I Who Have Never Known Men 

The 2019 Penguin paperback edition 

Written by Jacqueline Harpman

Deep underground, thirty-nine women are trapped in a cage. Patrolled by guards they cannot interact with, they have no memory of how or when they were imprisoned. Each of them vaguely remembers life before, except the narrator, the fortieth prisoner, the only child among the women. One day, an alarm sounds and the guards flee, leaving the women vulnerable but ultimately able to escape. Once above ground, they are met with a desolate and barren landscape with no signs of life. They come across bunkers filled with more prisoners, sometimes male and sometimes female but never alive. As they traverse this familiar yet unfamiliar landscape, the women work together to build a life for themselves and hope that one day they’ll find answers. 

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman has been captivating readers since its release in 1995. It was originally published in French and then translated to English in 1997 by Ros Schwartz (1). The New York Times described it as “bleak but fascinating” in a 1997 review (2). The dystopian landscape of the world above ground makes this novel perfect for a class like ours. They do not appear to be on Earth, as they can’t find any recognizable constellations, flora, or fauna (3). Their world is desert-like and barren, stretching for miles in every conceivable direction. Such descriptions are ripe with potential for both dystopian and gender analysis. I see potential for this landscape to be compared to an empty womb-like space. Though they have been freed from their underground bunker, the women are still just as trapped in this space, sparking questions of what constitutes freedom or humanity when all social structures have been stripped away. 

Envisioning the novel's landscape 

The narrator is an interesting source of exploration for what could happen to a woman, physically and mentally, if she were to never encounter a man at all. The narrator is unable to understand the other women's recollections of romantic and sexual desires and has not yet experienced puberty at the age of fourteen. There are points in the novel where she questions whether her asexuality is inherent or brought on by her circumstances. As Hannah Tang points out, her libido and imagination are “futile, restricted, her body cloaked in silence” (4). This concept of one biological sex being completely cut off from the other could be an interesting point of conversation for our class. I envision discussion leading into what this looks like for trans, nonbinary, and intersex people as well – how do they cope with these circumstances? Is our narrator now an implicitly sexless being? Is gender performance – femininity or masculinity – tied to the existence of the other gender?  

In the end, Harpman’s novel is an opportunity to consider real societies just as much as imagined ones. Although I Who Have Never Known Men seems to unfold in a distant and impossible world, its questions feel uncomfortably familiar. Who/what defines gender? Who/what controls the body? What happens when social systems are removed? The women’s struggle to build meaning in a landscape emptied of all they’ve ever known can be a mirror to the ways marginalized genders must construct identity within social landscapes designed without them in mind. Rather than offering answers to such questions, Harpman leaves readers to contemplate on their own, making this novel the perfect site for class discussions. 

Spoiler alert: The novel never explains why the women were trapped in the first place, or exactly what planet they're on. Esta Pinto's blog review discusses potential theories, which is fun to think about!

Works Cited

1. “I Who Have Never Known Men.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 20 November 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Who_Have_Never_Known_Men. Accessed 6 December 2025. 

2. Eckhoff, Sally. “I Who Have Never Known Men.” Review of I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. The New York Times, 14 September 1997. Books Archive, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/14/bib/970914.rv114521.html. Accessed 8 November 2025. 

3. Harpman, Jacqueline. I Who Have Never Known Men. Penguin Random House, 1995. 

4. Tang, Hannah. “The Post-Apocalyptic Catharsis of Jacquline Harpman’s ‘I Who Have Never Known Men.’” Strand Magazine, 5 November 2024, https://www.strandmagazine.co.uk/single-post/the-post-apocalyptic-catharsis-of-jacqueline-harpman-s-i-who-have-never-known-men. Accessed 8 December 2025.