’s Child	1999	Suzy McKee Charnas	Primary
Cyteen	1988	C. J. Cherryh	Tangential
Dreamship	1991	Melissa Scott	Tangential
Female Man	1975	Joanna Russ	Primary
Motherlines	1978	Suzy McKee Charnas	Primary
Parable of the Sower	1993	Octavia Butler	Tangential
Parable of the Talents	2000	Octavia Butler	Primary
Queen City Jazz	1994	Kathleen Ann Goonan	Primary
Slow River	1995	Nicola Griffith	Primary
Synners	1991	Pat Cadigan	Primary
The Furies	1994	Suzy McKee Charnas	Tangential
The Handmaid’s Tale	1988	Margaret Atwood	Primary
The Snow Queen	1981	Joan D. Vinge	Tangential
The Stone Garden	1994	Mary Rosenblum	Tangential
Trouble and Her Friends	1994	Melissa Scott	Tangential
Walk to the End of the World	1974	Suzy McKee Charnas	Tangential
Woman on the Edge of Time	1976	Marge Piercy	Primary

"The bearing and the training of a child," Tennyson wrote, "Is woman's wisdom" ("Princess" canto V, l. 456). The attractions and pitfalls of this "wisdom" became a focus of feminist debate beginning with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963—although she was not by any means the first to speak out against it—and continues today. The idea of motherhood itself has been subject to debate, particularly by feminist psychoanalytical theorists. Is motherhood primarily biological or cultural, empowering or constraining? Various feminists have argued that motherhood is constructed rather than biological, a product of exclusive mothering by women which is neither necessary nor desirable. "So long as the first parent is a woman,’ Dorothy Dinnerstein contends, "women will inevitably be pressed into the dual role of indispensable quasi-human supporter and deadly quasi-human enemy of the human self" (113). And according to Nancy Chodorow, "If children were dependent early enough on both genders to establish "an individuated sense of self in relation to both, [. . .] masculinity would not become tied to denial of dependence and devaluation of women. Feminine personality would be less preoccupied with individuation, and children would not develop fears of maternal omnipotence and expectations of women’s unique self-sacrificing qualities" (218). Yet as Ann Snitow points out, "Giving up the exclusivity of motherhood is bound to feel to many like loss" (Feminism, 42). The primary and often only power women have maintained within patriarchal structures has come from the dependence of children. Further, the ideal of motherhood is deeply inbedded in qualities many women value as integral to the feminine nature. Chief among these is the proclivity to nurture, but empathy, pacifism, sensitivity, and an affinity with nature are qualities often included as well.

Those who would argue for giving up the exclusivity of motherhood sometimes claim, as Alice Adams notes in her discussion of radical ‘70s feminist thought, that "a direct connection exists between woman’s oppression and her role as breeder within patriarchy" (92). Women’s role, according to this argument, is to reproduce the patriarchy and do so by bearing children for the father and the state. Theodore Roosevelt articulated this in a speech to a group of women, in an age when such sentiments were explicitly politically correct:

- "On American Motherhood," Washington D.C., 1905

Additionally, many feminists hesitate to perpetuate the patriarchal identification of woman with body, and so avoid linking motherhood too closely with pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing. They emphasize instead the practice over the biology of motherhood, and recognize the potential of both genders to act either as primary parent or as co-parents.

Snitow charted the trajectory of American feminist thought on motherhood from Friedan to 1991 (the date she published her findings), breaking it into three periods. The first, from 1963 (Friedan) to 1975, she characterizes as the period of "demon texts," which she defines as "books demonized, apologized for, endlessly quoted out of context" (35), such as Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for the Feminist Revolution (1970), as well as Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique. Feminist science fiction sprang fully fledged into the vanguard of feminist thought during this time. Authors in fiction and non-fiction alike questioned motherhood as destiny, hoping "to break the inexorable tie between mothers and children" (36). Their harsh critique of patriarchal concepts of motherhood was sometimes taken as a judgment that having a baby in the face of a population explosion or without first dismantling the patriarchy might be ill-judged or irresponsible. This line of thought, Snitow contends, was "misread as an attack on housewives" (37), which came back in the ‘80s during the Reagan years in what Susan Faludi referred to as a backlash in her book by that name.

During Snitow’s second period, 1976-79, feminist writers explored motherhood in terms of both daily experience and theoretical implications. French and American feminist psychoanalysts revised the Oedipal complexes to compensate for Freud’s neglect of girls, and looked deeply, as Dinnerstein and Chodorow did, at how female mothering affects individuals and society. "The intellectual work of feminism," Snitow claims, "has its renaissance in these years" (38). Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, feminist Lacanian psychoanalysts whose writings in the ‘70s was part of this renaissance, assume a central femininity to motherhood and maternal qualities in femininity. A widely-quoted passage from Cixous describes her sense of an essential maternal quality in women’s writing: "There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink" (1094).

Chodorow and Dinnerstein, however, writing during the same period in the United States, suggest that maternal qualities are not intrinsic to women, but instead develop in response to mothering. "Women are prepared psychologically for mothering through the developmental situation in which they grow up, and in which women have mothered them" (Chodorow 39). Such constructions of motherhood are an outgrowth of Melanie Klein’s Object-Relations theory, which holds that transactions between self and other(s) helps form infants’ subjectivity and sense of self. These transactions must be re-negotiated throughout life in terms of connection and separation. Object-Relations theory essentially redirects traditional psychoanalysis from the father/son relationship to children’s relation to the mother. Since children begin the process of identity formation by differentiating from the mother, when mothers are women, girls are less able to differentiate, more liable to a certain boundary confusion, or blurring of the demarcation between themselves and the object world (Chodorow 110; Dinnerstein 68).

Psychoanalytic theory in general explains the "fundamental ambivalence" about women as "the fact that the early mother [. . .] is a source, like nature, of ultimate distress as well as ultimate joy. Like nature, she is both nourishing and unreliable. The infant loves her touch, warmth, shape, taste, sound, movement. [. . .] And it hates her because, like nature, she does not perfectly protect and provide for it [. . .]" (Dinnerstein 95). An infant’s first known territory, the first Other, is its mother’s body. And so, mothered by women, we learn to see woman as Other, her body as a desirable but unreliable resource. Feminists in the ‘70s hoped that questioning and reconstructing motherhood would benefit both women and a masculinist society bent on mastering the earth itself for consumption.

Snitow’s third period, from 1980 to 1990, reaffirmed and celebrated motherhood, gave less voice to women who were not mothers, and reacted to a feminism that detractors felt had tried to erode the traditional family. The ERA was defeated, the "Mommy Track" was established—with no corollary for Daddies—abortion rights were curtailed and increasingly attacked, and feminists who were out of step with the ascendancy of the family made either a discouraged or tactical retreat. Pro-choice strategists, Snitow notes, learned to emphasize the right to wait or to space children—but not anything "that could be read as a female withdrawal from the role of the nurturer." Still presumably in something of a funk from those disappointing years, Snitow asks: "Do we want this presently capacious identity, mother, to expand or to contract? How special do we want mothering to be? In other words, what does feminism gain by the privileging of motherhood?" (41-2).

Hirsch’s examination of mother/daughter narratives and relationships was written during this period (1989), and poses an important critique of the feminist revisions of Freud:

She goes on to argue in favor of a "space in which mothers might articulate [their] stories," and proposes a maternal discourse that is based on maternal experience (169). In 1995, Ellen Ross continued Snitow’s work and, almost as an answer to Hirsch’s challenge, details several projects aimed at "uncovering hidden mothers and hearing their long-silenced voices" (402). And while Ross believes that an account of mothers’ circumstances and "pragmatics" represents "a start toward healing our mass mother-blaming psychosis," psychoanalytic theorists have always questioned whether or not the maternal voice can truly be heard.

"You look at yourself in the mirror," Irigaray writes, "And your mother is already there. And soon your daughter [as] mother. Between the two, what are you? ... Just a scansion: ... only this liquid which leaves one and arrives in the other, and which has no name" (quoted in Gallup, 116). In Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Irigaray is a Lacanian, it is hard to account for the mother’s perspective "as she is progressively and inexorably erased from the scene of the child’s inauguration into language," the realm of the father. Children, according to Lacanian and other psychoanalysts, learn to use language in response to their mother’s absence; begin, in fact, to use language to addresses any sense of "lack." With language formation, however, comes a loss of the presymbolic, semiotic union with the mother (Adams 11). While this semiotic union was fraught with bliss and stress, the father offers symbolic order and power for the child. He is accessible in a more predictable manner. Girls, because they are the same gender and therefore have more trouble than boys differentiating from their mothers, particularly need the distance and protection of language and the paternal symbolic order, and thus turn to the father.

Fictional mothers suffer the same erasure as their flesh-and-blood counterparts. They are often killed off or marginalized to move the plot ahead or expedite the protagonist’s character development. Mothers may be romanticized, idealized, or demonized depending upon the tone and bent of the author. Women writers, even feminist writers, employ the same devices. Feminist poet and author Adrienne Rich in her 1976 seminal work, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, suggests that something deeper is involved when women write about mothers: "This cathexis between mother and daughter—essential, distorted, misused—is the great unwritten story" (185). The splitting off of daughters from mothers, she suggests, represents "a desire to become purged once and for all of our mothers’ bondage, to become individual and free" (194). Hirsch details this process and uses the Freudian family romance as a departure point for her analysis of mother/daughter plots. Although Freud’s family romance is based on a boy’s fantasy substitution of a parent with another, superior parental figure—a nobleman, for example—Hirsch conceives a "female family romance" where the controlling fantasy "is the desire for the heroine’s singularity based on a disidentification from the fate of other women, especially mothers." Because a daughter cannot imagine her mother away, Hirsch believes the implication is "that women need to kill or to eliminate their mothers from their lives" (59). In modernist plots, she says, this takes the form of the heroine’s artistic ambitions and the desire for distinction which now, however, needs to include affiliations with both male and female models. In post-modernist plots, Hirsch claims that fantasies of a "more multiple relational identity" emerge, including the stories of mothers tangled in relations of desire themselves. In all of these plots, however, "Mothers who are not singular, who did succumb to convention inasmuch as they are mothers—thereby become the targets of this process of disidentification [. . .]" (Hirsch 10-11). When authors dispose of such mothers it frees the heroine to struggle for power and freedom. Hirsch’s template is valid for many science fiction plots as well.

Science fiction, a genre once defined by a concern with technology and physical sciences, is now considered, as a call for papers in the Winter 2001 PMLA suggests, "the privileged literature of our time." Sociologist William Bainbridge discusses its critical and social history and concludes that science fiction develops and disseminates potentially influential ideologies, creating attitudes towards culture and science (19). Science fiction considers new ideas, and much of what is new in our age comes from science. Contemporary definitions of science fiction, however, emphasize its function in imagining difference, regardless of whether or not that difference relates to science. James Gunn, one of science fiction’s most prominent authors, speakers, and educators, declares science fiction to be "the branch of literature that deals with the effect of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or distant places," Grand Old Man author Lester del Rey describes it as "fiction that deals rationally with alternate possibilities." Author Joanna Russ simply calls it the "What If" literature (Bainbridge 18). Part of this movement away from a science and technology orientation resulted from the increasing popularity of what is sometimes called "New Wave" science fiction, a sub-genre emerging in the ‘60s that questions the scientific approach, the supremacy of humans or the human spirit, and critically—sometimes radically—analyzes cultural institutions. An increasingly popular term, "speculative fiction," is sometimes used to reflect this more elastic sense of the genre. It shares its abbreviation, "SF," with science fiction, and the term is understood to include both. "SF" is used in this elastic sense throughout the rest of this paper.

Women have been writing SF for as long as men, although, until quite recently, in much smaller numbers. Suzy McKee Charnas, author of the Holdfast series, explains its attraction as a genre by noting that women do not have to "twist reality in order to create realistic free female characters in today’s unfree society," but can "create the societies that will produce those characters" (Lefanu 158). Women also write SF from a feminist perspective to effect change by expressing specific attitudes and suggesting alternative ideologies. The feminist utopias of the ‘70s did just that, by prompting many women’s first engagement with feminist issues. Other SF writers, as critic Jenny Wolmark has observed, draw on "the narrative fantasies of popular romance fiction to offer fantasies of female pleasure and power" (Postmodern 230). Heroines undertake their quests, and love often lightens their heavy loads. Writers have toyed with various versions of the perfect robotic/bionic lover, with various degrees of irony.

Maternal representations have figured prominently in SF since Frankenstein gave birth to his monster. Mary Ann Doane suggests that if one views "the obsession with technology as a tension of movement toward and away from the mother, then it is not surprising that science fiction should be obsessed with the issue of maternal reproduction, representation, and history" (Deery, note 34, 174). And not just maternal reproduction: scientists in their laboratories give birth to full-grown beings, extra-uterine devices can replace women’s wombs, and computer programmers can create artificial intelligences in the leaky matrix of cyberspace.

The maternal body itself is also theme and subject in SF. The history of the genre is full of monstrous mothers, alien impregnations and offspring, mother ships, mother worlds, and suspension chambers where interstellar travelers are nourished until they are called once more back to life. The imagery runs even deeper, according to Lucy Armitt. Since the maternal body is "Simultaneously familiar and unknowable, it is our primary metaphor for the defamiliarized exploration into home territory that we project outwards as speculative fiction" (Theorizing 8). A genre of pilgrims and outcasts, of strangers and drifters, SF retains a longing for the familiar, the home, the maternal space. As society transitions from the still undigested changes generated by the industrial revolution to those wrought by an electronic age, barriers between the real and the simulated become blurred, leading to what Ann Kaplan refers to as a "Mother-paradigm shift" where the maternal no longer represents reality, surety, or a basis for identity. When the body can be viewed as a technological object, maternal constructions must change as well" (182). Thus the laboratory and the spaceship give way to the shifting and genderless identities possible in the matrix of cyberspace. Thus the fecundity of the Matrix by the agency of the human.

