The explicitly feminist focus of Thendara House, one of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover Series, allows her to explore the effects of patriarchy on both individuals and society. In the Amazon Guild Houses communal groups of women are bonded under the Renunciate Oath, in which they exchange self-determination for the traditional protections granted women in conservative patriarchal society—marriage and respectability. The Guild houses also function like the domestic abuse centers which have sprung up across the country as places of refuge. In many ways the Guild House reflects the situation of the feminist movement in the 1970s, with its collective experiment, its focus on sisterhood in all its forms, including lesbianism, and issues of survival, separatism, ownership, and cooperation.

Terran and Darkovan society illustrate two ways patriarchal society may treat women. The Terrans are a highly technological liberal democracy with nominally egalitarian status for women...