Alderman's question — what if the balance of force flipped overnight — has older answers than most readers realize. Six of them here, from 1905 to a Stella Prize winner, plus one indie where the hierarchy runs on something else entirely.
1. Sultana's Dream · Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1905)
The oldest book on this list and still the boldest premise: in Ladyland, women run science and the state while the men stay inside the mardana, the inverted zenana. Hossain wrote it in colonial Bengal in 1905 for the Indian Ladies' Magazine, which makes the solar-powered universities and hour-of-leisure economy land even harder. Utopia as a mirror held up to dystopia.
2. The Female Man · Joanna Russ (1975)
Four women meet across parallel worlds: Joanna from ours, Jeannine from a 1969 that never ended the Depression, Janet from all-female Whileaway where the men all died in a plague, and Jael from a world where the sexes are literally at war. Russ uses the multiverse to argue that the patriarchy is the dystopia. Published 1975, still the sharpest knife in the subgenre.
3. The Shore of Women · Pamela Sargent (1986)
After a nuclear war, women sealed themselves into walled city-states and drove the men out to live feral, worshipping them as distant goddesses. Birana is exiled from her city and has to survive among the beings she was taught were animals. Sargent tells both sides, which is what keeps it from being a simple role-reversal.
4. The Gate to Women's Country · Sheri S. Tepper (1988)
Three hundred years after the wars, Women's Country keeps its warriors in a garrison outside the gates, and the women inside have quietly decided which men get to father the next generation. Tepper's cold little secret, the breeding program hidden under the pageantry, is the reason this one is still argued about. Published 1988.
5. The Natural Way of Things · Charlotte Wood (2015)
Girls wake up drugged in a remote Australian compound, each one punished for a sexual scandal that wasn't her fault. Guards, a fence, food that runs out, and the slow discovery that the institution has already lost interest in running the place. Wood's Stella Prize winner reads like a nightmare Australia keeps under the floorboards. Australian edition 2015, international 2016.
6. Gather the Daughters · Jennie Melamed (2017)
On an island cut off from a ruined mainland, the Wanderers' daughters submit to their fathers until they marry, and the only question the rules never answer is why. Melamed's debut follows four girls in the summer they start asking. The horror is pastoral: firelight, old songs, and obedience.
7. My Brother on the Moon · Maximilian Coolheit Vorfahrenheit (2025)
Disclosure: I wrote this one, and it is the odd entry here — Ventenstein does not sort people by sex, it sorts them by hour. The sickness bills every citizen one daily slot of violence, in whatever part of the day it pleases; every one of those deaths lands back on the killer, however much the bounty pays. Auzel writes those books for a living, and his newest line item is himself. Dexs is the only person in town with no entry at all, and he has opinions about the cemetery. If you came for control systems rather than gender politics, it fits. ~68 pages, free on Kindle Unlimited: amazon.com/dp/B0G1KNPF4X.
FAQ
What should I read after The Power?
The Gate to Women's Country is the closest in premise: women running a state and quietly deciding who reproduces. The Female Man for the sharpest version of the argument. For a control system that isn't about gender at all, My Brother on the Moon.
Are there dystopias where women rule?
A whole shelf of them, and older than you'd think: Sultana's Dream dates to 1905. The Shore of Women, The Female Man, and Gather the Daughters each build the matriarchy differently — exile, alternate worlds, and island cult.
Which of these is oldest?
Sultana's Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, published in the Indian Ladies' Magazine in 1905. It imagines Ladyland, where women run science and government while men stay indoors.