GEARHART, Sally Miller

(1931-)

   US author of lesbian- FEMINIST works - including A Feminist Tarot (1976) with Susan Rennie - and Professor of Speech and Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. Her sf book, one of the most extreme of those that envisage men and women as effectively different races, is The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (coll of linked stories 1980). It is set in the outlaw, all-women, UTOPIAN hill communities of a future when men are restricted to the CITIES and dependent on TECHNOLOGY, while women (in a somewhat New Age manner) have developed PSI POWERS through harmony with Nature. Even the Gentles, men no longer driven by violence, know that "maleness touched women only with the accumulated hatred of centuries".

   PN

   See also: PASTORAL.