Ayla has no such limitations, and she learns how to hunt and make tools, transgressions against the gendered order of the clan that result in repeated punishment and shunning. Since clan members are unable to learn and remember new information, gender roles and norms are unchangeable. Clan men and women are born with different sets of knowledge. Not only is the clan brutally patriarchal, but the roles of men and women are utterly biologically determined. Published in 1980, right on the cusp of a backlash against the feminist gains of the previous two decades, The Clan of the Cave Bear is deeply concerned with gender roles in society. Literary dystopias are always steeped in the cultural anxieties of their time. Unlike Katniss Everdeen’s Panem or Tris Prior’s post-apocalyptic Chicago, the society Ayla lives in is not the dystopia our current world could evolve into.
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