Reading the Future
Imagine a society in which two thirds of all mothers had children outside of marriage, often using "artificial wombs" to carry the fetuses, and women began generally to disassociate themselves from men.
This scenario, titled "Separate--and Doing Fine, Thanks!," is one of four possible world orders envisioned by authors Pamela McCorduck and Nancy Ramsey '62 in their bookThe Futures of Women: Scenarios For the 21st Century (Addison-Wesley, 304 pages, $24).
Written as if these events already have occurred, the book describes the sociological developments involving women around the world up to the year 2015. Each of the four scenarios depicts political and social changes stemming from trends that began late in the 20th century. For example, in "Backlash" the authors suggest that a rising tide of religious fundamentalism fueled a belligerent and aggressive worldwide campaign to turn back the clock on reproductive rights, equality in the workplace and other basic civil rights for women. So thorough were these movements that in Western countries women began to wear traditional Middle Eastern chadors and submitted to a range of oppressive measures to avoid derision and violence.
In "A Golden Age of Equality"--the most optimistic of the four scenarios--the removal of artificial barriers between cul-tures and genders, driven by the explosion of communication technologies like the Internet, results in worldwide prosperity and a new attitude of collaboration. Women lead the way to practical advancements in education, environmental preservation and conflict resolution. Differences are celebrated rather than exploited or used as a means of division. Political stability becomes the rule rather than the exception.
"Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back" perhaps most closely resembles what the authors refer to in their foreword as "the official future," in which women continue to make gains in equality, but the pace of change is slow and impeded by economic deprivation.
McCorduck's and Ramsey's book is intelligent, provocative and occasionally (perhaps intentionally) outrageous. Its construction of imagined societies is instructive if not always entirely credible. But any book that predicts social behaviorism based on the study of an obscure primate species, the bonobo, provides plenty to think about.