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Joanna Russ

The Female Man: 11 Paperback – 1 September 2018

by Joanna Russ (Author)

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Living in an altered past that never saw the end of the Great Depression, Jeannine, a librarian, is waiting to be married. Joanna lives in a different version of reality- she's a 1970s feminist trying to succeed in a man's world. Janet is from Whileaway, a utopian earth where only women exist. And Jael is a warrior with steel teeth and catlike retractable claws, from an earth with separate-and warring-female and male societies. When these four women meet, the results are startling, outrageous, and subversive.

ISBN-10

0807062995
ISBN-13

978-0807062999
Edition

1st
Publisher

BEACON PRESS
Publication date

1 September 2018
Language

English
Dimensions

13.69 x 1.47 x 20.35 cm
Print length

224 pages
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Product description

Review

As hard and mean and fine as Flannery O'Connor. . . . I wish that everyone would read Joanna Russ' books. -Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

Joanna Russ offers a gallery of some of the most interesting female protagonists in current fiction, women who are rarely victims and sometimes even victors, but always engaged sharply and perceptively with their fate. -Marge Piercy

A stunning book, a work to be read with great respect. It's also screamingly funny. -Elizabeth Lynn, San Francisco Review of Books

A work of frightening power, but it is also a work of great fictional subtlety. . . . It should appeal to all intelligent people who look for exciting ideation, crackling dialogue, provocative fictional games-playing in their reading. -Douglas Barbour, Toronto Star

About the Author

Nebula and Hugo Award winner Joanna Russ is the author of The Adventures of Alyx, Extra(Ordinary) People, and To Write Like a Woman, among many other books.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ BEACON PRESS; 1st edition (1 September 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0807062995
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0807062999
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.69 x 1.47 x 20.35 cm

Customer Reviews:
184 ratings

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DressageDreamer

I tried ... but I couldn’t

Reviewed in Australia on 15 December 2019

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Maybe if you were an adult in the 70s you might enjoy this word vomit, but I’m not that old and could not enjoy the random, unconnected and confused points of view / story lines. I’m sure it is a great work for some, but the radical feminism of the time is now just part of our belief systems, no longer shocking to point out that men rely upon controlling women.

Following the authors trains of thought (going in different directions), with vague (probably deep and meaningful) characters and jumping around was very unpleasant.

I love SF, I love feminism ... I could not read all of this book! (Only 3rd book in my life I’ve given up on!)

Reviewed in Australia on 14 August 2014

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A+

Reviewed in Australia on 2 November 2014

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Hard to read. Chops and changes all over the place. Haven't been able to finish it.

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J C E Hitchcock

The War of the Sexes

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 June 2019

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“The Female Man” is science fiction-cum-alternate history-cum-fantasy with a feminist slant. It follows the lives of four women (all with names beginning with “J”) from four different parallel worlds, two alternative versions of the present and two alternative versions of the future. Joanna (significantly named after the author) comes from our version of the Earth in 1969. Jeannine lives in an alternate 1969, in a world where the Second World War never happened because Adolf Hitler was assassinated in 1936. You may think that such a world would be far better than ours, but although Joanna Russ does not describe the politics of Jeannine’s world in any detail, it is clear that in many ways it is worse. The Great Depression has never ended and social attitudes, particularly towards women’s equality and relations between the sexes, are still very conservative.

Jael comes from the future, and from a society where relations between the sexes have broken down altogether. In her world the phrase “the battle of the sexes” is no mere metaphor; men and women have divided into two armed camps, in a state of continuous war with one another. Janet is a native of the planet Whileaway, and comes from another vision of the far future. The inhabitants of Whileaway do not need to worry about relations between the sexes, because there is only one sex on their world, a plague having killed off all the men several centuries earlier. The women, who survived the plague, have learned how to reproduce asexually, although they are not completely asexual as lesbian relationships are now the norm.

The novel’s main strength is Joanna Russ’s imagination and ability to conjure up visions of new worlds, especially in her descriptions of Whileaway. This society is not quite a utopia, but it is a lot closer to being one than any of the other three worlds featured, being more egalitarian, more peaceful and placing a greater emphasis on living in harmony with nature. Jael’s world is not so much a prediction of a possible future as a satire on the sexist (or “male chauvinist” to use the contemporary phrase) attitudes of the sixties and seventies.

