Halfway through a perfectly civilised conversation on gender warfare, Maggie Gee looks down at the floor and starts to weep, then makes her excuses and leaves the room. "Oh dear," she says bleakly when she returns. "I suppose this will be mentioned in your article." It could hardly be otherwise. Gee's Zen-like calm had suddenly been shattered as she recalled the death of her headmaster father. As a girl, her feminism had been forged in the fire of her battles against his strict patriarchal authority.
When she won a place at Somerville College in 1966, she went up to Oxford on behalf of her "clever, adorable" mother, an uncertificated teacher who had never had the chance to go to university. "I was always identified in my writing as a feminist; all intelligent women were," says Gee, now 50. In 1981, with the publication of her first novel, Dying, In Other Words, she was named one of the original 20 Best of Young British Novelists, alongside Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, William Boyd and Rose Tremain. Gee, Amis once said, was the only female author of his generation he'd bother to read. In 1988, the story of the murdered nuclear campaigner Hilda Murrel, an elderly spinster and celebrated rose-grower, inspired Gee's fourth novel, Grace.
All provided fuel, surely, for a fire-breathing feminist. Yet Gee's reconciliation with her father and her fears for the future of live-alone thirtysomethings have made her re-evaluate feminist principles and write a prophetic novel about the big chill she sees springing up in the next century between the "increasingly separate" sexes. Her latest novel, The Ice People, has been chosen by Dillons and Books Etc as one of the must-read paperbacks in their summer promotions, with work by Beryl Bainbridge, Nick Hornby and Jay McInerney.
A first-wave feminist, Gee has surfed the sex wars in both her books and her life: she chose Virginia Woolf for her PhD thesis, showed sisterly solidarity at the Greenham Common peace camps and still has her original copy of Valerie Solanas's man-hating Scum (Society For Cutting Up Men) manifesto. "At the time, I thought it was new, exciting and refreshing," Gee admits, "but it should be possible to attack the way men function in society without attacking them as individuals. Feminism doesn't mean sexism, and boys and men are more constrained than us in terms of who they can be. A lot of women's anger comes from being scorned and pigeonholed, but we don't make our lives better by doing the same to men.
"Women," she adds, "do have a bit of a culture of complaint. I like women, I have good female friendships, and I find it easy to work with them - but I also like men. I like their wit, their bigness and their energy. And you can't love men if you don't see their vulnerability."
Gee is worried by the current trend among thirtysomething women towards "dismissing men and living on their own. They are separating sex and love, giving men up as partners and just having sex with them in the way men have traditionally done, like relieving an itch. If there were real fertility problems in the future, I can't see what would keep the sexes together. The point of sexual differentiation is procreation. Control over fertility is a central plank of feminism because it's about your own rights, but maybe women forgot to be part of society at the same time."
In the west, Gee points out, the male sperm count is low: she quotes management guru Peter Drucker, who in 1998 said that there will be no more Italians in 100 years if the current birth rate decline continues. All of which has provided a scientifically believable basis for Gee's seventh novel, her first foray into science fiction. The Ice People projects a disturbing vision of sexual apartheid in a western society plagued by fertility problems and run by a man-hating matriarchy - sisters who really are doing it for themselves. Spiritual descendants of Scum, they feed female hormones to little boys until the dwindling numbers of resentful, sidelined men begin to fight back.
"I do feel frustrated by the male dominance of my profession and some men - often the charming ones - really hate women," Gee says. "But gender hate stuff is like race hate, and I feel female sexism has been legitimised to some extent. Women are giving up on their relationships too quickly. Living with a man I love very much, I keep thinking that all the generalisations about men just aren't true."
Gee and her BBC arts producer husband Nick Rankin live in north-west London with their 12-year-old daughter Rosa. "Originally I didn't want to slot into a nuclear family like the one I'd grown up in, I wanted to find my own identity, and getting married was a huge change. But Nick is a man who is very comfortable with women. We tried lots of times to have a second child, but I miscarried. A lot of early feminists now in their 50s left kids out of the equation and I didn't start thinking about children till my late 30s. I didn't start trying for another two years, so I left it too late for a big family. Now I hear women in their 30s saying they still have plenty of time, but it's so much easier to give birth in your 20s."
Biology, it seems, is still destiny. But to Gee, the getting of feminist wisdom means a new meeting of minds between the sexes. As a parent herself, she feels she understands at last how her father was locked into the patriarchal role of provider. "I did love my dad and I realise now that he was very oppressed by having to do his job. If he hadn't had kids to support, he would have been able to be a brilliant photographer instead."
Gee is not without hope for the future. "Rosa has a much easier relationship with her father than I had with mine. And today's twentysomething women actually seem to want men around, so maybe things are changing. In fact," Gee concludes with a subtle smile, "I think most men and women are quite sensible and don't believe everything they read."
The Ice People is published by Richard Cohen Books