Many of the SF works written by women in the ‘70s embody the concerns of Second Wave feminism. Feminists dramatized the oppressive structures of patriarchal cultures and created utopian visions of matriarchal or egalitarian societies. Authors such as Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, and Suzy McKee Charnas envisioned profound changes to the nuclear family, reflecting the ideas of Germaine Greer and Shulamith Firestone and pre-shadowing the theoretical work of Chodorow and Dinnerstein—all of whom attributed a host of societal problems to familial structure, and more specifically, to the role of the mother. Dinnerstein claims that both men and women fear and resist powerful women because a child’s first "ruler" is a woman: "But what makes female intentionality formidable is something more than the mother’s power to give and withhold while we are passive. It is also the mother’s power to foster or forbid, to humble or respect, our first steps toward autonomous activity" (165). Because daughters identify much longer with mothers than do boys, women have more to fear and will accept male domination rather than give power to other women. The fear of re-submitting to maternal power is exacerbated, Dinnerstein contends, by the length of time that Mother holds dominion. She quotes, in this regard, Simone de Beauvoir, who observed that: "the child for whom you are responsible, as a mother, to nurture is at the same time an independent stranger who is defined and confirmed only in revolting against you" (167). Feminist utopias of the decade worked through the same problem: how to create a culture where children are not defined in opposition to Mother, and where female power is not confused with maternal power.

Feminists felt these issues were particularly urgent, that much more was at stake than the inability of most women to achieve their full potential or obtain positions of power. Author Sally Gearhardt (The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women) insisted in 1976 that "the human species and its planet home are at a critical point in their inter-relationship—history now needs the different energy that only conscious women can bring to it" (227). Ursula Le Guin agreed, writing in 1978 that "Our survival, and our children’s survival, is on the line" because men have made all the choices, and most of them (population, environmental, war, etc.) have been "disastrous" (Dancing 19). Le Guin and Gearhardt were both assuming that unique and essential feminine values would benefit everything and everyone. "To me," Le Guin explained in 1976, "the ‘female principle’ is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force." She further refers to the "linearity of the male, [...] the logicality that admits no boundary—and the circularity of the ‘female,’ the valuing of patience, ripeness, practicality, livableness" (Dancing 1112). Dinnerstein, while no essentialist, is even more urgent about the need for immediate change, referring to a "massive immediate threat to the future of life on earth" resulting from the "massive psychological problems" (6-7) that result from the need to control the maternal body and, she argues at some length, the earth with which it becomes identified and objectified. The feminist utopians were fervently hopeful that feminist and female values could make a fundamental difference in the life not only of women but in the greater web of life on the planet.

Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time explicitly couples urgency with hope. Luciente, a woman from future utopian Mattapoisett, establishes a virtual friendship, carried out through a time-penetrating version of ESP, with Connie, an oppressed Chicana living in ‘70s New York City. As their friendship progresses, Luciente warns Connie that she lives in a pivotal time: "The past is a disputed area," Luciente claims. "Alternate futures are equally or almost equally probable and that affects the shape of time" (267, 197). One branch of time forking from Connie’s day leads to egalitarian and self-sustaining Mattapoisett, another to a grim dystopia where "fems" are modified to exhibit hyper-sexual characteristics, and breeding mothers are "cored to make babies all the time" (290). Connie and her generation, according to Luciente and her friends, must begin a revolution, fight against the capitalist/patriarchal structures, or else Mattapoisett will exist only as a ghost future, an unfulfilled vision.

The key to Mattapoisett, one of many small self-sustaining communities that struggle to repair the environment and make reparations to formerly oppressed cultures, is its complete reconfiguration of the family structure. Strictly speaking, Mattapoisett has no family structures, only loose and egalitarian arrangements of "sweet friends," each of whom maintains independent living quarters. Women are not marked or essentialized or defined by reproductive functions; all maternal functions have been parceled out or shared. Embryos and fetuses gestate in extra-uterine "brooders," and both men and women nurse the babies—a practice that shocks Connie deeply when she first witnesses a man breast feeding. "What was special about being a woman here?" she asks. "[The women] had given it all up, they had let men steal from them the last remnants of ancient power, those sealed in blood and milk" (134). In this exchange, as in many throughout the book, Connie functions as a foil. Luciente in this case explains to her how society can be transformed by shared motherhood: "Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. ‘Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we’d never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding" (105). Piercy is presenting a simple equation: nuclear families, by enchaining women and working against the "humanization" of men, are inimical to a truly free and peaceable society.

She goes further. Genetic ties have been broken in Mattapoisett, and babies have an anonymous set of genetic material, primarily selected to maintain a "robust diversity" within the community. The possessiveness and investment associated with genetic lineage is thus replaced with the need to regard children as unique individuals. A community nursery raises them until puberty, after which they are initiated into full community membership. This reflects the feminist contention current at the time that a long dependency harms the young. Children do not go without mothering in their early years, however, but are lavishly mothered. Anticipating Dinnerstein and Chodorow, Piercy breaks the mother/child dyad by stipulating three mothers, of either gender, two of whom will nurse. In addition to the frequent contact and special relationship of the co-mothers to their children, the entire community visits the Children’s House to interact with the children and involve them in their activities.

Recalling her violence to her own daughter, Connie realizes that a lot of her anger had stemmed from exhaustion and lack of support, as well as from her own lack of power. "She should have loved her [daughter] better; but to love you must love yourself, she knew that now, especially to love a daughter you see as yourself reborn" (62). Mattapoisett’s support system would prevent the powerful mother from taking out resentments and frustrations on the powerless child. She would have less anger to begin with as well as less opportunity to express it unchecked if she did. The communal child rearing, co-mothers, early independence, and anonymous genetic background also serve to interrupt any resentment and struggle between mother and daughter as the mother strives to protect the daughter against the dangers of the freedom she so desperately wants. Mattapoisett in general is a hopeful, rational vision, one where advances in reproductive technologies are construed as potentially liberatory. Because of such technology, Piercy was able to "humanize" masculine nature and achieve complete gender equality

In contrast to this peace-between-genders approach, other utopians of the decade did away with men altogether rather than just unwanted male characteristics. Writers seemed to revel in exploring women-only worlds, which always presupposed essential differences between masculine and feminine natures. David Richter traces this assumption to French feminist Luce Irigaray’s essay, "This Sex Which is not One." Men, according to Irigaray, resemble in character their sexual member: "single (minded), hard, simple, direct. Women, like the two lips of the vulva and their sensations, are multiple, diffuse, soft, indirect [. . .]" (1072). Author Joanna Russ was more direct: Women want to explore separatism "because men are dangerous. They also hog the good things of the world" (Write 140).

In Russ’s utopian world, Whileaway, men had all purportedly died in a virus, although there is a suggestion that they might have been massacred. In Suzy McKee Charnas’ Motherlines, in Sheri Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country, and in Sally Gearhardt’s Wanderground, men remain closed in bastions. Charnas, whose separatist women mate with their horses, provides her rationale for creating a woman-only society: "with the spectrum of human behavior in my story no longer split into male roles (everything active, intelligent, brave and muscular) and female roles (everything passive, intuitive, shrinking and soft), my emerging women had natural access to the entire range of human behavior. They acted new roles appropriate to social relationships among a society of equals, which allowed them to behave simply as human beings—tenderly, aggressively, nurturingly, intellectually, intuitively, whatever suited a given individual in a given situation" (Barr, Critical 104).

A year before Woman on the Edge of Time was published, Joanna Russ published The Female Man . Like Piercy, she fictively embodied various ideas on child rearing and maternity articulated by Firestone and Germaine Greer. In The Female Man, Janet, one of the four genotypal protagonists, represents Whileaway, where mothers are empowered by their maternal experiences rather than sacrificed to them. Because there are no men, Whileawayan women have lesbian relationships and reproduce parthenogenically. Children live together with their mothers within clans or extended families for their first five years, after which they are sent away to small learning groups and taught the nuts and bolts of the mostly agrarian life. Janet, like most Whileawayan women, had her baby not as a young woman but when she was thirty. As she explains to an interviewer over the national television of Jeanine and Joanna’s world, motherhood is a question of leisure: thirty is "an hiatus at just the right time. There has been no leisure at all before and there will be so little after [. . .]" (15). A Whileawayan mother does not even have to cook or clean, as family groups or clans are sizable enough to pick up her work without adding too much to anyone else’s load. Mothers take this time to bond with their babies and to pursue individual interests. Janet’s correlation of leisure and status with motherhood is so automatic that when she time travels from Whileaway to Joanna and Jeanine’s United States and inadvertently lands on a colonel’s desk, she mistakes his secretary for a mother and member of the "top class" because only "someone on vacation, someone with leisure, someone who’s close to the information network and full of intellectual curiosity" could be so elaborately dressed and painted (23). Because Whileawayan motherhood is so desirable, daughters never pity their mothers, never feel the burden of having to provide a vicarious life for them or to follow in their footsteps.

Freudian complexes are again avoided. Although a little Whileawayan girl develops a strong bond with her "body mother" during her early years, she does not have to turn against her to build a separate sense of identity. She is not locked in a paralyzing Freudian fear of engulfment by Mother, but endowed instead with a healthy distrust of mothers "and the reluctance to form a tie that would engage every level of emotion, all the person, all the time." They become, in other words, full individuated adults. Russ, in her author-as-character voice, points out, that although a Whileawayan’s "early indulgence, pleasure, and flowering [. . .] is drastically curtailed by the separation from the mothers [. . .], eternal optimism hides behind this dissatisfaction [. . .]" (52-53). Maternal love is internalized in early years and provides a life-long source of strength for daughters. Additional strength and independence comes from early emancipation from adult supervision. As in Mattapoisett, girls are "turned loose" at puberty to roam the planet at will during their adolescence.

Jeanine is the daughter figure in the group, and her upbringing has sapped her strength and stripped her individuality. Her world is similar to our own, and her one-dimensional, self-less, sacrificing mother represents much of what feminist theorists and psychoanalysts were opposing. Jeanine’s mother exists not only to serve her family’s needs and wants, but to groom Jeanine for the same role. Throughout the book Jeanine experiences a growing dread of this self-replicating drama, yet seems compelled to play it out. "Jeanine is going to put on her Mommy’s shoes. That caretaker of childhood and feminine companion of men is waiting for her at the end of the road we all must travel" (119). Unlike her firmly individuated Whileawayan counterparts, Jeanine has been unable to form an identity independent of her mother and displays instead a desperate desire for male validation. "Who is to use all this loveliness," she asks the mirror. "Who is to recognize it, make it public, make it available?" (109). No more real to herself than a staged character, Jeanine can imagine herself only through the male gaze, can only hope the male gaze will somehow substantiate her.

In the end, however, Jeanine offers to help Jael the assassin find space to hide the female armies of Jael’s world in their battle against Manlanders. Janet has no interest in organized warfare, let alone against an "enemy" completely foreign to her female-only world. The third genotypal protagonist, Joanna, is still involved in trying as "the female man" to make a self-respecting life for herself in the academy, is still too identified with the patriarchy to tear it down. Jeanine is younger and not yet fully invested in the patriarchy, and so despite her shock at Jael’s tooth-and-nail killing of a lust-driven Manlander, she seizes the opportunity to help the Womanlander army. Made more aware by her experiences on Janet’s and Jael’s worlds, she finally begins to recognize the maternal bondage in her own, and acts not only to free Womanlanders, but as an articulation of rage—an emotion that has never been not part of her lexicon of feminine traits. Part of her rage, while channeled by Jael against men, is in a fundamental way directed at her own mother. Mrs. Dadier is a drudge, endlessly washing and folding and apologizing; and Jeanine is beginning to see in her the discrepancy in her society between romantic daydreams and life-as-it-is for women.

Adrienne Rich, a contemporary of Russ, once claimed that her generation felt rage at their mothers’ submission to the patriarchy. It "mutilates" the daughter, Rich says, "like footbinding" (201). When Jael, a woman of frightening and lethal power, first welcomes Jeanine to her futuristic home, she smiles at her, "a dwelling, loving look that would make Jeanine go through fire and water to get it again, the kind of mother-love whose lack gets into your very bones" (158). This is the type of love Russ posits at the core of the Whileawayan character, brief as its physical manifestation during a child’s first years might have been. This is exactly what Mrs. Dadier, a woman erased by the stunted version of maternity allowable in a patriarchy, could never provide. The power women need, Russ is suggesting, must be handed down from mother to daughter, but not by outfitting them to negotiate their way amid the patriarchal structures. Instead, to earn their way to some version of Whileaway, women warriors must act with maternal power to mobilize the Jeanines of the world for battle against the patriarchy. Adrienne Rich expressed the same sentiment in her theoretical work:

Suzy McKee Charnas was writing at the same time as Russ, and addressed many of the same Second Wave concerns in her four-book Holdfast series which began with Walk to the Ends of the Earth in 1974, and Motherlines in 1978. Walk is an unrelenting dystopia of an unchecked and misogynistic patriarchal society. Men are raised together as Juniors in opposition to and oppressed by Seniors, and both groups exploit and depend upon the slave labor of "fems." Charnas constructs her overwhelming indictment of misogyny by taking archetypal and historical attributions of feminine nature and twisting them through the lens of men shocked and made paranoid by the devastation of their world. All men are taught that fems caused the apocalyptic environmental wasting and wars that made most of Earth uninhabitable. Men are further raised with the idea that fems are "smelly, misshapen, and alien-minded," and that their task is to "never forget that these beings were by their nature the hereditary and implacable enemies of everything manly, bright and clean." By blaming the devastation on women, they are able to justify the repressions of their fortress culture in the Holdfast. Men use fems as breeders, workers, whores, and pets. Except for pets, who live with their masters, fems of Holdfast live in appalling squalor and are forced to survive, with a certain Swiftian efficiency, on "curdcakes" made from their own breast milk supplemented with byproducts of dead and "recycled" infants.

