Nicole Souza is on a WOW! WOMEN ON WRITING TOUR of her book, Sins of Our Mothers. We are happy to welcome her here.
Sins of Our Mothers has received some wonderful five-star reviews. For example:
“I loved this book. I haven’t read anything quite like it before. It was absolutely captivating. There was something about Souza’s style that just drew me in.”
“Dystopian stories are generally unique anyway, but this one felt very different from anything I’ve read before. The world-building, the society, and the characters were captivating and unique.”
“This was different than most books I read. A dystopian novel with strong female characters, taking place after a solar catastrophe. This was a really good read and I enjoyed it.”
And we are very pleased to introduce Nicole Souza’s thoughts about what life would be like in a world with just women. Here’s Nicole:
In A World of Just Women, What Would Be the Ultimate Success? What Would A Successful Woman’s Life Look Like?
by Nicole Souza
While writing Sins of Our Mothers, I spent significant time considering how to define and demonstrate “success” in a world where only women exist.
To undo my modernized understanding of the word, I had to rewind to a time long before the society we know today, so much of which was constructed and organized by men. Our general understanding of success is a manmade concept formed by wealth, material possessions, social status, influence over others, easy access to pleasure and entertainment, and other things that could be construed as frivolous by past generations who spent their time and energy on health and survival rather than effortless enjoyment.
My thoughts journeyed back to our first parents, the original humans. It doesn’t matter what anyone believes about how the original humans came to be; everyone can agree that for there to be 7 billion humans today, there had to, at one point, have existed at least one female and one male human who first populated the earth. And the earth is all they would’ve had for food and shelter from the elements.
What would success have looked like for them? I imagine it would begin with finding a natural cave in a mountainside or fitting rocks together with mud to form a hideout near both a body of water and an area rife with fruit trees, hardy veggies, and plenty of wild prey. Of course, they would’ve been prey themselves, so they would’ve needed to make tools to protect themselves and their children. Success would’ve included strong, healthy, agile bodies with plenty of stamina and well-functioning digestive systems. It would also mean healthy sperm for the man and eggs for the woman along with capable, resilient reproductive organs and functioning breasts with which to nurse.
From there, I traced human history to the dystopian world I was creating for the book. The world in Sins of Our Mothers didn’t originate before modern society. It stemmed from modern society and blossomed over fifteen-hundred years. I had to envision what elements of primal success would’ve returned as many modern aspects fell away with men.
Here are my nine categories for success in a world of just women:
1. Quality Shelter
Quality shelter is the most obvious facet of success that has existed consistently throughout humanity’s habitation of earth. For our first parents, quality shelter meant safety from the elements and the predators that roamed among them. Today, it refers to size, décor, the view from the front door and the contents within—the latest electronics, popular brands and models of furniture, clothing, and vehicles. The more cars parked in a garage, the greater the owner’s success. The larger the pool out back, the newer the roof, the more precious the stones dangling from the chandeliers, the more successful the shelter’s occupants.
Women’s innate need to provide the best and safest for their families, combined with their evolved embracing of beautiful, human made things, bestows value upon spacious homes and quality belongings in the book. This is one piece of the success puzzle I believe would remain in a completely-female society. I also believe that, because women tend to comprehend that we’re all members of the human family, they’d want for all women to live comfortably. And they’ve had fifteen-hundred years since our day to make that happen. Therefore, spacious modernized houses are the standard in the book, and the more success, the larger and fancier the home
2. Fancy Cars
Because this female society takes place far in the future, women are not confined to a small area to acquire water and food. And because their time is limited, they don’t use their bodies for transportation as did our first parents. They, like us, move around in vehicles. The fancier the vehicle, the more successful the driver. This means they don’t get natural exercise using their bodies for daily tasks like hunting and gathering food, building shelters, and running from predators, so health continues to be a priority of its own
3. Health and
4. Diet
Until recently, women throughout history have had no choice but to make health a priority in striving for a successful life. From a young age, women learn to deal with the cramping, exhaustion, headaches, and bleeding that accompany menstruation. Puberty, pregnancy, delivery, nursing, and menopause each take an enormous, distinct toll on a woman’s body. With the constant mood changes and surges of hormonal dissonance, getting through the day is physically demanding.
Doing so in bad health is nearly impossible.
Nowadays, with the broader acceptance of varying body types (which, overall, is a wonderful thing, but in some ways can be dangerous), and the push for young women to choose childless futures in pursuit of material success, physical health is much less of a necessity. It’s far easier to sit at a desk and work all day in an unhealthy body (especially if there’s no one depending on you once the work is done) than it is to bear and raise children in bad health.
In the book, women have no one to depend on but themselves. Fathers, husbands, and brothers don’t exist. And mothers, sisters, and girlfriends all have their own lives and responsibilities. It’s essentially every woman for herself, and health cannot be jeopardized.
An important aspect of health is diet. It’s hard to believe women would settle on just one diet that works for everyone as women’s bodies are all vastly different and respond to diets uniquely. For example, a woman who suffers from PCOS is likely to experience improved health with high protein and low carbs while one with an accelerated metabolism will require more calories.
I imagine at the start of this all-female society there would’ve been attempts made to exclude certain foods like meat and processed goods. Overtime, however, women would be forced to acknowledge that a strict carnivore diet may prolong a life and processed foods may save entire civilizations in a famine. In the story, they ultimately chose to leave daily nutritional habits to the discretion of each individual woman, albeit with ample government involvement.
I concluded that a century into the woman-only world, nutritional habits would return to our version of normal but with a heavy emphasis on health and wellbeing.
