If you are a reader born in 2000, you might have been part of the Dystopian Era of readers. The years were novels such as The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Maze Runner was selling out in your local bookstore. Has much as 2000 popularized the genre in younger audiences, dystopian novels have always existed and been an important part of society.
Dystopias are used by writers and filmmakers to criticize parts of our daily society whether it’s capitalism, government, technological advances, human rights issues, and more. But prior to the 2000 craze of these genera, popular dystopian novels such as Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, 1984, We, and more had one thing in common: male leads.
A typical dystopian plot tends to go like this: male lead realizes society is corrupted and then tries to overthrow the government by himself or with a group of individuals.
The question I ask myself and hope at this point in this article you are asking yourself, is why a male lead? Women could also do all does things, can they not?
You might be surprised to know that it’s linked to one thing and one thing only: patriarchy. Since “‘in our male-dominated societies, heroism is often linked by actions that are specific to men: battles, hunts, quests, and long journeys”. For the longest time, women had to stay at home with the children and in consequence, could never relate to being represented as the hero. If they were the hero (which was a rare occurrence) they would suffer death or worse tragedy. This is the main reason why in mythology, in many stories, female characters will suffer tragedy or be considered villains. For example, Medusa is cursed to be a monster or Circe who is considered unreasonable in most of her stories.
Female characters were written this way to send the message that women should follow and accept their fate because if they chose to act against it, they would suffer. This fear was installed in female readers so they don't think of separating themselves from society's standards of feminity and leaving the hero work to men. So in shorter therm sommiting themselves to patriarchy and to not think of overthrowing. Which is why they weren't written in dytopians since if women could overthrow a government, they could overule the social-construct of patriarchy.
Do to all this, the first ever female lead dystopian novel was the Handsmaid's Tale in 1986 written by Margaret Atwood which depicted a totalitarian society, who imposed roles on women based on what people believe women roles should be. Dysopias then became more popularly used to depict the injustice women faced and other political issues.
This female-lead representation in dystopian demonstrated to young female readers to fight for what they think it's right, to not let themselves be manipulated by patriarchy and that they can be hero's in their own story.