The Revolt of Man (eBook)

The Revolt of Man is the satire of a female-dominated society of the 22nd century. Sir Walter Besant was a very broaden spirit, very attentive to the problems of his era, and very curious about history and politics. The Victorian era was the beginning of the Women’s suffrage. He was the brother-in-law of Annie Besant, a british socialist and activist, persecuted in 1877, for her campaigns for birth control. After two children and a legal separation in 1873 from his younger brother, Frank Besant, she became a prominent speaker for the national Secular Society, and a writer.

The novel comically reverses Victorian gender roles, and presents a dystopian vision of a female-dominated society, where women keep men in complete subordination, with disastrous effects. After the historic "Transfer of Power," women gradually take over the traditional men’s occupations and privileges becoming judges, doctors, lawyers, businesswomen and artists. Just effeminate men are allowed to live in passivity, submission and obedience to the females. Women hold all positions of power in society and men are submissive, with no property rights or access to higher education. 

He pictures a dictatorship, where the ideal of the "Perfect Woman" is enforced with absolute certainty and dissent ruthlessly punished. In the end society stagnates due to its rigid orthodoxy and a revolt against a single-gendered culture ensues. At one level Besant’s novel is an anti-suffragette novel, but in parts it can be read as a critique of any culture where one gender subjugates the other.