The Female Man was hardly the first feminist science fiction novel— my college professor Anne Mellor has argued, in an influential essay, that Mary Shelly's Frankenstein , published 150 years before Joanna Russ's book, should be read as a radical critique of gender roles. And many other sci-fi writers broke out of the stereotyped male and female character types in the years leading up to The Female Man .
Ursula K. Le Guin, eight years older than Russ, played a key role in the process, establishing gender roles and sexual preferences as a legitimate focus for probing science fiction works, but even Heinlein and Asimov could challenge prevailing conventions of masculine and feminine behavior in strange and surprising ways during the course of their future-tripping narratives. On the other extreme, a number of women genre writers actually played the role of real-life 'female men' —adopting pseudonyms that convinced most fans that they were guys. Author C.L. Moore met her husband, fellow sci-fi writer Henry Knutter, when he sent a fan letter to "Mr. Moore," only to discover, apparently to his subsequent delight, that he was a she. Surviving correspondence indicates that Andre Norton's publisher Houghton Mifflin had no clue that she was actually a woman (born as Alice Mary Norton). Even more secretive, Alice Bradley Sheldon did such a good job of hiding her identity behind the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. (she took the last name from a brand of marmalade) that virtually no one in the science fiction community was aware that she wasn't a man until she was in her 60s.
Despite these precedents, Russ's book stands out as a milestone event in the history of science fiction. The boldness and bravado of the dialectic in her book—more than half of this novel is devoted to ideology and cultural critique—made this an unusual work, even during an age in which sci-fi authors increasingly addressed social and political topics in their stories. And when plot and character development do move to the forefront of The Female Man , they clearly serve to advance an agenda. Russ certainly wants to entertain her readers, but she is even more committed to persuading them, and that preference is felt on almost every page of The Female Man .
Russ is just as iconoclastic in structuring her narrative as in advancing her arguments. The Female Man tosses around protagonists and settings as if they were hot dice in all-night craps game, leaving behind a series of unresolved complications and stranded characters in the process. But what seems, at first glance, blatant disorder in the plot eventually morphs into the literary equivalent of theme-and-variations. The individual stories that constitute The Female Man exist in separate time-space continuums, but they bear a family resemblance to each other, as do the various main characters.
Let’s call them the 4 J’s . Jeanine lives in a world much like our own, except for quirky differences in fashion and culture. She is a librarian who wants to get married, but is depressed and exasperated at the potential husbands available to her. Janet is a visitor from a future alternate universe known as Whileaway, where all men died long ago and women created a nomadic pastoral society. The assassin Jael comes from a different alternate future, and can also travel through time; but watch out for this visitor from another world—her home society takes the concept of the 'war between the sexes' seriously, very seriously. Not only do Manland and Womanland exist as separate nations, but the ladies are hatching a plan to kill off the fellows. And then, presiding over them all—or at least trying to run the show—is our last J, and the most powerful of them all. Joanna, the author herself, or her fictional alter ego, inserts herself into the various subplots and dialogues, full of motherly advice that the other J's frequently ignore.
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have an ungrateful character!
A few other women have prominent secondary roles in this book. We meet Laura, from the same time-space continuum as Joanna— which may very well be the actual United States, circa 1970—and follow her budding romance with Janet. We get a brief glimpse of Janet's Whileaway wife Vittoria. And, you ask, what about the men? Well, plenty of them show up for cameo appearances, but they are a sadass group of guys. They are needy and whiny, phoney and bossy, egotistical and domineering. You will hardly care that many don't even get assigned a name, and won't shed a tear when a few even get assaulted or murdered. In the world of The Female Man , this is their comeuppance. (It's no coincidence that this novel came out around the same time that Charles Bronson's Death Wish films were drawing packed houses at movie theaters—they both, in their different ways, appeal to the latent desire among the victimized and oppressed for do-it-yourself vengeance.)
None of the men stay around for more than a few pages, but before they disappear they say stuff like this: "You want it. You want to be mastered….you're waiting for me, waiting for a man, waiting for me to stick it in, waiting for me, me, me." This bloke gets eviscerated by Jael, and bleeds to death on the next page—but it would have been better for all parties, and especially the reader, if it happened even sooner.
Russ is much better at showing complexity and depth in her female characters. The four J's may all be chips off the same block, but they still bicker among themselves and challenge each other’s preconceived notions. I'm happy to report that, at the close of the novel, they overcome their differences (as well as the boundaries between their various places in the space-time continuum) and gather together at a restaurant for a Thanksgiving dinner. The food is mediocre, but no one gets murdered here, and no man shows up with a lame pickup line. Instead, the protagonists serve up the trademarks ingredients of Russ’s novel, namely pointed dialogue, confession and assertive social commentary.
The rest of us can join in that process. Indeed, a lot of the science in this sci-fi book is expendable, and far less passionate than the polemic. Before I read this book, I assumed that The Female Man would focus on genetic and biological technology—and we do get a tiny dose of that in these pages. But when author (and character) Joanna Russ gets into her groove, she makes clear that the most radical dissection of gender and sex is, always and everywhere, conceptual and behavioral. That's a powerful idea, and one that—fortunately for us!—doesn't require a time machine or visitor from the future for rumination and response.
Ted Gioia writes on literature, music and popular culture. His next book, Love Songs: The Hidden History is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.