The Female Man by Joanna Russ

First published: 1975

Type of plot: Science fiction

Time of work: 1969 and the future

Locale: Several versions of Earth during different centuries

Principal Characters:

• Joanna, a character who is judging events often from the perspective of twentieth century society
• Jeannine Dadier, Joanna as she might be in a culture devoted to male superiority
• Janet Evason, Joanna as she might be in a future world without men
• Alice-Jael Reasoner, Joanna as she might be on an Earth far in the future, in which the war of the sexes is no longer metaphoric

The Novel

Two of the staple plots of science fiction are that of time travel and that of alternate universes. Traveling in time—analogous to traveling in space—has become such a common peg from which to hang a story that it hardly requires explanation, but the idea of an alternate universe is not so familiar. In a story of alternate universes, and in The Female Man, in particular, the author supposes some different outcome of a historical event: One might imagine, for example, an Earth on which Adolf Hitler died in the 1930’s, one whose history would therefore be much different from that of twentieth century man. Such stories would seem to embrace a “Great Man” theory of history: Hitler dies, and therefore World War II never occurs, and therefore the Great Depression endures into the 1960’s, and therefore. . . . Authors of alternate-universe stories fill the universe with a plentitude of possible worlds, because every action, no matter how minor, produces another continuum of possibility. One might suppose two universes, for example, identical in every respect, except that in one an individual wore brown shoes on a given date and in the other the same individual wore black shoes on that day.

Such prodigality of creation, however, is not often used. The Female Man deals only with a few universes—four, in fact—and with a character who is essentially the same person molded four ways by four different societies.

The first one the reader meets, Janet Evason, comes from a planet called Whileaway, a planet that is in fact Earth far in the future but in an alternate history. Several centuries in the past on Whileaway, the reader is told, a plague killed every man in the world. Whileaway has become a planet of women using science to reproduce; it is both like and unlike the world known to modern humankind. Although the planet has been called a feminist Utopia, there are things about Whileaway that the reader will surely dislike; indeed, the inhabitants themselves dislike some of the things about their world. The scientists of that world devise a means of sending Janet as an ambassador to the alternate Earth described above in which World War II never occurred. This is an Earth more like the reader’s but one in which every instance of sexual chauvinism is magnified and, in some cases, institutionalized.

Here Janet meets Jeannine Dadier, a thirtyish librarian in New York City, an unmarried woman terrified at the thought of becoming a spinster. Jeannine is not alone in her opinions, however, because every woman in her society, it seems, measures her life by how well she fulfills a relationship with a man.

At first the story seems to be a contrast between Janet and Jeannine, but very soon the reader becomes aware of a third personality hovering over the two. This, the reader finds out later, is Joanna, a character who describes herself in her youth as an unhappy Jeannine but who now yearns to be like Janet, a character who is writing The Female Man.

These three characters are assembled by a third, Alice-Jael Reasoner, a warrior from a far-future Earth but from Whileaway’s past. Jael is a leader in her world’s literal war between men and women. At the end of the novel, Jael informs Janet that it was no plague that killed the men on Whileaway—it was the success of her time’s war, a war that she says gave a thousand years of peace and happiness to Whileaway.

The Characters

The Female Man has little plot: What action occurs flows directly from the four main characters, who perhaps illustrate different facets of the same personality. Again, as suggested above, they may be considered the same “person,” the same bundle of genetic potential, shaped by four radically different environments.

Jeannine lives in a world in which sexual roles are a parody of American ones, a world in which boys and girls graduating from high school are given blue and pink books, respectively, entitled What to Do in Every Situation. The sexual relations recommended therein sound like early Playboy magazine. Janet comes from a world where mothers receive a five-year sabbatical to rear their daughters, after which the children are sent off to communal schools and taught to be independent, capable, outgoing, and happy. In that world, women learn how to do every job there is to be done by the time they are twenty-two. There is no war, no pollution, no class strife, no poverty.

Joanna hovers between the two, comparing a childhood that was unhappy because of sexual stereotyping to Jeannine’s existence, looking with envy at Janet’s freedom from domination and general self-confidence, and, at the end, deciding that she would like best of all to be like Jael: Jael the powerful, Jael the dangerous, Jael the female Genghis Khan.

Critical Context

The Female Man, set in 1969, seems very much a feminist novel of that decade. Pigeonholing a work is often equivalent to dismissing it, yet many of the details of the book will inevitably seem dated to later readers. That decade made symbolic use of the most unlikely material: brassieres as the sign of male oppression, for example. When characters in The Female Man complain how uncomfortable their bras are, a whole decade comes to one’s mind, but only one decade. Details such as the statement that women in New York State can now get legal abortions sound like voices from the past in a present when the country is divided over a million abortions performed a year.

