"HER" LAND AND THE LAND OF THE "RAINBOW"

Two Feminist Utopias is an interpretation of two feminist utopias written in the interim of six decades. Novels Herland, from the beginning of the century, and Woman on the Edge of Time, published in the seventies differ not just because of the time in which they were written and accordingly in crucial feminist assumptions about the nature of women which have changed in the intervening years, but also because the two authors approached "women's issue" differently: one offered an Amazonian utopia in which there are no men, and the other created an egalitarian bisexual society. Charlotte Perkins Gilman depicts a female utopian society developed after eliminating men, where celibate culture of mothers reproduces by desire alone (parthenogenesis); while Marge Piercy proposes a world of men and women changed by biological and psychosocial transformations where sex antithesis have been canceled and both sexes have become mothers, where the mating, is artificial and the foetus developed in brooder tanks. Although diverse and unique, both novels consist of some basic characteristics of feminist utopias which their authors postulate: they criticize everyday life and believe that existing human societies are not the ineviteble products of biological forces but the result of human ideas, choices and behaviours, often brought about by the weaker, poorer and dissatisfied population; they oppose limiting female nature to a set of traditional attributes, giving their characters a full range of human characteristics, from strength, ability and ecological conscience to nurturance, comunal raising of children and co-operation, where the necessities of lire are guaranteed and the few luxuries are shared equally, where a , woman develops all their potentials