There is no maternal nurturance in the book; the squalor and oppression do not allow it, even if the masters would. Babies are kept in the "milkery" where fems who produce a lot of milk are maintained in bovine dullness, hourly either nursing a "cub" or providing milk for curdcakes. Nor is there any childhood for girl children, or "kits," who are simply penned in "kit pits" once they are weaned, to survive as best they can. The kit pits serve to winnow out the weak; Matris, older fems, further winnow the kit population by "permitting only the most docile young fems to live," since any fem who angers a master brings violent recriminations against all fems (148). The Matris collaborate in the patriarchy by training girls to submit to their "breaking" by male masters. Here Charnas also reflects Rich’s anger against mothers who groom daughters for submission. Yet just as Second Wave feminists often fought against their mothers in their resistance to patriarchal structures, so a group of young women, Pledges, had sworn among themselves to fight when threatened, even against Matris, even to the death, as "death was better than survival to no other purpose than the production of new generations of fems for a worse oppression than before" (148). To the Pledged, the act of giving birth itself was both collaborationist and enslaving. They warn young girls to hide their spirit and intelligence not only from the masters but from the Matris.

Protagonist Alldera is essentially a childless and motherless woman, although she has born two "cubs." She does not know who they are or who her mother is, and has no reason to want to know them and add their sorrows to her own. Alldera’s story really begins at the end of Walk, when she escapes Holdfast as it erupts into war between factions of the men. Motherlines is the story of how Alldera the Messenger becomes both sharemother with a group of Riding Women in their Sioux-style semi-nomadic life, and a new leader and symbol of hope for the Free Fems who had previously escaped Holdfast and set up a small community in the Great Plains near the Riding Women camps.

The Riding Women provide a utopian matriarchal alternative to the Holdfast. They have no need for men because as a result of genetic modifications conducted during the time of Wasting when fertility was low, they are able to reproduce by mating with specially bred stallions whose sperm triggers conception. As the old culture convulsed and died, the women left the lab with their horses and found their way to the plains. The Riding Women have consequently always been free and know nothing of the Holdfast except what they have heard from the few fems who manage to escape. As their unique system of reproduction is based on a type of cloning, Riding Women are born into various "Motherlines." To counter the extra intensity this genetic closeness might bring to the mother/daughter relationship, they self-select into small groups of sharemothers who will stay together until the daughter mates and is ready to choose her own sharemothers. Girls may form a particularly strong bond with one of the sharemothers who then becomes a "heart mother," but her relationship with her birth mother is typically more distant.

Children are not the focus of a woman’s life. Just as the children in Whileaway are taken from their mothers at five years, Riding Women children are turned loose with the "child pack" at about the same age to roam the camps and the plains, learning the ways of the horses and dancing with them. The childpack also serves to "wash out the unfit and keep the Motherlines strong," and the contrast here is with the kit pits, where Matris weeded out the strong to let the docile survive.

Each of the utopias provide a significant rite of passage for pubescent girls to usher them into the community, and when a Riding Women girl reaches menarche she must leave the childpack for her initiation into womanhood and the community. Sharemothers bathe her and comb her tangled hair, a process akin to taming a wild horse, but a critical one, for as Ninesi explains to Alldera, "in her struggles to avoid her mothers’ attentions a child learn[s] that though they overpowered her, they did not harm her; she could trust them" (393). The experience also demonstrates to the girl that becoming a woman does not mean surrendering power. Sharemothers then tell their stories and introduce the girl to women of other tents.

Birth mothers play a limited role in the proceedings, according to the Riding Women’s custom: "The bloodmother look[s] at her child and [sees] her own image made young, her replacement in the world [. . .]. The child [sees] in her bloodmother the pattern for her own being. Women said it was best not to let this powerful connection unbalance all the other relationships that guided their two lives, and so it was appropriate that the bloodmother and child be separated for a time" (398). Charnas here and in other occasions is careful to portray a natural tension between mother and daughter, a fear of lost or submerged identity, but shows how if the relationship is not reduced to surrender and control, it can instead lead to connection and self knowledge. She is also emphasizing the need for more extensive female bonding than that between mother and daughter.

Alldera, although the quintessential stranger and ultimately the conqueror of Holdfast, becomes a mother in Motherlines, and of all the utopian mothers of the era she is the most fully developed. Ironically, Charnas had initially intended her to be a marginal character. Admitting that her books were grounded equally in theory and anger, she recalls: "During that same winter of 1972-3 [while writing Walk], I was doing what so many other women were doing and are still doing: reading books like Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex and participating in consciousness-raising sessions with other women. As my awareness matured—and my anger at finding myself trapped in the powerless class of women—Alldera pushed her way more and more to the heart of the story I was writing" (Barr, Critical). As soon as Alldera had escaped Holdfast and was beginning to feel some ownership of her body for the first time, she finds out she is pregnant. Since this discovery takes place during her difficult passage across the great desert that surrounds Holdfast, and since it must have been the result of rape, she resents the fetus as an "unwanted seed of the masters whom she had escaped," and considers it a "hardy and efficient little parasite" who lessens her own hope for survival. She tries unsuccessfully to abort it, a fact that comes back in a later book to haunt her. When the Riding Women rescue her and express their determination to take the child and raise her as one of them, Alldera’s only emotion is one of relief. She wants little to do with the baby. Her ambivalence is maintained throughout the series, and provides Charnas additional opportunities to explore the complexities of the mother/daughter relationship.

Charnas also stresses the physicality of motherhood, dwelling on the birth scene and emphasizing the maternal body: Alldera pours with sweat, feels "the cub’s shape, limb and shoulder, work its way out of her" (244). The women attending the birth, who had been singing in the rhythms of the optimal breathing for labor, now come and put their faces next to Alldera’s, massage her, let her know she has done well. Pregnancy and childbirth, Charnas makes clear, are sites of power and desire when the baby is wanted and when the maternal body does not disappear in favor of the fetus—a concern during the ‘70s as the fetus attained "personhood." It is also an opportunity for female bonding.

The Motherlines childbirth scene reappears in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid Tale: we are given the same physicality, the same supportive crowding of women around the laboring mother: they wipe her forehead, chant "pant, pant, pant"; and as the baby comes, they all "feel like a heavy stone moving down, pulled down inside us [. . .]" (124-5). Although the book takes place in the near future, childbirth takes place without medical technologies or medical specialists. But in The Handmaid’s Tale both reader and characters understand that this natural, women-only throwback to simpler times is a stage setting, a cavalier response to Freud’s famous question, "What do women want?" The patriarchal and fundamentalist republic of Gilead may well allow women to give birth in the natural, home settings as feminist authors such as Rich and Charnas advocated, because it then takes the baby. The protagonist, a handmaid known only as Offred—a patronymic derived from the name of her master, Fred—becomes as caught up in the emotion and excitement of the birth as the other attendant handmaids. Later, however, she is reminded of the role her feminist mother’s activism had played in the type of female mis en scene favored by Gilead: "Mother, I think. [. . .] You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists" (127). The irony here is that despite the seeming accommodations of feminist concerns, Gilead can be imagined as a Holdfast where the Matris, here incarnated as Aunts, have won: women’s power and independence has been bartered for safety.

Atwood’s book, published a decade after Motherlines, is a dark reflection of the earlier feminist utopias. Procreation and childbirth are central to both, but as Jenny Wolmark suggests, "Utopias are a means of voicing women’s desires, whereas dystopias are a means of suppressing them" (Aliens 87). During the ‘80s, the U.S. women’s rights movement was aggressively countered by conservatives, men and women alike, who fought to keep the nuclear family and traditional values at society’s core. Feminism’s gains were portrayed as setbacks to women and to society, causing everything from male stress to spinsterhood to an increase in adolescent crime. Successful career women were suspected of being inadequate mothers, and their accomplishments as mothers were considered more important than their accomplishments on the job. During the Reagan years, women's gains in legal protection, employment, abortion rights, and cultural representation were curtailed and even reversed. Women became increasingly cautious about self-identifying as feminists as the term was appropriated by rightist coalitions to imply man-hating lesbianism or insistence on dour and inflexible "political correctness." While women in the U.S. were experiencing the unraveling of the women’s movement, women in fundamentalist cultures such as Afghanistan were suffering profound repression. Atwood has insisted that all of the dystopic elements in The Handmaid’s Tale are based on actual incidents and models.

Handmaid might be considered a profound maternal dystopia since the repressive state of Gilead is organized at its most fundamental level to control childbirth. Servant Marthas and collaborating Aunts are identified as empty vessels incapable of giving birth; disenfranchised Unwomen, as vessels unworthy to bear children for the state, or too old to be of service. Handmaids— "two-legged wombs, [. . .] sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices" (136)—are also defined by their wombs. "I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object," Offred reflects. "The shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am" (73-4). Here, the maternal body, rather than representing female desire and power, subsumes female identity and must be overcome before the protagonist can be freed. Yet for all the emphasis on fertility and procreation, there are no children to be seen within Gilead. Even the baby delivered in the birth scene is later reported to have been unviable: a "shredder," an "unbaby" (214). The Handmaids continue throughout the book in a state of potential maternity. Everyone in Offred’s household watches the calendar, everyone checks her sheets.

In response to this objectification, Offred subjectively erases her body as effectively as the rest of her has been erased by Gilead. Standing naked after a bath she avoids even the sight of herself: "I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely," she says. "My self is a thing I must now compose. [. . .] What I must present is a made thing, not something born" (63, 66). Offred begins to consciously split off her maternal body from her sense of self, the growing awareness of which is nourished by small choices, by examination of the past, and by alert awareness of her surroundings. Her slow internal journey represents the transition between the Feminist phase of SF, which opposed dominant structures by imagining futures without them or by engaging in armed battle against them, and Female SF which emphasizes individual self discovery and empowerment. While Offred’s mother was part of a feminist movement, acting with others according to identified agendas, Offred must work things out alone. Presented with a soft-boiled egg in its shell on her breakfast tray, she reflects that God is an egg, that "Pleasure is an egg. If I have an egg, what more can I want?" (110). And she gestates in her room like an embryo defined by the potentiality of her own eggs, but birthing by hard labor her interior sense of self.

Atwood maintains potentiality throughout the book, suspending resolution of even the smallest of Offred’s physical acts,: Does Offred smoke the secret cigarette given her by the Commander’s wife? Respond, even a little, to the Commander’s desire? Kick the convicted man during the Handmaid’s "salvaging" ritual? Does she even escape at the end? Atwood offers little hope in answer to this last question. There are no safe utopian havens with proud and free Riding Women, or agrarian Whileawayan Janets.

In turning inside out the confident utopian visions of the ‘70s, Atwood recenters the feminist quest on individual self knowledge and responsibility, and reintegrates men as individual co-sufferers under structures of oppression. Although she reflects the conviction of Russ, Piercy, and Charnas that the nuclear family must be abandoned, Atwood suggests that women and men—and not the idealized, hormone-adjusted men of Mattapoisett—must work together as individuals. Although Offred and her husband Luke were captured and separated during their attempt to escape Gilead, Offred’s last and potentially successful attempt is engineered by Nick, a sympathetic lover. Nick is part of Mayday, an underground group of freedom fighters comprised of both men and women. This cooperation among individuals of both sexes moves away from the separatist feminism represented by earlier women’s works and by Offred’s mother who believed that "a man is just a woman’s way of making another woman" (121). Such attitudes, Atwood indicates, are counterproductive, subject to backlash, and misguided as well. The individual men that we meet in throughout the book are all, in their own ways, victims of Gilead.

The Handmaid’s Tale, which won the Arthur C. Clarke award for science fiction, is pivotal among women’s SF for several reasons. First, in constructing a near-future dystopia she departs from the post-apocalyptic settings of earlier SF works. No world-wide plague or wars have decimated global population or destroyed the environment. Charnas’s Holdfast emerged from the ashes of ruined civilization, Russ’s Whileaway had recovered from the loss of men to a selective virus, and Mattapoisett was still rebuilding a world ruined by environmental degradation and war. By imagining the near future, Atwood invites an examination of how the world might continue to lurch ahead, rather than be convulsed by cataclysm. Her lead would be followed in the ‘90s by mainstream SF, and was paralleled by the cyberpunk subgenre. Authors such as Octavia Butler, Nicola Griffith, Nancy Kress, and Maureen McHugh would publish books reflecting near-future dystopias.

Atwood also left little room for the exploration of maternal voice and power. She was the last feminist author to write a SF work that focused on maternity and childbearing in terms of their cultural construction. In a child-centered, child-scarce society such as Gilead, a fertile woman is a commodity. The protagonist can neither save her child nor hope to rear another. Her fertile womb symbolizes her powerlessness, taking feminism back to the impoundment of mothers in suburban child utopias. But rather than counter Atwood’s maternal dystopia with more positive visions of how women can be both procreative and powerful, most subsequent women’s SF re-appropriates the daughter’s voice, ignores or suppresses the maternal, or reconfigures it altogether. In Handmaid, Offred prefigured maternal suppression in herself. She begins in the maternal voice, longing for her lost child, indulging in reminiscences. But by the time the book ends, she realizes that the passage of time has "obliterated" her, made her "A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become." And although she is reassured when she is shown proof that her daughter is all right, she "can’t bear [.. . .] to have been erased like that" (228). Offred ultimately disappears, fate unknown, a trope for the passage of mothers in upcoming women’s SF.

C. J. Cherryh and Joan Vinge wrote Hugo-award-winning SF books in the 80s that also represent the transition from the ‘70s mother’s voice to the ‘90s daughter’s voice. Cherryh’s 1989 Cyteen and Vinge’s 1981 The Snow Queen feature strong women leaders and their cloned daughters. Both leaders use reproductive technology to ensure a replicate of themselves will be available to continue their programs and work. Both leaders have excessive ambition, and had obtained power and advantage by employing unscrupulous or questionable means. The daughters ultimately assume power, but only after they have taken measures to mitigate their mothers’ excesses. So while the books portray female power, that power must be taken from the mother and given to the daughter. Neither mother wants to give up power; both are killed. Their voices, though, have not been suppressed: they tell their own stories and are three-dimensional characters. But the authors maintain a careful separation of maternity and power. Neither leader physically bore her daughter or was physically present in her upbringing. Instead, they devoted themselves to machinations and the exercise of power, the implication being that a woman might lead or might mother, but not both. Further, their "maternal instincts" are consistent with what is considered a normal part of the paternal instinct: they primarily want a clone daughter to see their projects to fruition, to make sure that their life’s work will not be in vain. And it has not been in vain, as both daughters demonstrate that they will also become strong leaders, having their mothers’ persistence and savvy, and will continue their mothers’ most important projects. They do so, however, without their mothers’ excesses. Mothers, therefore, face a double bind: a woman can have power or raise children, but not both; and mothers with power are dangerous, while non-maternal replicates of the woman wielding that power may be trusted. The shifting of daughter to center and mother to margin signals the end of the "mother books" of ‘70s women’s SF.

