The Cleft

The Cleft is a 2007 novel by Doris Lessing that portrays an all-female society of amphibian creatures, apparently human ancestors, who commit infanticide of their male offspring, until they discover that they can have sex with males who have been rescued from infanticide by an eagle and raised by a deer.

Reviewed by Ursula K. Le Guin in the Guardian (2/10):

I call the tale a parable, but hesitantly, because I can't believe it says what I think it says. It appears to be as prescriptive as Desmond Morris and more essentialist than Freud himself. Anatomy is destiny. Gender is an absolute binary. Women are passive, incurious, timid and instinctively nurturant; without men, they scarcely rise above animal mindlessness. Men are intellectual, inventive, daring, rash, independent, and need women only to relieve libido and breed more men. Men achieve; women nag. Much of the presentation of this is familiar from the literature of misogyny. The "Old Shes" are described with utter loathing and disgust; the escapades of boys are made much of, while the doings of girl-children are ignored.

...

If we are offered the story as an origin myth of human sexuality and gender, I can't accept it. It is incomplete; it is deeply arbitrary; and I see in it little but a reworking of a tiresome science-fiction cliché - a hive of mindless females is awakened and elevated (to the low degree of which the female is capable) by the wondrous shock of masculinity.