Review: I Who Have Never Known Men

Review from Jaqueline Harpman book, discussed on 2/2/2025

The book I Who Have Never Known Men, lauded as a Trump Era Handmaid's Tale, has gained popularity among book clubs and TikTok influencers alike. A story about 40 women, trapped solitary in a bunker provokes not only questions about the parts of us that truly contain our humanity, but the ways in which we interrogate with womanhood and liberation.

The author Jacqueline Harpman was born in Belgium in 1929. During WWII she fled with her family to Morocco until the end of the war. Much of her adolescence, like the women in the story, was spent in isolation.

The book signals to many of WWII’s thematic undercurrents– matching, seemingly soulless guards holding people prisoner, a post-nuclear, uncanny desert landscape, bunkers, and a proto-space-age. A threat of the nuclear disaster of nothingness. Even the narrator’s final feeling about the guards – in similar vogue Nazi analyses – where she wonders if they really had a choice.

In many ways, more than a historical allegory, the book is a coming of age tale – and in classic fashion – lacks conclusiveness. The narrator approaches puberty without ever having had any physical touch. She was malnourished and ignored. Her only socialization is observing the even-keeled and organized domesticity of the older women in the bunker. The narrator yearns for knowledge, for feeling, for something more, though she does not even have any prior knowledge as a basis for fathoming it.

Through describing the narrator’s coming of age, completely void of any social context, we learn about what the author considers to be innately human: sexuality, timekeeping, loyalty, and hope. Without a society to engrain certain attributes to humanness, this is what the narrator was born with. This is juxtaposed with what the older women took from the previous world, from which they have some memories: guilt, shame, and normative patterns of being.

When the women escape the bunker, however, it becomes clear that they have held on to something else from the old world: patriarchal social organization.

Escaped from the physical imprisonment of the bunker, it becomes clear that the women are not totally free from their shackles. Instead, what holds them captive seems to be frameworks from the world they knew before. They bring a domestic structure to their lives outside of the bunker, after years of searching for something more, for something beyond.

Yes, they are finally free from the nothingness of detention, yet, they recreate the systems they had within the bunker – systems they presumably had in their lives before. They create houses, they live in twos, they give subtle hierarchies. They observe death rituals. Outside, they exist in a world that is a blank slate – yet they struggle to create something new.

That said, outside the bunker is a barren land. It is a place unlike earth: the women never have to fear for lack of basic resources, the weather is consistently temperate, and a monotonous static rules their days.

Perhaps the women did not create art. However, neither did they create systems of barter. They did not tell myths, though they did teach. Many did not learn. They did not exploit, they did not fear. Their time, with vague structures of western hegemony, was oblivion.

This book, therefore, is not a Handmaid's Tale. It is not a world without men, nor a story that centers male violence. The women, though victims of an unknown and unspecified act of corruption, are complicit in upholding certain norms. Instead, could it be a commentary on women's liberation at the time Jacqueline Harpman was writing? Or the time she was coming of age herself?

As much as the story signals to an (our) apocalyptic future, it is a coming of age story nestled within a commentary of feminism. To the narrator, the older women in the bunker represent the first wave: they withhold (under the guise of protection), bring domestic activities to the public sphere, and devote themselves to voting and democracy. The narrator, the character coming of age, the nucleus of the tale, pushes for further liberation, without wisdom and without deliberation. The pages are filled with a tension between the two – first and second, old and new.

Could Harpman be noting that though free to work in the public sphere, born into an era of Rosie the Riveter, her generation of women are still shackled? When the patriarchy burns down, or the world, we did not make what we rebuilt different.

Sheltered and isolated, the narrator still knows much of man, of mankind.