When Women Were Dragons, Fantasy Feminism with a Mad Men Twist

The Handmaid's Tale is the book that made me scared to be a woman but The Power is the one that made me angry, physically, explosively angry. I spent much of the latter clenching my fists, willing the electrical power given to women in that novel to pour into them and free me of the enforced backfoot my own gender keeps me on. One in which men will always be physically stronger than me.

When Women Were Dragons [Kelly Barnhill] is a book that takes the next logical step, and asks... what if women were given access to their potential? What if, instead of freeing women from oppression, their powers gave them the ability to explode out of their small bodies and learn, build, help others, and - yes - take revenge as they please?

But unlike The Handmaid's Tale and The Power, this isn't a book that educates the reader on the female condition. It doesn't try to paint one view of womanhood or represent them as a universal whole (it's also more queer and trans friendly than either of those books). Instead it's a rather small story, one girl's ascent into womanhood against a backdrop of 1960s McCarthyism and dragons.

Alex is an ordinary girl in suburban America. Her dad spends his life at the office, her mom is beautiful and clearly the most intelligent person in any room - but stubbornly plays her traditional wifely role. Alex is just as clever, but - as she puts it - keeps her eyes on the ground. She doesn't look to the skies and she doesn't make waves. She's a good girl.

Her Aunt Marla is the very opposite - a war mechanic, loud, large, opinionated, and unsubtle in her queerness. Eventually she 'settles down' and has a child, Beatrice, whom Alex instantly adores.

Peppered throughout the story are 'historic' cases of women transforming into dragons, followed by a 'forgetting'. Isolated cases begin to pop up, women turning against their husbands or bosses, but then one day there is a mass dragoning. Thousands of women explode into scaled beasts and take to the skies, never to be seen again.

And once again, there is a forgetting. The government suppresses research - calling it un-American - and life is pieced back together. Talk of dragons is relegated to something unspeakably feminine - like discussing menstruation over dinner.

Alex's Aunt is one of the women who dragon, and overnight her cousin becomes her 'sister'. As far as Alex's mom is concerned, Aunt Marla didn't exist. Alex tries to believe it, even as she starts going through her own physical changes. A 'friendship' with a girl gets them both in trouble, for reasons neither understand, and her intelligence begins to show up the boys at school. (Oh no! Think of their male feelings!)

Of course, when her mom dies and her dad abandons her and her 'sister', everything changes. The dragonings are still happening... and then the dragons come back.

On paper, this may sound quite YA, but this is a very adult book. For all the fantastical talk of yellow eyes and flapping wings, this is a painful coming of age story. It's about having a role forced upon you, choosing between love and freedom, about the complex relationships between female family members, about parentification and abuse, and about the simple truth that your mother is never someone you can truly understand, because you are at once too close, and too far away from her true self. 

That said, there is a certain naivete to this book. There is a very Tumblr post that states that, if there was a real life 'purge', many people would use it to do things that are only illegal on paper, and for the common good. It's naive and feelgood in the way only peak Tumblr can be, and there are echoes of that sort of thinking here. I don't think women would immediately use their dragonly ability to start clearing up trash and helping their community. I don't think women are naturally inclined to live in peaceful communes and strive for inclusivity. Women are people and people often suck, especially people who have been hurt and who are given immense power (as, indeed, The Power makes clear.)

The book also never fully answers why all this is happening now. Although the book makes references to other dragonings throughout history, none happen on the scale of the one in the story. That initially gives the absurd impression that the middle-class Mad Men-esque wives are the most oppressed women of all time, which... wow. The book makes clear that it's not just white women, but hoo boy, literally every woman in history wants a word. 

To be very fair, it becomes clear in the later parts of the book that it's not just oppression causing it, but joy too, and ambition - being bigger on the inside. One could argue that the 1960s were the first taste of freedom for a lot of women, and so it was a unique time of freedom and hope, versus oppression and enforced gender roles.

What I did love is the queerness of this book. As well as Aunt Marla's love letters (and eventual dragon polycule), there is Alex's coming of age story, and Beatrice is a clear metaphor for a trans child - one who is clearly a dragon in her very soul. Alex has to eventually come to terms with it, and allow Beatrice to change, despite her fears for Beatrice's future. The book also outright states that trans women (and even non-trans drag queens) can dragon.

If you are wanting a feminist story that's more hopeful and fantastical than other, similar books, this may be for you. If you already accept that women have rich internal lives that are often thwarted by the real world, you probably won't learn anything more, but you will certainly have a good time.