What seems to differentiate this literature from earlier apocalyptic tales is the increasing complicity of women in a gendered apocalypse.
Apocalypse becomes almost feminized.
Perhaps epitomizing this gendered and internal source of apocalypse most succinctly, Doris Lessing ultimately moves the source of destruction into the womb with Harriet's conception of the fifth child. Implicitly, these shifts may suggest that feminist and poststructuralist interrogations, aimed at dissolving male boundaries and certainties, simultaneously prompt feminized versions of apocalypse.