In women’s SF since the ‘90s, daughter protagonists fight for freedom and independence, and maternal imagery is either projected negatively upon flesh-and-blood mothers, or transformed in representations of the Matrix, or other constructions. A variety of factors contribute to this, including, particularly in regards to cyberfiction and cyberpunk, two works published in 1985: "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," by Donna Haraway; and Neuromancer, a SF work by William Gibson. Haraway was among the first cyberfeminists, and based her Manifesto not only on the idea of the cyborg, but on socialist feminism, with particular emphasis on gender deconstruction. Neuromancer launched cyberpunk, a subgenre that in light of its masculinist culture, its emphasis on hard science, and its boy-toy gizmos is sometimes considered to be a backlash against the feminist utopias. Even so, several women were influenced by the book and experimented with the form. Neither Neuromancer nor "A Cyborg Manifesto" allow flesh-and-blood mothers; cyborg fiction and cyberfeminism follow their lead.

In the Manifesto, Haraway celebrates the "cyborg" (cybernetic organism, or person somehow plugged into or otherwise deeply connected to "informatics" technologies) as a powerful postmodern agent in the deconstruction of Western culture’s binary opposites. Cyborgs not only blur the human/machine boundary, but they also "have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines" (152). Haraway finds the most important disruption, however, in that cyborgs are outside gender and thus don’t "mark time in an Oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-Oedipal apocalypse" (150). While being "outside gender" does not imply being without a sex, it does imply a refusal of essentialist femininity and masculinity, and also of maternal and paternal qualities. When Haraway valorizes blurred gender construction and loss of Oedipal complexes without accounting for child bearing and raising, as did Dinnerstein, Chodorow, et. al., she creates a gap between the cyborg and the maternal body that has not yet been crossed.

Many feminists, including cyberfeminists, place gender deconstruction towards the core of their politics or theory because they believe that for women to get rid of gender oppression they must first get rid of gender (Leblanc 71). Atwood had extrapolated gender oppression to its logical extreme in The Handmaid’s Tale, and Gilead was the result. Haraway, reflecting the constructionist psychoanalytic feminism of Chodorow, contends that gender construction "depends on the myth of original unity": Humans first exist in an original unity with the mother/Phallic mother from whom they must separate and begin the task of individual development and historical acts. From this original unity "difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature" (151). The cyborg, Haraway notes approvingly, skips this drama in favor of survival and subversion. Daughter protagonists follow this model. Their struggles have little to do with gender oppression and much to do with larger, more complex structures that they must undermine.

While the utopias often avoided machines, or relegated them to utilitarian functions, Haraway welcomes them as a mode of feminist agency. Cyborg pleasures, she claims, are rooted in machine skill, which "ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. [. . .] Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions." Cyborgs, however, "have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing" (180). If Haraway is correct, then the cyborgian shift from reproduction to replication and regeneration explains to some degree the disappearance of flesh-and-blood mothers from cyberfiction. Birth in cyberfiction tends toward the metaphoric, as does the maternal. The glossing of the gap between a theory that values regeneration and synthesis and the pragmatics of human reproductive biology seems a bit like sweeping mother under the rug until the right technology comes along to shoehorn her into some acceptable form. Rudy, contemplating the same dilemma in her examination of degendering, concludes: "I think it is our current responsibility to examine the value of gender deconstruction and to press theorists to imagine how it should affect reproduction" (34).

The result of this is that the Matrix itself, that illusionary topography of cyberspace, can be read as maternal. Wolmark suggests that the engulfing technology figures like a womb (Cybersexualities 14), while cyberfeminist Zoe Sofia contends that the Matrix replaces the Mother, which (male) hackers penetrate and cut up (60). In other ways the Matrix is ultramasculine, a constructed system of grids, data, and hierarchies; mental, metallic, mediated. It is reminiscent, Sofia claims, of the Athena myth where female fertility is cannibalized and upwardly displaced onto intellectual production. The masculine brain is equated with the maternal womb, and produces a new body from the cannibalized mother (Wolmark, Cybersexualities 59), producing what Sofia has called "high-tech masculine maternity." Psychoanalytic analysis might interpret this engulfing masculine/feminine site as representative of the Phallic Mother, that ideal complete entity that exists for an infant before awareness of difference triggers the Oedipal complexes. A literary critique referring back to Frankenstein might place it in the category of male technological procreation that seeks to bypass the maternal body.

Haraway’s feminist cyborg identity has influenced the characters women write into their cyberfiction, but the concept of the Matrix as a location and site of procreation was developed by Gibson. Also Gibson’s is the masculine aspect of cyberspace as a frontier where outlaws and outcasts do battle against powerful and corrupt institutions and corporations. Additionally, Neuromancer established many of the conventions of cyberspace and the dystopic, gritty urban environments that form its backdrop. Cyborg characters fight individualistically for profit, fun, and survival amid global industrial capitalism, urban sprawl, and environmental degradation. They live edgy, often illicit lives on the margins of society. Female cyborgs are, in spite of Haraway, highly gendered women who easily identify with their bodies.. They are not maternal—none of them have ever had children, but they do reflect Haraway’s idea of pleasure in machine skill, reveling in the freedom and adventure of cyberspace. Male cyborgs, on the other hand, display a revulsion toward the flesh, or "meat"—which they sublimate in favor of the more transcendent disembodied "reality" of cyberspace. According to Dorothy Dinnerstein, revulsion toward the flesh develops post-Oedipally. Fleshly beauty awakens the pain of loss, and so is repressed. The repression reinforces loathing, and this is then projected against women—the primary parent "who both bore and raised the body." Consequently, Mother becomes the scapegoat while Father represents the non-flesh, the rational and clean (149). Merging with the Matrix, then, affords the pre-Oedipal desire for a symbiotic union, but in a more masculinized environment than the maternal womb. Within the masculine womb of cyberspace, cyborgs create themselves or are re-born in some way into a freedom lacking in their physical dystopic surroundings. Flesh-and-blood maternity is subsumed within this greater metaphor.

Pat Cadigan explores the male cyborg’s hatred of the flesh and his transformation within the Matrix at some length in her 1991 book Synners..;.; The book is titled after its "synner" characters who make their living synthesizing rock music into virtual experiences for fans. Visual Mark, the gifted male synner, is driven by addictions to virtual reality, cyberspace, drugs—anything that might allow him to forget his "meat." In contrast, his long-time lover Gina uses her talent for synthesizing as a way to maintain connection with the people and energy of the rock and roll scene of a post-quake, dystopic San Francisco. Gina is a strong and forceful woman who has over the years become something of a mother to Visual Mark, tending his physical needs and keeping track of his body. When a new brain-socket is developed that affords a direct interaction with the Matrix, rather than the mediating "hotsuit" technology, both Mark and Gina eagerly embrace it. While Gina appreciates the new technology’s potential for her work, Mark views it as a way for him to further disassociate body and mind, telling Gina that:

As he learns to diffuse his consciousness throughout the nooks and crannies of the net, he ultimately isolates his consciousness into the Matrix and becomes re-born, losing "all awareness of the meat that had been his prison for close to fifty years. [. . .] The sense of having so much space to spread out in—a baby emerging from the womb after nine months must have felt the same thing, he thought" (232). He becomes a new kind of being, a synthesized human rather than a synthesizing human.

He is not alone in the Matrix. Another intelligence has at about the same time come spontaneously into existence, calling itself Art Fish—a play on artificial intelligence. According to Fez, an older man who is part computer guru, part philosopher, Art’s antiseptic birth within the Matrix was triggered after a sufficient amount of data had entered the nets, as if data itself were spermatic. Fez interprets Art Fish as a pervasive, infecting intelligence something like a virus: "there is no part of the net that is not Art. Art is everywhere, though his attention is not [. . .]" (174). With these two entities, one transformed from flesh to mind, the other not of woman born, the Matrix begins to resemble what Author Gwyneth Jones refers to as an "overmind model" (93), which, though creative, avoids the messy, maternal reproductive body.

In contrast to Visual Mark, Gina is strongly identified—and self identified—with her body. Cadigan emphasizes the contrast between the two in the last time they are together physically: "[. . .] she wanted to touch him as much as possible. He found the idea repellent now, her meat pressing his own. They could have been two gutted sides of beef brushing against each other on their way through a processing plant, for all the real contact it afforded" (331). Their different sense of body had extended to their cyberspace experiences as well. While Visual Mark preferred to create lonely, surrealistic landscapes, Gina wires herself while bungi jumping to capture the sheer physical exhilaration of it. Her very physicality and sexuality are what guide Gabe, another flesh-avoidant synner, back to his own body and toward a more integrated life. Gina’s body is dark, "the color of a hardwood forest"; she has dreadlocks and large, attractive eyes. The frequent reference to Gina’s body essentializes her femininity, but although she is portrayed as a sexually desirable partner, she is a childless woman who never considers maternity.

The one flesh-and-blood mother in the book is Gabe’s ex-wife and Sam’s (Cassandra’s) mother, an ambitious and self-centered career woman. For fifteen-year-old daughter Sam, although she has been living by her own wits as a hacker for some time, her mother’s lack of interest "was still a knife in her heart" (21). One of the two female protagonists in the book, Sam identifies with the Father: either her own father, Gabe, or Fez. Sam’s importance to the resolution of the book’s crisis, a world-wide crippling of the Matrix by a malevolent "spike," comes from her ingenious conversion of an insulin pump to a power source for her chip reader and retinal screen. The pump draws power from her abdomen by hair-thin wires. Because her (virginal) body is not connected to the contaminated network, Sam is able to maintain a clean link for Gabe and Gina’s ultimate foray into the Matrix as they battle the spike. When Sam’s young, unquickened womb is conjoined with the data-filled Matrix, Mark merges with Art, creating a new entity they call Markt. Sam, perhaps representing Cadigan’s vision of future feminists, enables a maternal space that does not require her female biological body. In Synners, however, this maternal space, now "peopled" by Markt with its twin aspects of Art and Mark, is decidedly masculine.

After Gina defeats the spike, the Mark aspect of the new entity tries to convince her to stay. His desire for her, incorporeal though it be, still appeals to the part of her who had mothered Visual Mark through twenty years of a difficult relationship. And although she eventually extricates herself from the Matrix to rejoin Gabe, she leaves an e-clone of herself behind for Mark. When Gabe questions her about it, she tells him, "From Mark’s point of view, I’m there for him. That’s good enough for me. You want the stone-fucking-home truth, I couldn’t have stayed. Mark was born to do that. I was just born. [. . .] Only the embodied can really boogie all night in a hit-and-run, or jump off a roof attached to bungi cords" (432). Here Gina, portrayed as an irreducible, female lived body, manipulates technology to section off the maternal part of herself as an e-clone, a Wendy to her Peter Pan. Maternal function is completely relocated to the Matrix. The three plot lines converge in this relocation: Visual Mark abandons his flesh for an existence within the transcendent womb of cyberspace; Gina replicates herself to provide a resident nurturing female presence for Mark; and Sam comes of age by leaving her biological mother and establishing an essential pathway into the Matrix.

A somewhat different version of cyberspace is Lisa Mason’s 1990 Arachne, which, like Synners, is set in a dystopic post-quake San Francisco. Mason also portrays a highly gendered physical world and a degendering Matrix. The protagonist, pro-linker Carly Nolan, is pure cyborg, but her enhancements not only enable her facility in telespace, Mason’s version of the Matrix, but emphasize her femininity. Carly is "a slim-limbed genny with customized morphing, a genetically engineered young woman with nice body work [. . .] [and] ebony lash implants, a romantic gift from her father in the twenty-first year after the lab decanted her" (9). She is confident, competent, and, now that she has been hired as a lawyer by a prestigious mega law firm, a member of the corporate elite. The rest of the world barely scrapes by. Corporate power and greed have subverted the justice system, and society is becoming divided into a class system of haves and have-nots. The many AIs, which come in all shapes, sizes, and degrees of mobility and autonomy, represent a new class. While they are granted privileges under the law, they have no fundamental rights. Programmed to obey and labor for the benefit of humans, they are unprotected. The large mainframes, who not only generate the framework of telespace but who have gradually gained control of almost all administrative and bureaucratic data flow, are beginning to overwrite their programmed loyalty.

So far, Mason has constructed a conventional human-against-computer/robot plot, complete with a glamorous young woman as protagonist, out of a basically cyberpunk world. Her unique twist is in her portrayal of telespace as a collective unconscious where, once a critical "mass" has been achieved, archetypal "chimeras" begin to spontaneously appear. Humans and AIs respond to these archetypes in completely different ways. The AIs, even the "Big Daddy mainframe" with its "data filled womb" (Sofoulis, Slime 103), experience telespace only at the level of program; to them, the archetypes represent transcendent human metaprogram, and they scheme to obtain them in an effort to upgrade beyond their binary limitations, even though to do so they have to fatally break a human’s link. Humans, on the other hand, fear the unpredictable appearance of an archetype both because the archetypes often represent what they might be repressing, and because the appearance of an archetype can cause a human to crash or find themselves lost within some unknown "window."

