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in which they explained that neither husband nor wife should rule, God should rule: what that meant in practice of course would take a novel to tell. My sister, a strong Christian, is also a feminist and has had a successful career as a teacher and been Head (Principal) of a large school.
Whatever the reasons, and probably the women in my family are the main ones, I took easily to feminism: it appeared right. But if it was so obviously right, why had it been so slow coming? Why had men been oppressing women so vigorously for so long? Why had women let them get away with it? Was it a bargain they struck early on and then found they didn't have the power to renegotiate? If so, how was it that all the women I knew in the 1970s were suddenly and vehemently renegotiating it? What had given them the moxie to do it, after 'n' thousand years, and why, for heaven's sake, just at the moment that I was discovering who women were?
The reasons for oppression of women available in feminist circles then were all social: society done it. To give a biological explanation was anathema: women were trying to escape from the old male arguments that they were biologically made only for kids, cooking, and church (which sounds snappier in German: kinder, kuche, kirche). 
So were men and women psychologically the same, not from Mars and Venus at all, but just cursed with different plumbing and a sexist society? Which meant that baby boys and baby girls were treated differently from birth, and molded into the male and female stereotypes?
I liked this idea because as my twenties went by I felt I wasn't so different from women. Tess left me, and I started a relationship with another strong feminist. I began to make women friends, especially in the communal house we had started. I didn't sense a big gulf.
I enjoyed the feminist science fiction of that time - Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Suzy McKee Charnas, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and Dorothy Bryant's The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You. It promised that everything could be different, though usually in an unrealistic way: but hey, it was fantasy.
So I started to write a science fiction novel. But instead of utopia, I wanted explanation. How had free and equal human beings got into one half oppressing the other half? Could I invent a society in which there was no gender, where the different plumbing had no meaning and there was no difference in upbringing between baby boys and girls? The only way

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Why I wrote Children of Arable
I don't know, you might want to read this after you've read the novel. It's a story, after all. This article reveals some of the conceptual underpinnings.
I wrote this novel as a man trying to understand feminism and the origins of male control over women. I had had a dream that I was a stick man and my girlfriend was pregnant. I was 29 or 30, living in a big communal house in a run down part of Leeds, a Northern industrial city in England. I was working as a carpenter.
It seems as if my biggest priority in my twenties was trying to sort out relationships with women. I was handicapped by having gone to an all-boys boarding school, a bizarre environment. Then at age 17, I "gave my life to God." I was raised in an intense religious movement, in which there was a strong emphasis on 'purity' or chastity. No dating, no courtship: people did get married, but it seemed that they often barely knew each other at marriage. Any kind of close relationship, even friendship, between a young man and young woman was virtually impossible for many of us.
I didn't get to know any women at all until I left the movement (Moral Re-Armament or MRA, formerly the Oxford Group) around age 22. I had worked with MRA in India and Ethiopia by then, as well as getting my undergraduate degree at Oxford, at my father's old college. I had done everything right and yet I was miserable, verging on suicidal.
So I started afresh, and one of the first things I wanted was a girlfriend. I met a wonderful, vivacious girl, called Tess, and we got married. She discovered feminism, and I discovered I had to have a whole new language: girl was out, woman was in. 
My grandmère, my grandmother, had been a feminist. My grandfather was a real authoritarian patriarch. I was told she said to her first four boys, "Men are beasts! I never should have had you!" She was well off, but trapped. My mother got a psychology degree and was a social worker in London, before going full time for no salary (like my father) with the Oxford Group / MRA. That movement did not then give women positions on the Board of Management, and the leadership was male, but women were respected. My parents used to give a talk on marriage,