The Matriarchy Classics project is an experimental literature project that gender-swaps classic literature, inverting only gendered words and leaving all other text unchanged.
I first started working on my gender-swapped literature project during my PhD in computer science. Eighty percent of computer science graduate students were men, which meant that in my research group, in my classes, and at department socials, I was often the odd woman out. This was not back in the 1950s. This was in 2020.
I fantasized about what an inverted world would look like. In my imaginary matriarchal society, the other students and professors would mostly be women. When I walked through the walnut-paneled halls of the Dean’s Office, all the portraits of past deans would be of women. When I flipped through a history book, all the past presidents would be women too. I imagined the women of classic literature strolling around with all the power and all the money, going on grand adventures and making world-changing decisions.
Initially, I assumed it would be easy to write a software program to gender-swap books. But I soon ran into complicated issues with plurals, punctuation marks, and pronouns that required a fair amount of thought to resolve. I ended up manually creating gender-swap mappings for over 900 gendered English words and their often-irregular plural forms. I couldn’t even replace all instances of “man” with “woman” because that produced nonsense transformations like “manor” to “womanor.” I had to use whitespace- and punctuation-preserving tokenization to isolate individual words while supporting subsequent reconstruction of properly-formatted sentences and paragraphs. Resolving “her” into “him” or “his” and resolving “his” into “her” or “hers” required language modeling. Then there was the problem of character naming. I experimented with different approaches, including keeping the original names (too jarring), changing to unrelated opposite-gender names (too detached from the original), and the final approach I settled on, changing to closely-related opposite-gender names whenever possible. Even after all this work, I still caught edge cases on final read-throughs that required manual editing.
The final result made me uncomfortable.
Gender-swapped classics unsettle me because of what they reveal about society, but also because of what they reveal about me—a woman raised in a patriarchal society, who feels awkward when reading certain sentences and then feels awkward about feeling awkward. But, they say, the first step to changing society is changing yourself, and I do feel like working on this project has changed me. The Matriarchy Classics series is not a parody. It is a mirror.
Thank you for looking in the mirror with me.
— Dr. Rachel Draelos, Creator of Matriarchy Classics