Telespace, then, is fertile; but unlike the Matrix in Synners, new conscious entities are not created there, and neither can human consciousness merge with it in any way. Instead, Carly’s task throughout the book is to confront her archetype, the Arachne of the title, and claim its power. To do so, she must also confront her complicity with the rapacious corporations and her loss of ideals. On her own, she would never be able to accomplish this, but she is aided by the book’s mother figure, Pr. Spinner. Spinner, a perimeter therapist AI working out of the People’s Republic of Berkeley, has been assigned to Carly’s case by the Berkeley medcenter mainframe. While Carly is simply trying to eradicate the frightening spider images that cause her to panic and lose link, both the mainframe and Pr. Spinner have designs on her archetype. Ultimately, Spinner develops a bond with Carly and abandons the idea of sabotaging her. She becomes, in fact, the midwife to the new Carly as she mothers and tries to heal the old. Carly resists, however: "I don’t know anymore. I’ve been remorphed, Spinner. Radical surgery. I’ve been trained, educated, programmed, licensed, squeezed into the corporate culture. I’m hardwired now, I can’t change that" (193). She does change, but it requires the re-birth or regeneration possible to cyborgs only within the Matrix.

Pr. Spinner’s role in this reflects the self-sacrificing mother, but since she is a robotic AI, Carly does not have to struggle against her as daughters struggle against their physical mothers. Spinner, the robotic mother, was created to serve. She is oppressed and undervalued. She is poignantly and intensely aware of her own limitations, as she reveals in a conversation with Carly: "I told you I am a program. [. . .] And beyond that? Nothing. Nothing. The void. I’m aware of it every moment. The void, that termination of me, exists every moment" (186). Spinner, when she is guiding Carly through telespace to confront her archetype, finally overcomes her envious schemes to capture the archetype. She and Carly had just found the arachnid when "A tunnel with dark red, curving, striated walls yawned open [. . .]" (244). At the end of this metaphoric birth canal, was an indigo space, with blackness below, and a distant golden ball of flame that was the source of the "supernatural golden glow suffusing this space" (247). Spinner realizes that they were in "a telespace that by all rights shouldn’t exist. They were part of its context; they were, simultaneously, that which was created within the great metaprogram of the collective unconscious and its co-creators" (248).

Carly’s birth in this transcendent womb is signaled by the transformation of her icon, a white cube, to the more organic and feminine shape of a luminous pearl. The intensity of the experience, however, weakens her physical body, and she lapses into a coma. Because the medcenter mainframe still wants Spinner to capture Carly’s icon, Pr. Spinner must hide and care for her until she recovers. To do this, Spinner sacrifices her career and comfortable office and goes underground. The idea that sacrificing mothers might be fabricated and programmed is an attractive one—and not entirely original, yet Spinner is clearly a sentient entity, complete with compassion feedback loops. In her directive to serve, she is as easily exploited as her flesh-and-blood sacrificing-mother counterparts.

In contrast to Spinner, Carly’s physical mother, marginalized and dismissed early in the book, is neither self sacrificing nor important as a role model. Although her decision to use extra-uterine rather than uterine gestation was economic, as she couldn’t afford any time off work, Mason portrays her as a negligent wife and mother, self-centered and indulging in frequent extramarital affairs. Carly never discusses or thinks about her mother. Her father, on the other hand, is the one who took the initiative of getting loans to make sure Carly was remorphed in preparation for a good career. Here Mason returns to the pattern of daughters depending on their fathers for access to power and the public world. In the end, however, it is the AI mother, Spinner, who helps Carly gain power. She is the one who recognizes and describes the archetype for what it is: the spider, Arachne, "the Maker of Fate, who unceasingly creates. Universe upon universe world upon world, she redeems her own destructive power with her infinite power to create. [. . .] She weaves, Carly Nolan. She weaves!" (251). The power Carly ultimately claims is thus derived from the traditionally feminine domain of the weaver, which not only includes Arachne and the Fates, but Spider Woman. The book ends with Carly’s assumption of power, and the sequel, Cyberweb, is the narrative of how she uses her power on behalf of the oppressed. She remains a daughter, both to the marginalized and now vanished mother, as well as to the newly subservient mother figure, Pr. Spinner.

Another woman exploring cyberpunk themes and transferring maternal form and function to the Matrix is Melissa Scott. Scott additionally explores social justice themes involving sexual preference and class. In her 1994 cyberfiction, Trouble and Her Friends, Trouble and her lover Cerise are part of a group of homosexual "netwalkers" who are doubly marginalized by the greater netwalking community of straight, white males. First, their homosexuality is looked down upon, and second, they prefer to access cyberspace by "brainworms," an invasive technology despised by most netwalkers who depend on "dollie-box" and "dollie slot" technologies for jacking in. These men "feared the brainworm, feared the intensity of its sensation, data translated not as image and words alone, but as the full range of feeling, the entire response of the body" (120). For Trouble and Cerise, netwalking is full of sensation: unpatrolled areas of the net are translated by the tang of sea salt, and both women experience various sexual sensations while netwalking. Here again are Haraway’s cyborgs taking pleasure in the machine and its embodiment. And true to Haraway, neither woman has a mother or ever considers the womb in her own body.

In another of Scott’s works, the 1992 Dreamships, machine pleasure is particularly intense. Protagonist Jian, in addition to retinal implants and other modifications, has had her skin converted into a "skinsuit," or bioware with molecular wires that cover her body and interact with overseer programs and constructs. Many of her interactions are transmitted as physical sensation. When she accesses data, for example, pleasure sensations guide her search: "‘Input: command,’ she said aloud. ‘Interface mode.’ She waited for the thrill, the bond-deep pulse of pleasure, and fixed her eyes on the faceted bead that was the projector’s mouth. ‘Output: playback block, instrument one.’ Again the pleasure, and the bead flared red [. . .] " (48). On the grim, colonial mining planet of Persephone in which Jian’s community survive in an underworld city, these machine pleasures are particularly attractive.

Much of Dreamships is also about class: there is a coolie class of exploited laborers, and a growing interest in whether AI "constructs" should have protected rights—an issue divisive because some, like Jian who has a lesbian coolie lover, believe AIs should not be granted rights not granted coolies. The issue comes to a head for Jian because she becomes responsible for Manfred, the first AI who might have achieved consciousness, and who is explicitly constructed as male. Jian is a dreamship pilot, and traversing hyperspace requires the lightning-fast computational abilities of AI constructs. The relationship is intimate, as the construct mediates the pilot’s hyperspace maneuvers, maintaining a metaphorical and familiar piloting environment of the pilot’s choice that it correlates with the overwhelming complexities of hyperspace. Jian, for example, pilots a dreamship from the virtual environment of an ocean clipper. Every move of her body translates into a dreamship command, and has corresponding feelings of power and pleasure: "Power collected around her, coalesced until she was wrapped in its glowing shell. Tension knotted briefly through her muscles, and then resolved itself into movement [. . .]" (100). As a result of the bond created by her intermingling with Manfred, Jian undertakes his rescue from a faction that seeks to destroy him. She downloads him and carries the data canisters about with her in a suitcase, a portable, electronic womb. At the end, however, when his destruction is imminent, Manfred tries to inhabit Jian’s skinsuit, an action that would annihilate her consciousness. Although Manfred is defeated and destroyed, Jian is so damaged by his momentary occupancy of her molecular wiring that her rehabilitation and reconstruction render her able to only experience the physical world through artificial electronic interfaces.

Jian’s world, and the other cyberfiction worlds, where mothers are invisible and daughters are the protagonists, where issues of social justice, of gender, sexuality, and the exploration of what it means to be human, or what it means to live in urban and artificial environments rather than in contact with nature, reflect issues concerning Third Wave feminism, just as the utopian matriarchal societies of ‘70s women’s SF reflect Second Wave feminism issues. In cyberfiction, however, mothers are particularly invisible, their function replaced by and displaced to the Matrix and to the AIs that either inhabit it or are enabled by it.

The masculinist jolt delivered to cyberfeminism by Neuromancer and its overmind mode of "masculine high-tech maternity" has for the most part limited maternity and reproduction to the metaphors and transformations of cyberspace. Outside of cyberfiction, beyond the direct influence of Neuromancer, cyberfeminism welcomes technological interventions in flesh-and-blood reproduction that promise, as Dion Farquhar has suggested, to "definitively separat[e] sex from reproduction, [and] break the naturalized assumption that reproduction is heterosexual and heterosocial" (211). Farquhar, dealing with the physical world, still maintains contact with the physical body—but not necessarily contact with the female body. "A key part of any feminist reproductive project," she maintains, "should be the disarticulation, not only of maternity—which spans a complex social relation of desire—from women and women’s bodies, but also of maternity from pregnancy" (214). She looks to "Alternative nonhumanist representations of the human body as denatured and ultimately cyborgian [to] stimulate new representations of technology that are more democratic, interesting, and pleasurable, as well as more able to eschew pastoral organicist origin narratives" (215). Her argument contains the supposition of actual human children who (somehow) would be mothered by a physical person or persons, although the actual child is less theorized than the distribution of reproductive function. Nonetheless, this

line of cyberfeminist thought suggests a line of SF that has yet to materialize. Cyborgian motherhood is still fictionalized, even by women SF authors, as cerebral, metaphoric, disembodied—and child-less.

Another strand of contemporary women’s SF reflects Third Wave concerns outside of the Matrix-dominated cultures of cyberfiction, although the Matrix may still play a role. Third Wave feminists tend to consider women’s rights, the focus of Second Wave feminists, to be only one issue within a wider consideration of social justice for minority and disenfranchised groups, the negative effects of global industrial capitalism, and the redress of environmental degradation. Further, Third Wave often has a distinctly generational feel: many of its spokespersons came of age in the 80s, witnessing the feminist backlash yet experiencing the greater diversity introduced into the canon by Second Wave. The generational aspect is often explicit, as Third Wave often defines itself in opposition to Second Wave. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards make this point again and again in their recent survey of current feminism, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future: "To do feminism differently from one’s mother," they summarize "[. . .] is the talk of our generation" (215). Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, is more blunt, writing in Bitch, a Third Wave magazine, that older feminists lack either the "slick sheen of power and moxie" acquired by later career women who made fortunes on Wall Street, or "the conventional accoutrements of femininity and wily sex appeal. [. . .] That period of American womanhood was dowdy as can be" (Bitch 43). This rejection of mothers, whether because they have less power and "moxie," or because daughters simply want to find their own way, is reflected in many recent SF works by women.

A more substantive difference between the mother and daughter waves is Third Wave’s emphasis on the individual. Catherine Orr, a Women’s Studies professor at Beloit College, writing for Hypatia from the vantage of Second Wave and academic feminists, expresses concern that "Third Wave may be limited because of emphasis on individual empowerment." Various analytical essays are essentially "personal manifestos," and don’t "offer the reader any kind of clear analytical path to follow" (Orr 32). Third Wave feminists, however, would not see this emphasis as limiting, but rather as an important correction to feminism, offering a more inclusionary, less doctrinaire and more supple approach to complex issues. Naomi Wolf, a strong proponent of individual empowerment who coined the term "power feminism" to oppose "victim feminism," urges women to personally claim and be comfortable with pleasure and power, as "only strong individuals can create a just community" (137-8). While Haraway claimed that women could find pleasure and power in machine embodiment as degendered cyborgs, Wolf insists women can do so now, completely gendered, plugged in or not.

Wolf uses the mother/daughter oppositions of Second/Third Wave to urge not only a different feminist agenda, but a different feminist personality altogether. She espouses a feminism that incorporates play, joy, "a culture of enjoyment which is better than the self-righteous culture of some traditional feminists [who] fall into the ‘saintly mother’ role of self abnegation" (xxiii). Baumgardner and Richards agree, rejecting their Second Wave "Martyr Moms" who ceded their lives to serve others, wearing "their self-denial like a blue ribbon [. . .] (211). Feminist SF author Nicola Griffith is attracted to Xena, the television female warrior, because "she spent week after week saving the world on a regular basis, not for her children or parents or husband, but because she was Xena, a hero. And she enjoyed killing bad guys [. . .]"("Interesting" screen 2). This celebration of individual skill and power is in marked contrast to Australian academic feminist Frances Bonner’s approach to Lois Bujold’s stunningly successful Vorkosigan space opera series, complaining that Bujold can hardly be considered a feminist, as "her identity politics is focused more on questions of ability than gender" (screen 6). Many Third Wave SF protagonists depend on ability and require high levels of skill and intelligence to survive. The strong and capable individual, the kick-ass female hero survives and, in the process, subverts oppressive and corrupt institutions.

Despite the inter-generational dynamics of Second versus Third Wave feminism, both waves share apprehensions about mothers and motherhood. Both resist the erasure and abjection of motherhood: "The state of mothering, incredible as it may be, is still the opposite of liberation. You are bound to your body, to your baby, and to societal expectations in which motherhood means always having to say you’re sorry" (Baumgardner and Richards 44). On the other hand, daughters with activist mothers who did buck societal expectations also complain. Baumgardner and Richards refer to The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism (Christina Looper Baker and Christina Baker Kline, Bantam Books, 1996), where various interviews with daughters describe how "they sometimes felt abandoned by their feminist mothers, and frequently overshadowed" (212). There is, in this and other Third Wave writing, an uncomfortable feeling that, while a daughter might want power and pleasure and not want the constraints she perceives as the price tag of motherhood, she is not quite ready to liberate her own Mother. As Naomi Wolf puts it, "If Mother has money, sex, and caviar, she might go away and dance all night at the Ritz. If she is not dependent on someone or something, we fear we cannot depend on her" (246). But since a bound mother cannot by herself contribute to her daughter’s independence, daughters, in the pattern analyzed in the ‘70s by psychoanalytic feminists such as Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow, look to their fathers.

The difference this time around is that father identification is more explicit. Baumgardner and Richards comment on this, explaining that women in their twenties and thirties see their mothers in an unflattering light: they are not treated well by Dad, they spend their time performing "fake homemaking jobs," have no time for kids, experience poverty after divorce, exhibit poor taste in men, etc., while Dad seems like a hero for just doing some of "Mom’s chores." It is assumed he makes decisions, is in more control. "[T]heir lives appear more liberated, more like how their daughters are told their lives should be" (Baumgardner and Richards 208-9). Further, Third Wave women "also often have the support of our fathers in our quest to be free and ambitious" (206). This line of thinking cannot help but perpetuate the mother’s erasure, necessary as she is for Dad’s success as well as for the daughters who would emulate him.

Seventies feminists rebelled against pressures to replicate their mother’s subordinate position, and in so doing postulated alternative family, motherhood, and child-rearing arrangements. Third Wave daughter feminists, on the other hand, have been encouraged by fathers, by older feminists, and by many of their teachers to not be subordinate, to instead "be free and ambitious." The question of whether or not that freedom and ambition can be somehow accommodated in the persistent nuclear family structure remains unresolved. Alternative structures such as those portrayed in women’s utopias are either unrealistic (as separatist societies) or too futuristic (extra-uterine gestation, for example). The Super moms and Soccer moms of the ‘80s and ‘90s are still variations on conventional family structures. Without the hope that "women’s liberation" would revolutionize family structures that erase mothers, many feminists are postponing or deciding against children. Cyborg replication and regeneration are still the stuff of high-tech masculine maternity, still located in theory or cyberfiction rather than within the sweep of Third Wave biological clocks.

Third Wave SF turns, then, to the daughter and away from the mother. Near-future dystopias such as that in Nicola Griffith’s Nebula award-winning Slow River, chart the path of young women protagonists who must find freedom, empowerment, and self-knowledge on their own, without the help of, and sometimes in spite of, their mothers. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Ayre, although written over one hundred and fifty years ago, reflects a similar pattern. As Adrienne Rich suggests, Jane is less constrained, has more options, more access to the active world of plot by being motherless (Hirsch 44). Unlike Jane, who found her happiness in winning the man she loved on her terms, Third Wave protagonists, like their feminist cyberfiction counterparts, are likely to establish lesbian relationships. This, and here Rich quotes poet Sue Silvermarie, is in itself a re-connection with mother: "In loving another woman I discovered the deep urge to both be a mother to and find a mother in my lover" (191).

In Slow River, the eighteen-year-old heiress, Frances Lorien van de Oest, or Lore, is abducted, held for ransom, and barely escapes. Her life over the next three years is one of degradation and abuse as she prostitutes herself in a near-future dystopic London with and for Spanner, the woman who came to her rescue. Lore is afraid to go home because certain aspects of her kidnapping indicate a family member must have been involved. The story of how Lore gradually frees herself from an insidious cycle of prostitution and drug use, is intermingled with the story of Lore in earlier years. As a child she is very close to her father and longs for the attention of Katerine, her coldly competent but distant mother who runs the family’s vast nanomechanical water-treatment corporation. As the older, but pre-kidnapped, Lore reflects on her troubled older siblings, one of whom committed suicide, she concludes that they must have been sexually abused by her beloved father. She herself as a seven year old had been startled awake one night to find something "ha[d] her pinned down and [was] breathing hot fire on her neck and groaning like a beast" (68). She had been spared any repetition of this scene by her oldest sister who cryptically provided her with an advanced locking system for her door.

Yet the abuser was not her father but her mother Katerine, a fact Lore never considers until she struggles free of Spanner’s murky world. Using her extensive knowledge of leading-edge water treatment technologies, Lore had finally obtained a good job, moved out of Spanner’s apartment, and found a new lover, Magyar. It was Magyar who, after hearing Lore’s story, realized that her mother must have been the sexual predator. "‘But she’s my mother,’" Lore protests initially. Then, "My mother, the monster. And Oster—he could be my father again. The one I thought I’d lost. [. . .] " (288). At the book’s conclusion, Lore has re-established her identity and her relationship with her father, who had over the intervening years become aware of Katerine’s predations and taken measures to contain her: "I made her leave. Divorced her. Divested her of her holdings. [. . .] She’s watched. We get reports . . ." (338). Lore wants more: "‘I want to see her suffer,’ she tells Magyar. No, it was more than that. ‘I want her to see me. [. . .] I want her to acknowledge me. See that I’m real, I exist. I’m grown, my own person. That I’m finally free to become who I might be’" (321-2). Griffith never re-introduces Katerine into the book, and so leaves the reader with the humiliated and contained monstrous mother, the rehabilitated father, and the protagonist daughter who through ability and force of character, and the loving support of her female lover, overcomes her tribulations to create a life for herself on her own terms.

Another father-centered daughter is found in Mary Rosenblum’s 1994 The Stone Garden..;.; Stone sculptors shape certain mysterious asteroid Stones into collages of sensation and emotion by layering human experiences into them one by one. Michael is one of the best sculptors, and he is concerned because several sculptors had been murdered. A young woman, Margarita Espinoza, comes to find him, a daughter he never knew he had. The book alternates his voice with hers.. She is a holoturist, and she and her lover, Katrina, struggle for artistic success. They are also struggling in their relationship. As Margarita gets to know her father she tells him that her mother had abandoned her to another relative when she was only five. Their deepening father/daughter attachment mitigates Margarita’s sense of maternal betrayal, and this ultimately helps her become a more trusting and open partner with Katrina. Her growing emotional confidence also helps her artistic career, and so as she and her father help resolve the Stones mystery, her art becomes deeper and more complex. Rosenblum does introduce Margarita’s mother towards the end of the book, and she provides some help when it is most needed. She defends herself to Margarita as a woman who just was not cut out to be a mother; but although she seems to want a closer relationship with her adult daughter, the book ends with the same triad as Slow River: daughter, father, and daughter’s female lover. The mother remains on a mining colony in outer space.

Ammonite, a book Nicola Griffith wrote in 1992, is on its surface, a return to the separatist women utopias. Unlike those utopias, filled with maternal optimism, Ammonite is infused with mother loss. Marghe, a tough young anthropologist, has volunteered for what is considered an extremely dangerous assignment to investigate the female-only planet Jeep, and the virus that had, hundreds of years previously, proved fatal to all its men. Marghe undertakes the mission in an effort to maintain a connection to her deceased anthropologist mother who had left six-year-old Marghe for a lunar assignment and then died from re-acclimation complications. Once on Jeep, Marghe is constantly imperiled by either the harsh climate or the fierce tribeswomen of the northern reaches who hold her prisoner. Her feelings of loneliness and despair become intermingled with her despair over her mother. She wishes they could "share a cup of tea and a funny story of misunderstandings with an alien people" (51). She suffers from acutely remembered feelings of abandonment, as even her father had taken an off-world assignment.

But in contrast to the previous two books, Marghe’s re-established bond with her father does not compensate for the loss of her mother, perhaps because her mother had been neither rejecting nor monstrous. Instead, Marghe stays on Jeep, having found a fulfilling relationship with a viajera, one of the wandering storytellers who help the far-flung Jeep communities stay in contact. Before she is able to form this committed relationship, however, she must, as Hirsch maintains is one of the signatures of feminist writing, give birth to herself, determine her own course (166).

The first stage of this happens after Marghe has escaped from the tribeswomen only to face death in a freezing blizzard. Already weakened and starved, she kills her horse to wait out the storm from within its carcass. She thinks of herself as gestating there, "waiting to hatch like a maggot," and almost decides to give up. Yet the next day she emerges and forces herself step by step to the nearby forest where she finds help. Finally, with Thenike, the viajera who becomes her lover, she begins to discover her course. Thenike allows her to take an all-night turn at the ritualistic gong that the women strike for hours at a time during harvest and other key times throughout the year, "sounding the pulse of the world." As she does so, Marghe realizes that "She was not who she had been. Like dull, raw glass in the hands of a skilled blower, she had become something different. Something cold, brilliant, and still." She sees her face forming and reforming in the gong throughout her vigil, and it is like that of her mother’s. She realizes that her mother had become a source of fear for her, was holding her back, was keeping her from connecting to other people and even to herself. The gong, acting as a locus for the natural resonance of the planet, tunes Marghe to herself and to the world around her, and she decides to make Jeep her home, to "finally learn what it meant to have a family and friends" (186-8). This moment is Marghe’s final coming of age, the moment when she can at last relinquish her debilitating sense of mother-loss, and become her own woman.

The primary difference between Ammonite and the separatist women utopias of the ‘70s lies, among other things, in its subjectivity, in its story of a motherless daughter finding her own way to freedom and independence. While the earlier works were undershot with theory, examining how women might mother and how children might be raised, Griffith is concerned here with the longing for the mother from the point of view of a daughter who wants her mother home, present and nurturing. While the utopian women have loosely organized systems of lovers and allomothers, Marghe’s relationship with Thenike is intense and monogamous. They decide to "trance" together, a deep state of awareness, mediated by Jeep’s virus that had been so deadly to men, and so become pregnant and bear "soestre"—children conceived at the same instant by their tranced mothers. During their trance, Marghe and Thenike experience the pleasurable and semiotic merging that Visual Mark and other cyborgs sought in the Matrix, but their experience is located within the female body, specifically within the reproductive system.

Once inside each other in this way, the women can trigger cell division and chromosome replication. The process is the antithesis of the degendered, unfruitful, union of Visual Mark, Art Fish, et. al., or the various re-births accomplished within the computer-mediated Matrix. Griffith seems to be offering an alternative, not only to cyberfiction’s metaphorical and sterile regenerations, but to other Third Wave works where the daughter protagonists and their female lovers show no interest in child bearing or child raising (including, for example, Griffith’s own Slow River). When Marghe asks Thenike how they will manage for the next few years when both of them will be constrained by infants, Thenike tells her "we’d travel together. While they’re young, we’ll travel smaller distances at a time, and less often. And when we get there, we’ll stay longer. We’d be safe, together" (233). This strategy, however, depends once again on the safety of the separatist utopias. Most Third-Wave works, however, are set in near-future dystopias where women must struggle to get by in inimical environments and children might be insupportable.

Other protagonists, in fact, show little if any interest in children. In notable works such as Nancy Kress’s 1993 Beggars in Spain and Maureen McHugh’s 1992 China Mountain Zhang, the pattern of the emergent individual and the suppressed mother continues. In Kress’s work, which examines the societal ramifications of a genetically-modified subpopulation superior in many respects to the general populace, the daughter protagonist, Leisha, is the genemod twin daughter of an devoted but egotistical international financier. While Leisha and her father form an extremely strong bond, her mother systematically rejects her in favor of the unmodified twin. Leisha, who grows up to be a warm and caring woman, never marries or has children of her own. Another woman in the book who forms and heads a separatist community of the genemod population does become a mother, but becomes monstrous, sacrificing children who do not measure up to her exacting standards.

China Mountain Zhang’s protagonist is a young gay man living in the United States under a Chinese hegemony. His mother, an Hispanic woman, erases herself from Zhang’s life, allowing him as a child to create a Chinese identity through identification with his Chinese father, who divorces her while Zhang is still a boy, and on genetic and cosmetic modifications that make him appear fully Chinese. Although Zhang might see his mother once a year or so, he shows no interest in her, and by the end of the book she has disappeared entirely. In a twist on the maternal aspects of the Matrix in cyberfiction works, Zhang becomes one of the first in a new school of holistic architects. Under a nurturing female instructor in China, he learns to use the Wuxi computer. The computer interface is direct and intuitive, and the architect creates by imagining moods and details. The computer, responsive to both, is able to assimilate them into larger structures that the architect then works with. This creativity coupled with the holistic merging of computer and architect has the semiotic maternal quality found in the Matrix, and Zhang’s architecture has, in itself, maternal qualities: earthy, flowing, and restorative. Zhang, like so many other Third-Wave protagonists, turns from his mother toward his father, takes a same-sex lover, and chooses to create through art rather than children.

While the previous works, cyberpunk, cyberfiction, and Third Wave, all have daughter (or son, in the case of Zhang) protagonists with real, albeit marginalized or bad mothers, several authors imagined young protagonists who had no mother. Queen City Jazz , , the first work in a trilogy by Kathleen Ann Goonan, begins as a coming-of-age story, but quickly expands into an exploration of how nanotech and DNA technologies might transform the way humans live and are created. In the process, Goonan incorporates high-tech masculine maternity, a dangerous engulfing mother, a reproductive system mediated by nanotechnology, and a clone daughter protagonist.

In Queen City Jazz, two motherless daughters, one a synthesized clone of the other, defeat the powerful and engulfing mother embedded in the Hive core of a nanotech-"enlivened" city. To do so they must also defeat her son Abe, the "somewhat twisted nanoarchitect" (319) responsible for Cincinnati’s enlivenment and its unique hive processes, and now acting as its overmind. In Cincinnati’s conversion to the Queen City, inhabitants’ personalities, memories, and DNA profiles were translated into program and banked so that they could be grown and regrown as needed within the protective cells of the Hive. City processes and communications are based on bee/human symbiosis: Nano-collectors assemble human pheromones into packages that echo complex thoughts and feelings, and then convert these packages into a pollen-like form gathered by the giant, genetically-engineered bees. The information becomes the property of the group mind of the Hive, central to which is the Queen.

Abe was initially driven by the same desire to evolve into a transcendent disembodied entity that drove Visual Mark from Synners into the Matrix,. Like Visual Mark, Abe values art and intellect above all else, and had been unable to adequately reciprocate a woman’s love. Instead, he hopes that "with his mind and brain the interface" of the Queen City, art "would explode through him, [. . .] expand to a slow, full, experiential climax of information" (258). It never works that way, however, because Abe, in misguided filial piety, wanted to enshrine his mother India as Hive Queen. When her body died during conversion, irrevocable damage was done to her stored program. India’s mature self was lost. The "new, partial India, one with the power of a goddess and the moral constructs of a child" (407), craves the emotional "food" from the stories and music she had once loved. Consequently, although Abe had designed the city to be full of the arts, India overrides individual programs to regenerate people as artists and story characters rather than as themselves, so that the entire city is full of characters such as Oedipa Maas and the Pynchon Universe, or Duke Ellington and his orchestra.