The sexual politics of this novel, incidentally, are very much of their time. Russ takes a fairly negative attitude towards both heterosexuality and male homosexuality; the men of Jael’s world, deprived of female companionship by the state of war, form relationships with either transsexuals (“the changed”) or effeminate gay men (“the half-changed”). Janet, an adult in her thirties, enters into a sexual relationship with the seventeen-year-old Laura Rose, a girl from Joanna’s world, liberating herself from a Whileawayan taboo against cross-generational relationships. Russ may have been making the point that all societies, even semi-utopian ones, have their own sexual taboos which may seem irrational to outsiders, but forty-odd years on from 1975 when her novel was first published, a relationship like this one would seem more exploitative than liberating.

The novel’s main weakness is that the plot is very confusing. It is told using a multiple narrator technique, but it is never stated explicitly which of the four women is speaking. Sometimes it is easy to tell from the context, but at other times it is more difficult to identify the narrator or the world in which the action is currently taking place. “The Female Man” contains some interesting ideas, but Russ’s complex narrative structure really needed more careful planning in order to come off.

8 people found this helpful

Martin Jones

A difficult novel rather than an easy polemic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 December 2016

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I was reading the Female Man, getting towards the end. An episode of Friends happened to be on in the background . Chandler had finally proposed to Monica, and Monica was celebrating by standing on her balcony yelling to New York that she was going to get married. When some distant voice told her to shut up, she shouted in reply:

"Come here and say that. My fiancé will kick your ass."

I don't know if this is telling us anything, but it says to me that life since the publication of The Female Man hasn't changed much. The Female Man was 1960s feminist science fiction, a story in which a time travelling invention splits a woman called Joanna into four people, each inhabiting their own version of history. The theme uniting the stories of all these women is the difficulty of living with men, and the possibility of living without them.

I think I enjoyed The Female Man not because it told me how to put the world to rights, but because around the fervid feminist centre, the story had a touching and humorous ambiguity in describing people trying to find that elusive something. Of the four women in the story, I found Jeannine the most interesting. When she is not working at her mundane library job, she spends her time in a small flat with her cat Frosty dreaming daydreams straight out of a romance novel. There are no radical feminist ambitions here.

Jeannine has a crisis during a family holiday and tries to talk it through with one of her fellow versions of Joanna:

"Do you want to be an airline pilot? Is that it? And they won’t let you? Did you have a talent for mathematics, which they squelched? Did they refuse to let you be a truck driver? What is it?"

You get the feeling that airline pilot, mathematician or truck driver would not do it for Jeannine. Jeannine's family tells her that marriage will sort out her unhappiness. You could just as well say that flying aeroplanes or driving trucks, or fettling coefficients would do that. Marriage might help some people. Now that I think of it, marriage made Monica happy most of the time, except when Chandler temporarily lapsed back to smoking. People are different. They don't all fit into the same mould. In fact, as The Female Man repeatedly shows, people can have different sides of themselves struggling within them. Something that might help an individual today might not work tomorrow.

Different people find different answers, and the same people find different answers at different times. Perhaps a good society is not one without marriage or men, or truck driving or mathematics, but a society that allows people to find their answers. Alongside the feminist message I think there was this wider sense of exploration in The Female Man, which, for me, made it into a difficult novel rather than an easy polemic.

14 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

This is a feminist novel from the 70s

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 April 2022

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I didn't read this novel when it was first published, although I read others of Russ's books. She is not an author I especially liked but this novel gives an excellent picture of the position of women in the late 60s in the US. Having been such a young woman, though in the UK, I remember the casual sexism and overt sexism that existed, mainly to tell women they had never done anything (my father asked me to name any woman who had ever contributed to the arts or history!) and that they knew nothing. Most of the young women I knew were content with this until the upsurge of feminism in the 70s when we began (again) to demand an equal place in the world.
The Female Male is an interesting read, with a great many ideas that were totally new in the 70s for we had mostly forgotten that our grandmothers had fought for equality in the thirties, and that our great-great-great-grandmothers and back had also demanded a better deal for women. The novel not only throws light on the 70s feminist movement but has a great deal to say to us now, when women's hard fought for rights are again under threat of removal. Excellent, glad I found it - I actually found it while reading about the Vancouver Women's Library.

TheHairyWotsit

One to avoid

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 September 2021

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CW transphobia and underage sex

Leaves you with a nasty feeling. Contains content of transphobia and a detailed scene of an adult having sex with a minor.

One person found this helpful

little_miss_chatterbox

Four World Dystopian Fiction

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 June 2015

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I adore this novel It was on my set texts for Utopias and Dystopias for my degree in Sociology. It features four different characters, one named Joanna like the author and consists of parallel universes that co -exist drawn from the principle that every decision made opens another portal to another world. Interesting stuff and a fascinating read. I read it ten years ago, so I'm enjoying remembering it as I re-read.

2 people found this helpful

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