Even the Queen {short story}

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/even-the-queen-and-doomsday-book-by-connie-willi...

In 2002, I wrote the following:

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As has not been unknown on other occasions, the voters got it right. “Even the Queen” is a real jewel of a story, combining humour with a glimpse of a future made possible by an advance in technology. In this case, the outrageous technological advance is that menstruation has become an optional extra. The narrator is a woman judge; her mother a doctor; and her mother-in-law a very senior international diplomat. The father of the narrator’s two daughters is not mentioned, and nor is the father of her granddaughter. The only man in the story is the narrator’s clerk. The general sense is that in this show more very-near-future world, women are free both to pursue careers and to raise children.

And yet this is no feminist utopia. Indeed, the butt of much of the humour is feminism, or rather its loopier extremes:

"In the first fine flush of freedom after the Liberation, I had entertained hopes that it would change everything – that it would somehow do away with inequality and matriarchal dominance and those humorless women determined to eliminate the word “manhole” and third-person singular pronouns from the language."

"Of course it didn’t. Men still make more money, “herstory” is still a blight on the semantic landscape, and my mother can still say, “Oh, Traci!” in a tone that reduces me to pre-adolescence."

The main joke of the story is that the “Cyclists” of the future – inspired by “a mix of pre-Liberation radical feminism and the environmental primitivism of the eighties” – reject the technological advance offered by the abolition of periods, in the name of “freedom from artificiality, freedom from body-controlling drugs and hormones, freedom from the male patriarchy that attempts to impose them on us” (basically much the same rhetoric used in our world by the more evangelical advocates of natural childbirth). Perdita, the narrator’s younger daughter, is thinking of joining the Cyclists; the narrator herself uncomfortably defends her decision in the name of Personal Sovereignty, “the inherent right of citizens in a free society to make complete jackasses of themselves”.

This should make the alert reader realise that actually the abolition of menstruation is not the only advance that society has made. There are repeated references to the entranchment of the principle of “Personal Sovereignty” and to the “days of dark oppression” which came before. It sounds as if the “Liberation” may have included a libertarian component at least as important as the biological advance at the heart of the story. [Here I think I completely missed the point.]

(Inspired by a post to humanities.philosophy.objectivism, I tried to find political science or literary roots for the phrases “Personal Sovereignty” and “days of dark oppression”. For “Personal Sovereignty” I drew a total blank; though some commentators invoke the concept in discussions of Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, etc, the original writers themselves don’t appear to have used the phrase, though it does crop up fairly consistently in recent libertarian discourse. Wordsworth, writing romantically of the French revolution in his “Descriptive Sketches“, and Wilde, writing ninety years later in similar vein of the Risorgimento in “Ravenna“, both use the phrase “dark oppression” to describe what had gone before, and it also appears in one of the more lurid passages of Shelley’s “The Revolt of Islam“, but I am inclined to feel this is coincidence and that I have been Taking It Too Seriously.)

The alert reader will also realise that while the joke of the story is on the Cyclists, the humour of the story depends on the family interactions between the four generations – the narrator, her mother, her mother-in-law, her elder daughter and her granddaughter – who gather at a restaurant in an attempt to brow-beat the recalcitrant Perdita. Anyone who has – or fears they have – relatives like that will appreciate the way Willis characterises them. The story ends with two minor surprises, that the narrator’s clerk gets off with her elder daughter, and her younger daughter gives up being a Cyclist when she discovers that menstruation hurts. [Here I mistook a silly narrative trick for genius.]

Not everyone sees the point of “Even the Queen”. They are supported in their error [sic] by Willis’ own tongue-in-cheek comment that “I was just a tad vexed at radical feminists who were always after me to write a story about women’s issues. So I did.” I know there are many people out there who simply don’t get or don’t like the story; for me personally, considering all six short stories to have won both Hugo and Nebula, it’s a close run between “Even the Queen” and Simak’s “Grotto of the Dancing Deer“ as to which is my favourite (the others being Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “Jeffty is Five”, Bisson’s “Bears Discover Fire“ and Bear’s “Tangents”). [There have been several better ones since.]

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Right. Re-reading the story twenty years later and twenty years older, it is a mean-spirited skit on feminism. In the world of the story, the abolition of menstruation has immediately resulted in the emancipation of women everywhere (except that “men still make more money”). Considering how embedded the patriarchy is in real life, this is a deeply dishonest and disempowering message. Considering also how technology does or doesn’t spread between and across cultures, it’s a thought experiment that assumes that everyone is a white American, or behaves like them. (The jokes about peace processes and conflict resolution are in particularly poor taste.)

There could be a great story to be written about how improvements in women’s healthcare could be rolled out globally, yet fought by conservative politicians at home and abroad; except that it’s actually happening in real life, in Texas and Alabama, never mind other cultures; it is journalism rather than sf. The story misses the point of what is really going on so badly that it’s offensive. If I had had my eyes open in 2002, I could have seen it even then. I’m dropping it to the bottom of my list of Hugo and Nebula winners in this category, along with “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”. show less

You know that if science found some way to eliminate women's menstrual periods there would be women campaigning for the right to have them. Hysterically (pun intended) funny.