Motherlines
Motherlines is a novel by Suzy McKee Charnas, originally published in 1978. It is the second book in the Holdfast Chronicles. It is believed to be the first novel with no male characters ever published by a mainstream (not explicitly feminist) publisher.
At the end of the previous novel, Walk to the End of the World, enslaved "fem" Alldera escapes from her male owners and flees into the wilderness, which is reputed to be inhabited only by wild beasts. There she finds the all-female culture of the Riding Women, who never were slaves in the Holdfast. Eventually, she also encounters the Free Fems, an escaped-slave culture.
Charnas spends a lot of time and imagination developing these two cultures, examining child-rearing, family and kinship, economics, and sexuality. (As a result of some pre-Holocaust experimentation, the Riding Women are able to reproduce in a complex relationship with their horses--although the horses do not contribute genetic material to the process). The Free Fems are childless, but not celibate.
This novel, along with Walk to the End of the World were joint winners of one of the thre Retrospective Tiptree Awards in 1996.
Editions and translations
- 1978, first printing (Putnam/Berkeley)
- 1999, republished with Walk to the End of the World as The Slave and the Free (Tor)
- German / deutsch Alldera und die Amazonen