The Disappearance

One ordinary moment, the world splits in two: every man on Earth finds every woman gone without a trace, and at the same instant every woman finds herself in a world emptied of men -- two parallel realities on the same planet, each population convinced the other has vanished. Philip Wylie follows both worlds afterward, one sliding into authoritarian collapse without women to share or restrain power, the other building something more equal and freer, using the split to interrogate mid-century assumptions about sex, marriage and the double standards separating what men and women were each allowed to be. A speculative novel years ahead of the feminist movement it anticipates.