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When I was a college freshman (in 1986) I had to read The Wanderground by Sally Miller Gearhart. It is a collection of stories set in some bleak future where women are worse than chattel and men rule the world in brutal fashion. A number of women escape to the wilderness and form a feminist Utopian enclave. After a couple of generations these women develop psychic powers such as telepathy and healing, because they're in harmony with nature. Eventually, of course, they have to contend with the encroachment of the evil men. The politics come right out of the "All heterosexual sex is rape" school of thought. The women, of course, love each other in a beautiful, nurturing, giving, sharing, caring way. The only men who possess even a shred of decency are the "gentles", who are, of course, homosexual. They have developed psychic powers of their own, because they have embraced their feminine sides. That's all I can remember about the book.

At the time I liked the book because it appealed to my sense of adventure, but when I revisited it a couple of years later the clunky, heavy-handed politics left me cold. The professor who taught the course was a lesbian -- although, in all fairness to her, she made no reference to her sexuality during class, and unlike another feminist professor I had she did not mistreat the male students in the class. (I found out about her lesbianism long after I graduated, in an article she wrote for our alumni magazine.) It was actually a pretty good course, because we also got to read Huxley's Brave New World, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, and Orwell's 1984. Looking Backward was also part of the curriculum, and it was one of the most horrifically boring books I ever read -- so boring, in fact, that I don't even remember what it was about, LOL.

Huxley's Brave New World, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, and Orwell's 1984

As a homeschool mom, the first thing I did was to make my 10th-grade son watch "A Man for All Seasons". With that introduction over, we read "Utopia" and contasted it with Machiavelli "The Prince".I had him read "Anthem." We discussed the use of power. We went through Henry the 8th, Elizabeth I, Coligny, the Medicis, even the slaughter in Matanzas Bay (we live 5 miles from Ft. Caroline)...

This year, the Enlightenment, we are into Rousseau, Smith, Locke, Mills and the Federalist Papers. I had him read 1984. Compare and contrast with Anthem, which he had to re-read for the essay. His response, "Mom, I am smarter now than I was last year." Next, "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged"