Although biology and societal convention push Ada into it, she is really not cut out for an outlaw’s life in Outlawed, Anna North’s thought-provoking alternate history of late-nineteenth-century America. A few decades before Ada was even born, devastating influenza ripped across the country (and presumably, the rest of the world). The world left behind seems obsessed with growing the population. Women are expected to immediately start gestating as soon as the ink is dry on their marriage certificates and keep going until they die or their body gives out. Women who can’t get pregnant are viewed askance and heaven help them if anything bad happens to anyone or anything in their village. Ada’s path to outlawry begins when she fails to get pregnant and is blamed for everything.
That first chapter or so of Outlawed is very uncomfortable to read, as North throws in just about every anti-feminist trope into the narrative. Women have limited roles: mother, wife, pre-wife, post-mother. Women like Ada and her mother, who are midwives, are tolerated but barely. Ada’s first port after fleeing accusations of witchcraft is a convent of barren women. The convent is relatively safe but Ada finds it just as confining as her village, even if she’s not expected to procreate.
Outlawed starts to get good—even funny—when Ada runs away again, to Hole in the Wall. Hole in the Wall is a remote camp run by the Kid and their gang of gender non-conformists. There are some misadventures that had me smirking at Ada’s terrible luck when she tries to break the law, although that rotten luck puts her on the gang’s bad side more than once. (Ada is a lot more successful when she keeps to doctoring.) When the Kid comes up with a scheme that could set them all up for life, Ada agrees to play a part in the hopes that she might finally be able to follow her dream of studying medicine and finding out the real reason why some women can’t get pregnant. The last third or so of Outlawed follows Ada from one disaster to another as she and the gang try to pull off the Kid’s plan.
While I enjoyed a lot of the plot, there were some things that bothered me about the book as a whole. Gender weighs heavily on this book and I appreciated the community reviewers on Goodreads who pointed out where North had her finger on the scale. For example, readers noted that all of the members of the gang seemed to be assigned female at birth, which means that transwomen are erased from this version of history. The only “safe” male character is a bisexual man who was castrated before he met Ada and the rest of the gang. The more I look back at the book, the more I wish North had had a lighter touch with her handling of gender and race (Ada has some issues with White Saviorhood) and let the characters be characters, instead of mouthpieces.