When a plague wipes out most of the world's male population and
civilization crumbles, women struggle to build an agrarian community in
the English countryside.
Imagine a plague that brings society to a standstill by killing off most
of the men on Earth. The few men who survive descend into lechery and
atavism. Meanwhile, a group of women (accompanied by one virtuous male
survivor) leave the wreckage of London to start fresh, establishing a
communally run agrarian outpost. But their sexist society hasn't
permitted most of them to learn any useful skills--will the commune
survive their first winter? This is the bleak world imagined in 1913 by
English writer J. D. Beresford--one that has particular resonance for
the planet's residents in the 2020s. This edition of A World of Women
offers twenty-first century readers a new look at a neglected classic.
Beresford introduces us to the solidly bourgeois, prim and proper
Gosling family. As once-bustling London shuts down--Parliament closes,
factories grind to a halt, nature reclaims stone and steel--the
paterfamilias Mr. Gosling adopts a life of libertinism while his
daughters in the countryside struggle to achieve a radically transformed
and improved egalitarian and feminist future.