Both Sides of the Gate: Patriarchy in Sheri S. Tepper's the Gate to Women's Country (Critical Essay‪)‬

You may as well forget it, Achilles. There is no f*****g in Hades. Hades is Women's Country. These two lines, spoken by Iphigenia in the Women's Country play Iphigenia at Ilium, embody the central theme of Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country. The play is performed annually as a reminder of what women have had to endure since before the beginning of human history: violence and oppression by men, allowed and even encouraged by the social construction of patriarchy, which anthropologist Steven Goldberg defines as "any system of organization [...] that associates authority and leadership primarily with males and in which males fill the vast majority of authority and leadership positions" (30). Each of the three major societies in The Gate to Women's Country (henceforth Gate), the women, the warriors, and the Holylanders, has a distinct relationship to patriarchy and its exercise. The women, attempting to build a utopian, egalitarian society, practice eugenics to root patriarchy out of their society; the warriors live under a code of male domination that seeks to overthrow Women's Country; and the Holylanders embody a religiously-based form of patriarchy, depicting the worst possible conditions for a woman to live under. Patriarchy does not simply appear in a culture full-formed; it has warning signs. Tepper has provided several of these signs within the three societies in the novel and provided possibilities for fighting or eradicating patriarchy by being aware of these signs and contesting them.