The Female Man

An early paperback edition (possibly the first edition)

The Female Man is a 1975 novel by Joanna Russ. It's a critical part of the feminist SF canon, and also a damn good book. One thread of the narrative takes place on Whileaway, a planet previously featured in the short story "When It Changed". The Female Man is one of the winners of the Retrospective Tiptree Award in 1996.

Discussion

No discussion of the 1970s wave of feminist utopias is complete without a mention ofThe Female Man (1975). This simultaneously hilarious and angry novel is based on the premise of alternate worlds. Its four protagonists share identical genes, but have developed into four very different women according to their environments. Jeannine, who lives in an economically depressed United States, is the most oppressed and unhappy character; the only life for a woman in her world is marriage, and she both longs for and dreads that destiny. Joanna (a fictionalized version of Russ) comes from a world familiar to the novel's readers -- America, 1969, with second-wave feminism on the move. Joanna has more choices than Jeannine, but she is still expected to orient herself around men and is constantly being told "women can't" or "women don't".... She longs to be something other than a woman and tries her hand at becoming a female man. Janet represents the ideal, a woman who grew up with no gender-based constraints on her life and thus developed her full human potential. She hails from the utopia Whileaway, a world in which all the men were killed off centuries ago in a plague (or, in a different version of the story, a war). Joanna wistfully calls Janet a woman "whom we don't believe in and whom we deride but who is in secret our savior from utter despair." Jael brings the other Js together in her world, a near future in which men and women wage a cold war. Jael's experience of being a woman is much like Joanna's, but her response is violence.

No summary can do justice to the complexity and energy of this novel. Whileaway is engagingly detailed in bits and pieces throughout the book; the first-person narrator switches from character to character with occasional intrusions by the author; Russ jumps from genre to genre (indeed, the label "utopia" is reductive); and there's good sex to be had, both lesbian and robotic.

Editions & Translations

• New York: Bantam Books, 1975.
• Beacon Press, 1986. ISBN 0-8070-6313-4.
• German / deutsch Planet der Frauen
• German / deutsch Eine Weile entfernt (1979) ISBN 3886199592

Influences, Impacts, Connections

• The name of the lesbian feminist journal Sinister Wisdom, founded in the 1970s, was taken from The Female Man.