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The Female Manifesto
Prologue
Sarah sat on the bus and stared out the window. The streets of New Haven were bathed in the soft glow of early morning sunlight and Sarah fancied that the town itself was just waking up as she noticed the first stirrings of the day’s activity. A shopkeeper was rolling up his shutters; a young boy in pyjamas was playing with his dog on the front lawn. Seeing this, Sarah could almost let herself believe that things were still normal.
A jogger ran down the street in the opposite direction of the bus. He noticed Sarah watching him and gave her a little smile and a wave as the bus rushed past him. She raised her own hand to wave back, but only got it part-way up before she saw the woman running along behind him. She was completely naked, or nearly so, except for her running shoes and ankle socks, and was clearly struggling to keep up with the man. They were gone in a second, but Sarah could just make out the smooth metal collar that encircled her neck and the leash that ran from it straight to the jogger’s right hand. No, she thought, things were definitely not normal.
It all began with the plague. In truth, the news had said, it was probably a biological weapon rather than a naturally occurring disease, but nobody knew who had released it, or where it had come from. No one group of people seemed immune to it, anyway, and the plague killed quickly and indiscriminately. The only people left now were those who were lucky enough to have some sort of natural immunity to the virus, winners of some bizarre genetic lottery, roughly half of one percent of the world’s population at last estimate. Sarah was one of those lucky few.
At first, the survivors of the plague were scattered, alone, and merely eked out an existence where they could. In the intervening years though, they had found one another, banded together, and tried to resume some semblance of their former lives. In the here and now, that meant New Haven. It was what they used to call a planned community, a place where families could move and shut themselves away from the crime and corruption of the big cities. It had its own power and water supplies and more than enough room to accommodate the first settlers who found it. That had been eight years ago, and New Haven’s population had swelled to well over a hundred thousand, one of the last bastions of civilisation in the world.
Sarah had come here when she was ten, a year after the plague had struck, when New Haven was first being settled. Up until then she had been cared for by Diane, a young woman who said she had just found her wandering in the street one day. Apparently, they were the only two people to have survived in their entire town, wherever that had been, Sarah couldn’t remember.
They came to New Haven together and, at first, their new life seemed a lot like their old one. The two of them were allocated a house, Diane found a job, and Sarah went to school. There were few real families in the new town as the plague had rarely spared two members of any one bloodline, but most of the children managed to find homes, usually with people like Diane that had brought them there in the first place. New Haven was a town determined to bring society back from the brink of oblivion, to be the phoenix rising from the ashes, as Nathan Grey had said in one of his editorials.
Nathan Grey was one of the original discoverers of New Haven, had taken over the running of the town’s newspaper, and was once one of the most respected men in the town. Now he was, for all intents and purposes, its complete lord and master. A year ago, Grey had published two books, Principles of Patriarchy and The Female Manifesto. In them, Grey argued that the great new society of New Haven should not merely attempt to emulate the failed society that had preceded it, but instead, try to surpass its accomplishments by correcting the old mistakes before they were cemented in the foundations of the new one.
What this meant, of course, was that females had to be strictly controlled. Females, Grey said, were the cause of most of the former society’s ills. Their clamouring for voting rights, sexual liberation, equal representation, all had dominated the public forum of the last century and diverted society’s attention away from the real issue it should have been focusing on. Happiness. And happiness, as Grey defined it, was a world in which men were happy. Females, he said, were naturally subservient to the male, that was obvious from the ease with which the average man could subdue and tame them if he wished. Nature had surely intended man to use these creatures for his own comfort, and it had only been the good nature of men that had let them off their knees in the first place. Their intelligence, he argued, was misleading. Man had been convinced that because she could speak and reason as he did, that what a female had to say was equally as valid as his own thoughts and ideas. This was an error. The lesson of history, if it was to teach them anything, was that a female’s intelligence was not the same as a man’s. Indeed, whenever females had involved themselves in government, or any decision making really, it had only served to cloud and confuse an issue, this surely being self-evident. Nature, Grey argued, had only granted the female intelligence so that she could better serve and please her natural master, the male. And the only way to ensure that female involvement did not interfere with the development of New Haven was to enshrine their subservience in law.
Not surprisingly, Grey’s ideas gained great acceptance among the male population of New Haven and, six months ago, he was elected mayor in a landslide victory with a mandate to write a new constitution. Some females had tried to run against Grey’s platform but, as few women could get past the hulking male guards at polling places, they were soundly defeated.
Grey’s new constitution lowered all females to the level of property and a mass relocation and reorganisation project began. All females nineteen and over were rounded up and randomly allocated to male citizens in a town-wide lottery. The few married women there were automatically became the property of their husbands. Girls under thirteen were allowed to stay with their guardians, but slightly older girls, like eighteen year old Sarah, were taken to a group home where they spent months waiting for the school system to adapt to the changes that would soon take place. Sarah wondered where Diane was and if she was happy.
This was the state of affairs in New Haven as Sarah drove towards the first day of her new school year.
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