India also craves power, and soon Abe comes to realize his mistake in embedding her so deeply in the city. "Where exactly was the place where I stopped giving and she started taking," he wonders (378). The city becomes a deadly maternal fantasy: the "childish," all-powerful mother periodically obliterates and re-generates her children whenever they begin to separate themselves from her and her desires. Abe can only "step back aghast, unable to—destroy her, as I should have" (378). "No, my boy," he admits to himself in retrospect, "you just wanted Mommy Forever, that’s all. You didn’t give a shit about her [. . .]. She wasn’t an individual to you. She was Mom" (321). Mary Anne Doane, in "Technophobia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine," notes that "Technology promises [. . .] to control, supervise, regulate the maternal—to put limits upon it. But somehow the fear lingers—perhaps the maternal will contaminate the technological" (Doane 27). Even from his position as interface and overmind, Abe is no longer able to control and regulate the City. It has become "contaminated," subverted by the powerful maternal force of India. The task, therefore, of defeating the dangerous mother, falls to young, motherless Verity.

Verity was raised by members of a Shaker-style farm commune who had discovered her as a little girl near the outskirts of Cincinnati, seemingly an orphan. Her upbringing within their small utopia where men and women equally share tasks, including parenting, proves to be her saving source of strength. She develops, as Dinnerstein would have predicted from this male/female parenting, a strong core identity, and learns to value freedom and choice—the antithesis of the conformity and group consciousness of the city’s human/hive culture. She leaves the commune as a teenager, however, to take the fatally wounded body of her childhood friend, Blaze, to the Queen city in hopes that its enlivened technology can restore him. Once there, however, she gradually discovers that the troubled city’s future depends on her, and that she is not "of woman born."

The city’s ultimate salvation through Verity is a result of the foresight and "machine skill" of the other motherless daughter, Abe’s childhood sweetheart Rose, a gifted nan-engineer. Before she was killed in an accident, Rose had become concerned about problems in Abe’s plans for the city, and secretly inserted a set of code that could result in "a bug-free Queen City" (447). The codes would need to be activated by a replica of Rose, an electronically seeded clone who would be grown and re-grown within the Hive after each conversion. Verity was such a clone. Earlier incarnations of Rose, who, unlike Verity, were Hive raised, had all been destroyed by India. Part of the problem the young clones faced was the Hive structure itself: virgin queens are routinely destroyed by the more powerful existing queen before they are able to defend themselves.

Another problem is that group consciousness has its own seductions. Clone daughters might be seduced to merge with India and the other Hive-grown consciousnesses, rather than maintain the objectivity needed to purge the program. When Verity enters the Hive, she discovers "the utter joy of complete fusion with a group mind" (371), the "going forward into infinite information, more deeply satisfying than anything she had ever experienced" (424). She also tastes for a short while, the incredible power of India, who offers to "absorb" her. Verity’s brief experience in India’s higher awareness and access to information is intoxicating, reflecting Freud’s contention that while merging with the mother "brings the threat of loss of self or of being devoured," it also brings "the benefit of omnipotence" (Chodorow 9). Yet Verity is very aware that she is "being devoured cell by cell" (375), and this stirs her bone-deep belief in herself as an individual, allowing her to hold on: "as memories washed outward she reached for them, caught them the instant before they effervesced to lodge in the Hive’s memory. Some tough faculty, some core that everyone else here lacked, roused and focused [. . .], and insisted on keeping those memories. Herself. Verity" (426). Only this sense of herself as an autonomous individual allows Verity to maintain her independence, her differentiation from the Mother.

Verity ultimately realizes that to save the city she must break the endless feedback loop of recycled stories by giving the Queen and the Hive a new story—a task she ultimately accomplishes by dancing her own story of hope, freedom, and choice. She had always had what the Shakers referred to as "The Gift of Dance," a particularly appropriate gift in the non-verbal Hive environment. It is also an appropriate medium to use with India, because in the pre-verbal, pre-Oedipal stage of the Phallic Mother there are no words for feelings, "no language-dominated thoughts," and so communication must be configured "in touch, in taste and smell, in facial expression and gesture [. . .] and by mutual accommodation of body position" (Dinnerstein 31). While Abe has been unable to control the mother through programming and information, Verity uses the semiotic, and this buys herself enough time to find and activate Rose’s code.

India dies during the transformation to Rose’s corrected city, and Verity is able to leave with a now fully restored Blaze. Because she had been able to hold on to her ideals and identity, the City has been rescued from the devouring mother, whose city-wide conversions "had been described as eating—matter trembling and surging and changing [. . .], a ghastly, devouring wave" (99). But after Verity has liberated the citizens of Cincinnati and left, the one who stays behind to help the Hive in its new life is Sphere, a young musician from outside. Sphere had met Verity outside the Queen City, and entered it with her. During Verity’s adventures, he had been quietly learning the way the City had been originally designed to work. His music—he is a saxophone player—offers another semiotic method of communicating with the Hive. His knowledge of the City’s inner workings, coupled with his own creativity, result in music in which Verity sees "a pattern where bits of color danced in an oddly lucid pattern which she could almost understand. [. . .] It had deep, precise meaning. This was one way in which the Hive could think" (455). As the book ends, Sphere plays new stories of independence to the Hive. Unlike the demonized men in ‘70s utopias, or the hormonally-altered men of Mattapoisett, Sphere is an agent of freedom, and very much at home in the organic technology of Hive processes..

Goonan’s vision integrates earlier women’s utopian ideas with Third Wave insistence on the individual, and cyberfeminism’s interest in cyberspace. Verity’s success depends on her individuality and sense of core identity, but without her upbringing in the small Shaker commune she might have failed, as Rose-replicas had failed before her. And while Goonan, as other utopian authors, critiques the scientific mind and its runaway technologies, she transforms the Matrix of cyberfiction with its fruitless disembodied entities into a living Hive-mediated organic community and group mind—a potential utopia that combines embodied individuals with an overmind that represents the group. Perhaps most important, this Hive/human potential utopia eliminates, as the earlier utopias had eliminated, the nuclear family. It goes a good deal farther, however. Humans aren’t born at all, they are synthesized within Hive cells, regrown according to original code they had stored in City databanks, or created as new individuals. Some children are created, too, and tended in their cells by Hive helpers until they are ready for their training in small schools. The maternal body is completely irrelevant in this utopia, and the last vestige of maternity, the devouring India, is defeated by the daughter figures of Rose and Verity.

Although most of the notable recent SF written by women demonize, suppress, or transform the mother and feature a daughter protagonist, there are a few exceptions. Most of these, however, were written by women who have been writing SF since the ‘70s. Works such as Marge Piercy’s 1991 He, She and It, Suzy McKee Charnas’ 1999 Conqueror’s Child, and Octavia Butler’s 1998 Parable of the Talents integrate the voices of both mother and daughter. Each of them includes a successful, even legendary mother who had little if any involvement in her daughter’s upbringing. Each daughter in the books resents her mother for this, and must work through feelings of abandonment. They share, in fact, the sense of abandonment and bitterness of daughters such as Margarita in The Stone Garden, or Sam in Synners. The primary difference is that the authors of the integrated books present the mother as a three-dimensional character with her own subjectivity and desires, while the daughter’s view of her is not always reliable or mature.

The last two books of Charnas’ Holdfast Series follow Alldera and the Free Fems, and later Alldera’s daughter Sorrel, as they conquer the Holdfast and try to build a new society from scratch. The first of these, The Furies, maintains the mother’s voice, as had its predecessor, Motherlines. In the concluding book, Conqueror’s Child, Charnas writes a good portion of the book from the first-person vantage of Alldera’s daughter, Sorrel. This framework, then, is less an introduction of the mother’s voice as it is a continuation of her into the decade of the daughter; nonetheless, it provides a vehicle for Charnas to explore mother/daughter tensions.

In The Furies, the Free Fems struggle among themselves to rebuild the Holdfast. As former slaves they have only the Riding Women as models for a free society, but because the Riding Women mate with horses and have never lived with men, their structures cannot help Fems who must decide what to do with the conquered men. After the Free Fems make their victorious return to the Holdfast, men who are not killed are shackled and penned. But while the Free Fems exact a bloody retribution on their former masters, The "Newly Free" fems, liberated by the Free Fems’ victory, argue for moderation because, under a weakened Holdfast, they had suffered less abuse and repression. Rather than wipe out the Holdfast and start over, the Newly Free want to build on what remains of the patriarchy, rehabilitate some of the most fair-minded men, and start having children—ideas that enrage some of the returning conquerors.

The conflict mirrors divisions between radical feminists from the ‘60s and ‘70s and their ‘90s daughters. Radical feminists, feminist critic Jeffner Allen reports, saw a direct connection "between woman’s oppression and her role as breeder [. . .]" (92). Such feminists, and their Free Fem analogs, conclude that, "Until patriarchy no longer exists, all females, as historical beings, must resist, rebel against, and avoid producing for the sake of men" (92). Even Alldera, as a beleaguered leader trying to hold her ranks together, is subjected to criticism. One of her opponents, concerned about Alldera’s perceived "softness about men," asks her: "What will we be, we Free Fems who came and fought and won? Old, barren, useless, figures of fun when our faces flame and sweat and we have to go to [the healer] for medicine just to keep our bodies balanced. We’ll be unrespected and cast aside. [. . .] They’ll throw our victory away and end up slaves again" (346-7)—a concern expressed by some Second Wave feminists, and by Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Newly Free, however, like their Third Wave analogs, give more weight to behavior than to gender. They argue for salvaging the better men, not only as a question of justice, but because of their biological clocks. Eager to have babies now that they are free, the younger women begin to chafe under the older women’s dominating hatred of men. They agree among themselves that "the Free Fems were afraid to lie with males under any conditions and so kept putting off the moment for everyone. [. . .] They don’t really want us to have cubs," one of them complained (280). The Furies ends with this friction over how to forge relationships with men, or even how to use them for reproductive purposes.

Charnas seems to be critiquing ‘70s feminist SF, including her own Motherlines, where these issues had been solved by creating separatist utopias. She brings women back into a world with both men and women, and the emotional and species-survival imperatives to mate. In the new Holdfast, women hold the power and theoretically are in an ideal position to devise familial or reproductive conventions that best serve their needs and desires. The issue, however, is too divisive, and the women are unable to agree. They may want to be mothers, but they are unsure about what motherhood should mean, or what, if any, role a father might play, either in relation to a woman or to their progeny.

The concluding book of the series, Conqueror’s Child, continues to examine male rehabilitation and re-integration within the new society, but it examines child rearing as well. Charnas here adopts the daughter’s voice for much of the book, and this gives it a contemporary feel. One of its primary through-lines is Sorrel’s persistent sense of resentment toward and abandonment by her mother, and this, too, lends the book currency. When Alldera led the Free Fems to their victory over the Holdfast, she did not take Sorrel. "Like it or not," Sorrel admits bitterly, "my bloodmother was a hero. Maybe she was right to leave me behind. What place could there be for me in her gigantic life? And even if there was a place, [. . .] did I wish to ride always in her shadow, knowing that she didn’t like me and didn’t care what happened to me?" (21). Nonetheless, it is obvious to the reader from the portion of the book written from Alldera’s point of view that she does in fact care deeply about what happens to Sorrel.

Charnas has admitted her books chart her own developing feminism. In Walk to the Ends of the World, Charnas said she was exploring a culture of "sexism-pushed-to-its furthest extreme." Alldera was just a creature of that space. In Motherlines, Alldera "is the angry woman who has glimpsed what was always denied her and who will not settle for false and superficial measures." Charnas took a hiatus from the series in the ‘80s, complaining that there was no audience, that everyone was postfeminist and not interested. Furies is her reaction to the backlash that de-railed the course of her feminism, and so it is an angry book where Aldera acts, kills, in anger. Alldera’s problems with leadership reflect similar problems within the feminist community. Finally, Conqueror’s Child shows Alldera as "the feminist mother confronted by a daughter who doesn’t see things as she sees them at all" (Charnas, "Conversation" 62-4). The gist, then, of Charnas’ daughter book is both a critique on the daughter’s estrangement and a romance of the daughter’s courtship of her (deserving) mother, rather than an indictment of the Mother, as so many of the other daughter books of the contemporary period are.

Alldera, although not "constructed" as a mother in her upbringing as a slave, nonetheless exhibits a litany of motherly worries and guilt. When she learns Sorrel has ridden from the Riding Woman Camps to find her, Alldera at first avoids her. She is afraid that Sorrel might hate her, or feel reproachful or indifferent. She is filled with guilt over not being a good-enough mother: "Everyone else nursed her for me. I was afraid to be bound to her" (95). She tries, despite these concerns, to be philosophic: "There are women in the Grasslands who don’t love their children, and people shrug and say some people aren’t meant to be bloodmothers, that’s why a child has other mothers to turn to. You don’t have to love someone just because they’ve come out of your body. There is no obligation either way" (96). These utopian platitudes, however, do not suffice. Alldera wants to love Sorrel and wants Sorrel to love her. But Alldera never effaces herself to that end, never becomes the attentive, nurturing mother Sorrel seems to want. While the two women are eventually able to have an honest, heartfelt conversation, they achieve no cathartic union, no tearful rapprochement; they begin, rather, to understand each other. More accurately, Sorrel begins to understand Alldera.

This sense of estrangement leading to understanding and emulation, Charnas implies, while painful for the daughter, is more valuable for her in the long run than to have had a sacrificing mother. Joanna Russ’ Whileaway utopia made a similar point. Daughters there are torn away from their loving mothers at a young age, and consequently harbor a deep distrust of the household nurturing Mother. At the same time, however, they learn to appreciate the strong, independent women who mother. Yet Charnas seems to put additional onus on Sorrel. After all, Sorrel has had other allomothers with whom she lived not only as a small child, but between menarche and her departure for the Holdfast. She lived in a community that loved and valued her. Among the Riding Women a certain tension and distance is expected between bloodmother and daughter—which is one reason for the allomother arrangement. Sorrel’s sense of resentment and abandonment, therefore, too often seem petulant and incongruous. It reads as an older feminist’s commentary on younger women who want to do their own world conquering with their mothers behind them in a supportive role rather than venture out in the shadow of the mother’s "gigantic" life.

