Human society in The Word for World is Forest is male-dominated, as women are sent from Earth to planetary colonies solely to serve as sexual partners for men and to populate those planets with children. As a result, soldiers prize their masculinity above all else. In contrast, the Athshean society on World 41 (a planet that Terrans, humans from Earth, have colonized) is more balanced, as men act as decision-makers while women act as politicians. In the end, Athshean society remains relatively intact while World 41’s human society crumbles. By presenting an alternative that outlasts the Terrans’ patriarchal society, the novella suggests that overvaluing masculinity can contribute to societal collapse.
The Terran colony on World 41 is a patriarchal society that values men over women. At first, there are no women permanently stationed on World 41, but at the start of the novella, a ship from Terra (Earth) brings a large group of women. These women fall into two categories: “Colony Brides,” who are meant to bear children to populate the planet, and “Recreation Staff,” who are available for casual sex with men. While the women may or may not have chosen these roles (something the novella never clarifies), their purpose in the colony always centers around men, and none of the women have any real agency of their own. Moreover, none of them have any say in the decisions the colony makes—for instance, there are no women present at a crucial meeting in the colonists’ headquarters, where the male colonists discuss the future of World 41. Maybe because of this unequal arrangement, masculinity is highly prized on World 41. Captain Davidson, the leader of a logging camp known as Smith, frequently touts his own virility and strength (stereotypically masculine qualities), and he and the other men objectify the women who are shipped to the colony. This appears to be routine, and while human society on World 41 is distinctly unequal, it nevertheless functions stably and without any apparent unrest.
However, patriarchal human society is later contrasted with Athshean society, which treats men and women as relative equals. Male and female Athsheans still have separate roles in society, but these roles are equally important. Men are “Great Dreamers,” who interpret information from their dreams, and women decide whether or not to act on their interpretations. This means that women often function as politicians, interacting directly with their society while the men focus on dreams. Because the women’s role is crucial to a functioning society, Athshean women (and especially older women) are valued more in their society than human women are in theirs. The human anthropologist Raj Lyubov later comments that if the humans had old women on World 41, they might not make such rash choices. In fact, Athshean women are baffled at the limited role of women in human society. At one point, the Athshean woman Ebor Dendep notes that the humans should have sent the women to World 41 first, as they might have been able to dream in ways that human men can’t. The concept of a patriarchal society is alien to the Athsheans, whose men and women live on equal terms.
In the end, the patriarchal nature of human society is part of what leads to that society’s collapse, while Athshean society remains standing. The Athsheans eventually attack the humans’ city, and their attack is specifically designed to target the human women, as the Athsheans murder the women and take many of the men prisoner. The Athsheans’ leader, Selver, notes that the Athsheans killed the women to sterilize the men, because otherwise, the human population on World 41 would have continued to grow. In other words, the women were murdered in part because of their designated role in human society—Selver is right that they would have increased the population, since they were brought to World 41 to breed. Furthermore, the women had no way to defend themselves against the Athsheans, as they were never considered soldiers and instead depended on the men’s protection. Meanwhile, Athshean society is structurally unchanged after the Athsheans succeed in shutting down the humans’ logging camps. Although the novella implies that the Athsheans are a different, more violent people after their encounter with the humans, their societal structure seems to remain stable, as the women help Selver negotiate with the humans. This comparative stability suggests that the Athsheans’ system of governance, which values both men and women, is far more stable than the humans’ strict patriarchy.
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Gender and Masculinity Quotes in The Word for World is Forest
Get enough humans here, build machines and robots, make farms and cities, and nobody would need the creechies any more. And a good thing too. For this world, New Tahiti, was literally made for men. Cleaned up and cleaned out, the dark forests cut down for open fields of grain, the primeval murk and savagery and ignorance wiped out, it would be a paradise, a real Eden. A better world than worn-out Earth. And it would be his world. For that’s what Don Davidson was, way down deep inside him: a world-tamer. He wasn’t a boastful man, but he knew his own size. It just happened to be the way he was made. He knew what he wanted, and how to get it.
Davidson saw then the telltale tension of the creature’s stance, yet it sprang at him so lithe and oblique that his shot missed, burning an arm or shoulder instead of smack between the eyes. And the creechie was on him, half his size and weight yet knocking him right off balance by its onslaught, for he had been relying on the gun and not expecting attack. The thing’s arms were thin, tough, coarse-furred in his grip, and as he struggled with it, it sang.
