Janet Evason lives on Whileaway, an all-female human colony planet whose inhabitants produce offspring by combining ova because all their males died in a plague 30 generations earlier.
[2] In the afterword, Russ states that "When It Changed" was written to challenge ideas in science fiction that had not, at the time of writing, been addressed.
She wrote: I have read SF stories about manless worlds before; they are either full of busty girls in wisps of chiffon who slink about writhing with lust (Keith Laumer wrote a charming, funny one called "The War with the Yukks"), or the women have set up a static, beelike society in imitation of some presumed primitive matriarchy.
Why women who have been alone for generations should "instinctively" turn their sexual desires toward persons of whom they have only intellectual knowledge, or why female people are presumed to have an innate preference for Byzantine rigidity, I don't know.
The story's conclusion alludes to the ending of such an ideal when masculine/heterosexual forces threaten the character's way of life, and in turn, queer as a concept.