5. Careers and
6. Money
In the world of Sins of Our Mothers, women live for their careers. While I believe women incline toward a barter system that lends to financial equality over the capitalist system we know today, in considering carefully the remnants of our society that would survive a segregation like the one that leads to the dystopia in the book (ex: vacant business parks, overwhelming financial inheritances for beneficiaries of large corporations, governments and other organizations of power from which women could benefit), I knew not all women would choose simple exchanges over the potential for individual success. Thus, I couldn’t create a society completely void of currency.
In cases where women refused to exchange services because they couldn’t agree on an exchange value/quantity, they believed their highly specialized skills to be irrelevant to the average civilian, they hadn’t developed a skill that could be exchanged for what they needed, etc., there needed to be an incentive for other women to provide their services to them, particularly farmers, contractors, or others offering survival-related services. And so money exists in the women’s world, and it’s similar to how money operates today but with an emphasis on trade.
7. The Preservation of Humanity
Of course, if women wanted to preserve the human family, they couldn’t just work all day and consume entertainment all evening; if none bore children, the species would die off in a single generation. The book’s result is a society where women’s eggs are extracted and fertilized IVF-style, then implanted in simulated uteri commonly called “pods” where children develop and whence are born. Women, in essence, have become fathers to their children, observing their development and births from the outside while preserving their own bodies for work. Furthermore, they no longer experience pregnancy, so their breasts no longer produce milk, and all babies are bottle fed.
Raising children in such a society would be a profession of its own. Because women must keep society functioning, all work outside the home and leave childrearing to professionals or retired family members—often the children’s grandmother.
8. Entertainment and
9. Technology
In the world of Sins of Our Mothers, all can afford entertainment. However, lavish vacations on private jets still indicate exceptional success. Such luxuries are not commonplace even in a quasi-equal world.
The practice of keeping up with the latest household technology would slightly increase women’s perception of one another’s success. Not because it implies wealth, but because it bestows relevance in respect to fashion and other trends. Jemima, a tremendously successful character, is always first to preorder the newest gadget. This is manifest in her first appearance in the book where she tells Lyratelle it’s time to upgrade her outdated API ring. Lyratelle, a character driven by things other than success, shrugs it off.
One thing many readers have picked up on is the fact that technology and its value is different in the book than it is in real life. This is because I believe a world of women would value, create, and use technology very differently than we do now. Grace’s character is the link between our current use of technology and the far less tech-saturated world in which she lives. API rings and verbal communication between women and their household appliances, cars, and other machines are the most common manifestations of technological advancements. Most others remain between specialists like Grace.
My Conclusion
In a world of just women, success would look a lot like it does today for men. A successful woman’s life would go something like this:
She’d wake up in a lavish house, dress in fine clothes, drop the kids off at daycare or her mom’s, drive to work in her fancy car, and exert the bulk of her energy to her job. After work, she’d stop for drinks to unwind and enjoy a few hours of downtime with a coworker, pick up her daughters from daycare or her mom’s, spend dinner catching up with the kids to ensure they’re being raised the way she prefers, put them to bed, review tomorrow’s workday and pending deadlines, and eventually fall asleep in an expensive bed.
It’s not a bad life. And it certainly wouldn’t produce bad women.
I believe such a world would, however, not only erase men, but also erase womanhood. It would diminish the qualities, attributes, and abilities unique to women. Ultimately, women would occupy only traditionally male spaces, all constructed by men. That’s not to say the workforce can’t be a female space as well—of course it can. But women would no longer exist in the spaces that can only be occupied by women.
They would no longer experience conception, pregnancy, delivery, or nursing babies. Consider the range of women’s emotions and physical experiences such a society eliminates. Life as women know it would be over for good, and it would be life as men know it…but with no men.
The biggest problem with our current understanding of any concept is that it’s limited to our current understanding. We are not the ones who built the world from the earth. The only view we’ve ever had is from the tops of skyscrapers—not because we climbed there, but because that’s where our mothers gave birth.
Sins of Our Mothers is my way of reaching out to start more honest, less tribal-regurgitation-style communication among our human family. I believe we’re in the process of erasing what’s woman about women, which terminates construction of these skyscrapers, and initiates their destruction.
***
Thank you Nicole. Choices wishes you huge success with Sins of Our Mothers and the upcoming next two books of your trilogy.
Book Summary
It has been fifteen hundred years since the solar flare devastation of the Global Catastrophe. Due to the radioactivity in the harvesting fields, society dismisses its defective children as nothing more than flawed products of the malfunctioned seeds in the field.
But Lyratelle, a hyper-observant musical prodigy, believes these “defects” are intelligent, particularly her own sibling, the youngest child of her impervious mother. Abandoning her dream career, Lyratelle climbs the bureaucratic ladder to run the Defect Research Center, where she can safeguard the child.
With an underground team of women who share her uncertainties, Lyratelle unearths the Old History truth that womankind’s survival actually hinges on the existence of these defects.
When General Sarah Love, the city’s most powerful advocate against the defects, detects Lyratelle’s sympathy toward the creatures, she threatens the life of Lyratelle’s sibling.
Now Lyratelle’s desperate attempt to save this child endangers everyone she loves—her team, her family, even the existence of the defects themselves.
Print Length: 358 Pages
Genre: Dystopian Fiction
ASIN: B08FNMQ3XV
Publisher: E.L. Marker
Sins of Our Mothers is available to purchase now on Amazon.com.
About the Author, Nicole Souza
Nicole’s fuel is conversation. She loves hearing people’s stories and glimpsing the experiences that make them who they are. With a particular interest in women’s history and their individual stories, she has birthed a story that provides all the ingredients for a thought-provoking read.
You can discover more about Nicole’s work on her website:
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