Reviews: Katharine Burdekin

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Swastika Night (1937; 1985) as Murray Constantine.
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1937; Old Westbury NY: The Feminist Press, 1985)

Shortlisted for Retrospective Tiptree Award.

Swastika Night is one of the many anti-fascist dystopias written in the 1930s and 1940s (see, e.g., Zamyatin's We and Karin Boyle's Kallocaine). However, Burdekin includes a feminist analysis of fascism, and extrapolates Nazi sexism to its logical extremes: women as brutes, capable only of breeding. Considered to be a forerunner to Nineteen Eighty-Four (Patai), Swastika Night is a very powerful feminist dystopia.
--lq, 7/29/95; rev. 6/5/96.

The End of This Day's Business (1935; 1989)
(written 1935; not published until 1989 [?verify?] by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York)

The End of This Day's Business is a role-reversal society set 4000 years in the future. Women are the "superior sex"; men are fitted only for non-intellectual, physical work. One woman breaks tradition and teaches her son human history, which works with revolutionary factors in the society. The 1989 Feminist Press edition also includes a scholarly Afterword by Daphne Patai full of good information about Burdekin's philosophy (feminist, anti-fascist). -- lq

Proud Man (1934; 1993)

A human from the future visits 1930s England; humans in the future have evolved "beyond" humanity, and beyond humanity's bi-sexed nature; each individual can reproduce on their own, and is whole, containing both male and female attributes. This human contemplates with amazement the various social oddities of modern English society. For a similar narrative / satirical device ["visitors from elsewhere contemplate fucked-up human society & fucked-up gender relations"] see Louky Bersianik's L'Euguelionne. -- lq, 6/14/2002