Man's Rights; or, How Would You Like It?: Comprising Dreams

Before Herland. Before The Handmaid's Tale. Before every speculative feminist novel that followed, there was this: the first known feminist utopian novel written by a woman, published in the 1870s. Annie Denton Cridge imagined what would happen if gender roles simply flipped. Her narrator, a woman, dreams herself to Mars, where she discovers a civilization dominated by women, while men toil in silence, denied education, vote, and voice. She watches men struggle for the right to speak in public, to own property, to escape the domestic cage. The final two dreams transport her to a future America, now ruled by a queen. Cridge holds a mirror to Victorian society, showing how the very structures that silence women could, in different hands, silence anyone. This is not simple inversion for shock. It is sharp, philosophical satire that asks uncomfortable questions about power, gender, and who gets to define rights. Over a century later, its thought experiment still cuts.