The novel is very much an orchestration of a single theme. Those readers whose central interest was precisely that theme found it compelling. How very favorable its reception was can be gauged from several facts. First, an authoritative guide to modern American fiction listed only three science-fiction writers in its hundreds of pages: Robert A. Heinlein was one of them; under feminist authors were included both the prolific and best-selling Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ. Second (and perhaps a more general indication of importance), between 1978 and 1985, almost a dozen articles on Russ’s fiction appeared in scholarly journals; in addition, no complete article on feminism in science fiction fails to mention The Female Man.

Even critical success can have its ironic side. Joanna Russ has written other works: Picnic on Paradise (1968), And Chaos Died (1970), Alyx (1976), We Who Are About To . . . (1977), The Two of Them (1978), and numerous short stories. And Chaos Died is a novel in which a brutal and repressive Earth society is reformed by contact with an alien planet whose inhabitants have learned to live in harmony. The novel contains one of the most innovative uses of telepathy as a theme since 1950. And Chaos Died, however, does not deal directly and overtly with feminism and has therefore been largely ignored. Only The Female Man and, to a lesser extent, We Who Are About To . . . have enjoyed critical attention.

To a certain extent, Russ has contributed to the view of her work in an exclusively feminist framework. A full understanding of her writing should take into account her own criticism, most of which has concentrated on the position of women in science fiction.

Bibliography

Bonner, Frances. “From The Female Man to the Virtual Girl: Whatever Happened to Feminist SF?” Hecate 22 (May, 1996): 104-119. Compares the feminist science fiction of The Female Man to more recent science fiction by women. Bonner notes that The Female Man made a stronger political statement and was less conventional than recent science fiction by women.

Delany, Samuel R. “Orders of Chaos: The Science Fiction of Joanna Russ.” In Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Jane B. Weedman. Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1985. Delany discusses Russ’s writing style generally, describing it as rather a critical embarrassment because it is more complex and more directly political than other science fiction. He also places her writing in the context of other science-fiction writers.

DuPlessis, Rachel B. “The Feminist Apologues of Lessing, Piercy, and Russ.” Frontiers 4 (Spring, 1979): 1-8. Blau considers The Female Man as a “teaching story” or apologue. She compares the novel with works by Doris Lessing and Marge Piercy.

Gardiner, Judith K. “Empathic Ways of Reading: Narcissism, Cultural Politics, and Russ’s Female Man. Feminist Studies 20 (Spring, 1994): 87-111. Discusses the role of emotions in reader’s responses to Russ’s novel.

Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986. Includes a chapter-length discussion on The Female Man.

Perry, Donna Marie, ed. Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Includes an interview with Joanna Russ.

Rosinsky, Natalie M. “A Female Man? The Medusan’ Humor of Joanna Russ.” Extrapolation 23 (Spring, 1982): 31-36.

Russ, Joanna. “Recent Feminist Utopias.” In Future Females: A Critical Anthology, edited by Marleen S. Barr. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981. Russ discusses feminist utopias by Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Sally Gearhart, and Alice Sheldon (under the pseudonyms Raccoona Sheldon and James Tiptree, Jr.), as well as The Female Man. She compares the treatment of utopias by all these authors and finds common elements in the societies described, for example communal or quasi-tribal social structures.

Russ, Joanna. To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. An illuminating look at Russ’s views on writing, science fiction, and feminism.

Schuyler, William M., Jr. “Sexes, Genders, and Discrimination.” In Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, edited by Donald Palumbo. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Schuyler focuses his analysis of The Female Man on a sex scene that takes place between Jael and a male robot and on Jael’s killing of the Manlander boss. He concludes that since Jael’s sexual relations are completely impersonal, the other women cannot trust her; she will only treat other human beings as object (as she treats the robot, Davy). He describes her killing of the Manland boss as a failure to control herself when a man makes a pass. Schuyler’s reading seems to be taken completely out of the context of the rest of the novel, but it is interesting as an example of the kind of criticism that Russ anticipates as a reaction to the novel (which she describes in her address to the book in its final pages).

Shinn, Thelma J. “Worlds of Words and Swords: Suzette Haden-Elgin and Joanna Russ at Work.” In Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Jane B. Weedman. Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1985. Shinn compares women warriors in the works of the two authors and the relationship of those warriors to communities of women.

Spector, Judith. “The Functions of Sexuality in the Science Fiction of Russ, Piercy, and LeGuin.” In Erotic Universe: Sexuality and Fantastic Literature, edited by Donald Palumbo. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986. Spector reads the same scenes as Schuyler in the same volume (above) but points out that Jael’s response to the Manlander boss is hostile because his sexual overtures are hostile. She also notes that Jael’s treatment of Davy as a sex object must be thought of differently than the treatment of women as sex objects because Davy is an object (a robot), not a human being.