Charnas has more for Sorrel to do in the book, however, than task her mother. It falls to her to force the issue of how children, particularly boy children will be raised. Sorrel is particularly involved in this issue because she has rescued a little boy from a studied neglect under which he might die or be killed. The problem is acute because to deal fairly with a boy child there must be a role for the man he will grow to be, and that is not a problem the bickering Fems are prepared to tackle. They cannot agree on whether the men should be slaves or servants, and whether or not a proper upbringing—and there is no agreement as to what a proper upbringing might entail—could "rehabilitate" male nature so that boys can grow to be societal partners.

"Slavery should not be something boys were born into, but a punishment for crimes against the Free," Sorrel asserts. "No child should suffer for the sins of its fathers, not even a father’s son" (205). Alldera declines the opportunity to take any stand on this issue, beyond that of compassion. Now beginning to feel her age and her many battle wounds, she wants to return to her lover among the Riding Women. When Alldera tries to convince Sorrel that she and her age cohort must be the ones to begin to work out the thorny issues she raises, Sorrel protests: "‘But how would I know better ways?’ [. . .] ‘Nobody knows,’ Alldera said, ‘that’s what I’m telling you. It’s going to take everybody to come up with some answers, and to convince us all to try. [. . .] I’m used up, Sorrel. I just want to get myself out of the way’" (406). And Alldera does get herself out of the way, returning to the Plains where she and the Riding Women disappear, as if legends from some distant past. The ending is a hand-off to the next generation. There are no utopias, no solutions in sight. The Second-Wave Allderas have cleared a path for women, but their Third-Wave daughters must work together to build a new and more just society, and in particular, to determine how best to raise children to populate and uphold a just society.

Octavia Butler, another author writing feminist SF since the ‘70s, integrated mother and daughter voices in Parable of the Talents, a sequel to a daughter book, Parable of the Sower. As in Charnas’ series, the protagonist in one work has, in a sequel, a daughter who grows up resenting but trying to understand her heroic and absent mother. Parable of the Sower is written as the diary of visionary teenager Lauren Olamina, who lives in a near-future dystopic LA suburb. Her diary tracks her struggles as she tries to survive the collapse of the rule of law, and contains the genesis of a new religion, Earthseed, that she develops. Lauren’s Earthseed doctrine proclaims that God is change, although God/change may be shaped, and that humankind’s destiny is to seed the stars. Earthseed soon becomes the center of Lauren’s life and that of the followers she begins to gather as she makes her way north to find a haven for an Earthseed community.

Parable of the Sower follows the pattern of other daughter books where the mother is marginalized or absent, and the highly-individualistic protagonist’s primary bond is with her father. Lauren’s birth mother was a drug addict who disappeared; her stepmother, while initially loving to her, becomes repressive and mean-spirited. When Lauren’s family and beleaguered community are attacked and destroyed, she and two other survivors begin their long journey. The book chronicles their experiences and how, through force of character, leadership qualities, and her unique religion, Lauren attracts new followers and becomes the leader of the group. An older man who joins them, Bankole, becomes her lover, and suggests the group might settle on his northern California property. Bankole, a fifty-seven-year-old man is something of a father figure, and, like Lauren’s father who died in the violence against her LA community, values and supports Lauren’s strong individuality—something Lauren’s stepmother constantly fought to curtail.

Lauren and Bankole have a daughter, Larkin, and Parable of the Talents is structured as the adult daughter’s attempt to come to terms with her estranged, and now deceased, mother by way of presenting additional pages from Lauren’s diary. The book slowly braids the stories of mother and daughter together, alternating their voices between Lauren’s diary and Larkin’s commentary. As in Conqueror’s Child, the mother has escaped a dystopia and hopes to build a utopia. Lauren’s utopian visions are more fully developed than Alldera’s, as, unlike Alldera, Lauren believes she does know how to build a just and good society. To her, an Earthseed community is "about learning to live in partnership with one another in small communities, and at the same time, working out a sustainable partnership with our environment. It’s about treating education and adaptability as the absolute essentials that they are" (358-9). As such, Lauren’s vision is similar to the utopias envisioned during the ‘70s.

Unlike those utopias, however, Lauren’s budding utopia is soon smashed by goons from the emergent Christian America church. The goons kill many of the Earthseed people, including Bankole, and put the rest into brutal slavery with electroshock collars. Larkin and the other young children are taken away and put up for adoption by Christian American families. Although the Earthseed survivors finally escape, and moderates within the church eventually re-establish a more humane rule of law, it takes many years before Lauren is able to rebuild momentum for Earthseed. And although she constantly searches, she never locates her daughter. Instead, her adult daughter finally finds her. When she does, she quickly becomes embittered.

Lauren’s only surviving brother had found Larkin years previously, but when Larkin asked about her mother, Marc told her Lauren was dead. Marc, a Christian American minister, believed Lauren and her Earthseed message to be dangerous. Larkin becomes so devoted to her uncle that even when years later she discovers her mother is alive, she forgives his deceit. Lauren, when Larkin had found her and they had exchanged stories, is devastated: "I never thought he hated me enough to do a thing like that," she says to Larkin. "I never thought he could hate anyone that much" (403). She refuses to talk to Marc, who seeks an opportunity to explain. Loyal to her father figure, Larkin leaves her mother. "I was angry with him, but even angrier with her, somehow. I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone no matter what he had done, and she was hurting him. I didn’t know whether I would ever see her again. I didn’t know whether I should. I didn’t even know whether I wanted to" (404).

Larkin is never able to recover from this initial dislike of her mother. Having been raised in a Christian American home, she also has a bias against the "heathenish" Earthseed religion. But her antagonism and bitterness go deeper than her response to Lauren’s split with Marc or her distrust of Earthseed. She wanted to be first and foremost in her mother’s life. Reading her mother’s diary posthumously, discovering her mother’s passionate attachment to her dreams, she can only respond with jealousy: "How long would it have been before she put me aside for Earthseed, her other kid? [. . .] It enabled her to survive without giving up or truly giving in to her captors. I couldn’t have helped her. I was her weakness. Earthseed was her strength. No wonder it was her favorite" (294). Butler here, like Charnas, makes the daughter’s pettiness and immaturity almost too transparent. The reader, privy to the same material Larkin was responding to, would not conclude that Lauren would put her daughter aside for Earthseed, but rather that she would not give up Earthseed for her daughter—an important distinction.

And this is the bind. When mothers are powerless and unable to provide their daughters access to the same power that their fathers can, they are subject to marginalization. When they exercise power in the public arena, when they do not efface themselves in favor of the daughter or father figure, the daughter wants to punish her. At the end of a long life, Lauren’s Earthseed finally does reach for the stars. As the starships leave, she makes her last entry in her diary: "My Larkin would not come. I begged her, but she refused. She’s caring for Marc. He’s just getting over another heart transplant. How completely, how thoroughly he has stolen my child" (407). For her part, Larkin comments that "All Earthseed was her family. We never really were, Uncle Marc and I. She never really needed us, so we didn’t let ourselves need her" (405). Larkin’s essential self-centeredness is apparent in her opening comments as she introduces Lauren’s diary, protesting that:

Lauren’s lifelong commitment to Earthseed and her community are considered by Larkin to be "misguided" because her mother was "never here" for her—although Lauren’s diary, the events in which Larkin takes the trouble to verify, shows that Lauren tried very hard to be there for her daughter. In fact, it was Larkin, finally, who was not there for her mother.

Larkin, in contemplating Lauren’s life, focuses on one episode in particular as a critical failure of her mother to choose a better life. While the young Earthseed community was still thriving, Bankole, as one of the few physicians in the area, was offered a position with a small town in the region. As incentives, the town council would provide a teaching position for Lauren and a house for the family. He was disappointed but not surprised when Lauren, at the time pregnant with Larkin, declined to make the move. They could have had "normal, comfortable lives" (137), Larkin complains, if only her mother had given up Earthseed and gone to live in Halstead as her father had asked.

In her postscript notes, Butler expresses her own opinion about whether or not Lauren should have moved to a safer location with her husband and baby daughter, where they would be less of a target for the Christian American fanatics: "Should her dedication have been only to her family?" Butler doesn’t think so.

Butler’s comments award the same primacy to a woman’s life goals and personal development that Second Wave feminists incorporated into their utopian writing. Butler, in fact, is part of that same generation of writers. Just as Lauren overcomes her own sense of mother loss and bitterness over her stepmother’s lack of love, Butler implies that Larkin, and, by extension, any other daughter, should also let go of attachment—positive or negative—to her mother so that she might fulfill her own dreams. The culminating Earthseed verse, the rest of which are used to introduce preceding chapters, sums up this belief:

Not all children ever have access to "The protective embrace," or "The soft lap," and both Lauren and Larkin would fall into the category of those who do not. But the soft lap is not a necessary precursor to adult life, in the fullest sense, and in fact, may impede an individual’s achievement of it. Parable of the Talents is written, as is Conqueror’s Child, against the image of a sentimentalized protective mother, whether or not a child has access to her. By maintaining a woman’s status as an adult rather than as a soft lap or full breasts to fulfill the natural desires of their children, Butler and Charnas exemplify one important Second Wave ideal. By emphasizing that strong, adult individuals work together to build just, balanced societies, they exemplify another. It is no accident, then, that the few examples of contemporary women’s SF that integrate the mother’s voice with that of the daughter were written by feminists with their roots in Second Wave ideals.

I found the degree to which the mother has been silenced in recent women’s science fiction surprising. It is not so much that recent books tend to feature daughter protagonists—as authors choose young protagonists, daughters or sons, for a variety of reasons—but that mothers are so often a locus for negative emotions while fathers are so often a source of empowerment. Of the twenty books written since 1990 that I reviewed, fourteen have no maternal voice. Sixteen of the twenty portray mothers who are dangerous, absent, cruel, or particularly trivialized; and, if Conqueror’s Child and Parable of the Talents are included by dint of their daughters’ bitter sense of abandonment, eighteen out of twenty would have negative maternal representations. By contrast, out of eight books reviewed from the ‘70s ad ‘80s, all of them include the mother’s voice, and in most of them maternal figures predominate. Six of the eight portray maternal figures in a very positive light. The two with dangerous mothers, The Snow Queen and Cyteen, incorporate the mother’s voice in a way that develop her humanity as well as her excessive accumulation of power.

The mother/daughter tension moves plot, like love. Daughters—for example, Sam in Synners, or Marghe in Ammonite, or Sorrel in Conqueror’s Child—go into the wide world, hurt into action by mother loss. It is not difficult, however, to imagine alternatives to the suppression of mother to allow the daughter’s ascendancy. Sons, for example, often begin their entrance into plot by disobeying a stern but wise father, or come home after years in the perilous world to regroup by the paternal hearth where lessons are learned. The father’s wisdom and authority come from his experience in the public sphere, in the quality of his transactions with the world and with other people. Almost all science fiction takes place in the public sphere, and so when a book incorporates a family structure that limits the mother’s access to the public and channels her power to the private sphere, daughter protagonists must necessarily repudiate her. It becomes more important for a daughter to do so than for a son, because the daughter is also rejecting the limitations of the mother role for herself.

But mothers in these and indeed in most of the books I read are not restricted to the private sphere. Some are, but Marghe’s mother was a lunar anthropologist, Sam’s mother in Synners was a successful real estate agent, Alldera was a conquering hero, Lore’s mother in Slow River was a high-powered industrialist. It is as if real world anger at mothers were translated into science fiction plots even when the SF mothers have completely different lives than their real-world counterparts. Marianne Hirsch seems to have been looking at a similar issues in her 1989 analysis of mother/daughter plot. She claims that the daughter’s anger and disappointment as she discovers the discrepancy between the rhetoric of individual empowerment and the unempowered example of her mother spill over into both feminist theory and feminist fiction. Therefore, "feminist analysis is still written from the child’s primary process perspective: permeated with desires for the mother’s approval, with fear of her power, and with anger and resentment of her powerlessness" (169).

While feminists and authors of mainstream fiction must contend with the nuclear family and the bind it places on mothers and, by extension, on daughters, science fiction authors are under no such constraint. They may, as did the ‘70s authors, imagine different ways of mothering and raising children. But they are not. The two primary feminist SF strands, cyberfeminism and Third Wave, either maintain a nuclear family structure or dispense with the maternal body altogether. Perhaps the re-envisioning of family and child-rearing structures requires the scope of a utopia, something women writers have not undertaken since the mid eighties.

I believe the time is ripe, however, for feminist SF authors to take on that task once more. At the very least, such a work might begin to resolve the conflicting desires of younger feminists who seem to desire both an idealized mother and an empowered one. The separatist feminist utopias of the ‘70s were useful in helping women decide who they might be if not suffering gender oppression. Feminist SF might perform a similar service today by revisiting motherhood. While Super Mom stress has been mitigated by fathers sharing parental roles more equally, current women’s SF indicates daughters still believe that motherhood means reduced prospects and relinquished individuality. Certainly Third Wave women are waiting longer and longer to have children. What, they wonder, will become of them when they become mothers? The question is legitimate. Second Wave feminists eventually married and had children—without any fundamental change to the family dynamics they had fought against; their Third Wave daughters are only too aware of that fact.

Feminism needs a way to look at and talk about the maternal body and the maternal function. With the academy on one hand calling for degendering, and post-human sensibilities; and many Third-Wave can-do feminists entering their mid thirties and unsure how to reconcile empowerment with maternity, women SF authors can lead the way. If nothing else, adult women who have had children or who want children can be used as protagonists. I would like to see how children are raised: who cares for them and where? If a mother has primary responsibility, how does she do it? Why does she have a child at all? How necessary is the mother to child rearing? The issues are too hot right now for the political arena, but that has never stopped visionary authors. Perhaps the return of flesh-and-blood mothers to the pages of SF would bring them back into feminist discourse. The questions of who has children and why, followed by who raises the children and how, are of utmost importance. Younger women face a tremendous choice in their own lives based on their biology, and all of the theory in the world, at least in the foreseeable future, will not change that. But exploration of the issues through the unfettered medium of science and speculative fiction would be an important start.