The Ruins of Isis

The Ruins of Isis is a 1978 novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

A heterosexual couple from an interplanetary federation visit Isis, a matriarchal world, to explore some archaeological ruins. On this world, men are dominated by women in a role reversal fashion. The husband and wife therefore pretend that she dominates him. The two individually confront and handle the reverse sexism of Isis. Throughout the visit, she becomes more aware of the internalized sexism she and he both share, which forces her into certain realizations about her marriage.

As a feminist work, it is clearly a product of its times (the 1970s), engaging with feminism and feminist analysis current at that time. The sexism portrayed is on a crude & obvious level. The reverse sexism is also crude and blatant. Bradley was challenging some of the lesbian separatist utopian ideals, and to that extent the work is a little crude and a little dated.

Second, the characterizations of the people and the relationships are more subtle than other aspects of the work would suggest. The couple's hetero/patriarchal normativity seems at first to be over-drawn, and the reactionary reverse sexism of the Isis society likewise seems to be over-drawn. But despite these over-simplifications, the emotional landscape of the wife is richly drawn. Her reactions to her husband's sexism and to her changing perceptions of him are drawn in a detailed and realistic way. I wasn't convinced by the way everything comes right in the end, and the couple achives perfect understanding again -- that aspect of the ending seemed contrived and pasted on. It was effectively an "Oh, my dear, let's never quarrel again!" sort of ending. But the analysis underlying that ending -- that men and women are complex, sexism is culturally deep but not impossible to overcome -- is relatively sophisticated.