He was down on his back, pinned down, disarmed. […] He had never looked up into a creechie’s face from below. Always down, from above. From on top. He tried not to struggle, for at the moment it was wasted effort. Little as they were, they outnumbered him, and Scarface had his gun.
For Ebor Dendep was a practical woman. When a Great Dreamer, her brother, told her that Selver was a god, a changer, a bridge between realities, she believed and acted. It was the Dreamer’s responsibility to be careful, to be certain that his judgment was true. Her responsibility was then to take that judgment and act upon it. He saw what must be done; she saw that it was done.
[…]
As most writing was in this Lodge-tongue, when headwomen sent fleet girls carrying messages, the letters went from Lodge to Lodge, and so were interpreted by the Dreamers to the Old Women, as were other documents, rumors, problems, myths, and dreams. But it was always the Old Women’s choice whether to believe or not.
Every man alive except the Captain. No wonder pills couldn’t get at the center of his migraine, for it was on an island two hundred miles away two days ago. Over the hills and far away. Ashes, ashes, all fall down. And among the ashes, all his knowledge of the High Intelligence Life Forms of World 41. Dust, rubbish, a mess of false data and fake hypotheses. Nearly five E-years here, and he had believed the Athsheans to be incapable of killing men, his kind or their kind. He had written long papers to explain how and why they couldn’t kill men. All wrong. Dead wrong.
What had he failed to see?
The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he’s just had a woman or just killed another man. That wasn’t original, he’d read it in some old books; but it was true. That was why he liked to imagine scenes like that. Even if the creechies weren’t actually men.
And that’s one trouble with the colony, he thought as he lifted the hopper and Tuntar vanished beneath the oaks and the leafless orchards. We haven’t got any old women. No old men either, except Dongh and he’s only about sixty. But old women are different from everybody else, they say what they think. The Athsheans are governed, in so far as they have government, by old women. Intellect to the men, politics to the women, and ethics to the interaction of both: that’s their arrangement. It has charm, and it works—for them. I wish the administration had sent out a couple of grannies along with all those nubile fertile high-breasted young women. Now that girl I had over the other night, she’s really very nice, and nice in bed, she has a kind heart, but my God it’ll be forty years before she’ll say anything to a man…
“Should we have let them live?” said Selver with vehemence equal to Gosse’s, but softly, his voice singing a little. “To breed like insects in the carcass of the World? To overrun us? We killed them to sterilize you. I know what a realist is, Mr. Gosse. Lyubov and I have talked about these words. A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams. You’re not sane: there’s not one man in a thousand of you who knows how to dream. Not even Lyubov and he was the best among you. You sleep, you wake and forget your dreams, you sleep again and wake again, and so you spend your whole lives, and you think that is being, life, reality! You are not children, you are grown men, but insane. And that’s why we had to kill you, before you drove us mad.”
The raiding party burned up that warren by hand, and then flying back with a couple of his boys he spotted another, less than four kilos from camp. On that one, just to write his signature real clear and plain for everybody to read, he dropped a bomb. Just a firebomb, not a big one, but baby did it make the green fur fly. It left a big hole in the forest, and the edges of the hole were burning.
Of course that was his real weapon when it actually came to setting up massive retaliation. Forest fire. He could set one of these whole islands on fire, with bombs and firejelly dropped from the hopper. Have to wait a month or two, till the rainy season was over. Should he burn King or Smith or Central? King first, maybe, as a little warning, since there were no humans left there. Then Central, if they didn’t get in line.
No sound, no noise at all, until that screech from the guard; then one gunshot; then an explosion—a land mine going up—and another, one after another, and hundreds and hundreds of torches flaring up lit one from another and being thrown and soaring through the black wet air like rockets, and the walls of the stockade coming alive with creechies, pouring in, pouring over, pushing, swarming, thousands of them. It was like an army of rats Davidson had seen once when he was a little kid, in the last Famine, in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio, where he grew up. Something had driven the rats out of their holes and they had come up in daylight, seething up over the wall, a pulsing blanket of fur and eyes and little hands and teeth, and he had yelled for his mom and run like crazy, or was that only a dream he’d had when he was a kid?
