The Female Man

Four women from alternate universes come together in this work of feminist speculative fiction.

Although The Female Man is billed as a "classic of feminist science fiction," I hesitate to call it science fiction. It's barely even fiction. More accurately, it is a feminist stream-of-consciousness rant that employs speculative what-ifs to imagine worlds both better and worse than our own, specifically the positions of women in those worlds.

Russ herself is one of the four women, the "female man" who tries and fails to make herself into a man in order to succeed in what is presumably our world, at least our world of the 1970s, when this was published. Russ's anger is quite palpable throughout, although she tempers it somewhat with snarky show more humor. Several times, I found myself wondering whether we hadn't moved past all this male-female behavior that Russ is criticizing, but truthfully, you only have to read a few Internet comments to see it alive and kicking in the 21st century. In that sense, Russ's book is still needed and we are not yet free.

Those readers who come to The Female Man expecting a more straightforward narrative are bound to feel stymied by the lack of plot and the jumping around, without explanation, from one world to the next. Besides our own world, there is Jeannine's world, where the Great Depression has never ended and women are primarily preoccupied with catching husbands, and there is Janet's utopian world of Whileaway, where there are no men at all. I was feeling fairly adrift in all this until about three-quarters of the way through the book, when we meet Jael, a woman warrior in a world where men and women live separately and spend all their time literally at war with one another. This is probably the most cohesive section of the book, where Jael explains more or less what's going on and the plot, such as it is.

Forget it, this book is not concerned with plot. It's concerned with women, with what we endure and how things can possibly be different. Unfortunately, Russ does not seem able to imagine a world where men and women can live together with women not being subject to oppression. I hope she's wrong about that. show less

I read this ages ago, but someone reminded me that Jael's world has what are basically trans women living in the "male" space and the book treats them hideously. Like. They're presented as clearly women, and treated as women inside the male-only space, including being subject to abuse for being women, they're literally called "feminine", but they're not "real women". As soon as the main character women see a "half-changed", they get angry and hate them. The "changed and half-changed" are presented as horribly as possible. It's fucking vile. Like. Trans women were not totally unknown when Russ wrote this book. But she talks about them with a hatred that the men don't receive. Being a "half-man" is worse than being a "real man" to her, I show more guess.

The rest of the book has its moments and some deeply moving parts and it's incredibly personal but also often incredibly confusing because of the weird structure. It's very stereotypically second-wave feminist. Some of the ideas are good but I can't rate a book highly which has such a "Transexual Empire" vision of trans women. show less

If I read this before, it was 40 years ago, so this was bracing. It’s metafiction—the author encountering other versions of herself or women like herself in different timelines. It’s more like scream of consciousness than stream of consciousness, as Russ explores all the conflicting demands of white womanhood. The way it uses the language of race would not be repeated today (I like the idea of “period-typical anti-racism”), but very little it said about gender was hard to comprehend today, and—as the book’s last sentences indicate—that means we are still not free.

This was very much a breakthrough book when it was first published in 1975.

First, it was written by a woman writer, using her real (and recognizably female) name; second there's nary a rocket ship in sight; third, it deals with feminism at its 70s-era angriest; and fourth, it tosses most narrative traditions right out the window.

Obviously, it's not everyone's cup of tea. Some of it is dated. Some of it remains insightful and bitterly funny. And some of it attempts to shock with its frank sexuality -- and in these days of just-about-anything-goes, that may be where it shows its age the most.

The story, such as it is, wanders between three characters (and an occasional ephemeral, unnamed fourth) -- Jeannine, whose Earth never emerged from show more the Great Depression but which also never underwent WWII; Joanna, whose world is very much like our own; and Janet, whose world is not only vastly different than ours, but is also several millennia ahead of "our" timeline. There's a slight nod to the notion of diverging realities, in which each action splits off an entirely new future and which therefore allows the story to sneak in under the edges of the science fiction tent -- a tent which had been considerably enlarged in the preceding decade.

There is a vague plotline of sorts that emerges almost at the end of the novel, without which the entire book would be but a thin veneer over a feminist polemic pointing out how repressed, exploited, and psychologically abused women were at the hands of those beastly males.

At this remove, the novel verges on becoming an historical oddity -- angry and literate but flawed by its over-reliance on style over substance. show less

An intense, messy, piece of speculative fiction that goes some interesting places but, I think, seldom succeeds and seems, at this point, a bit of a product of its time. Split into four female voices, including at least two that inhabit alternate realities and and one set in contemporary New York City, "The Female Man," the book seems less polyphonic than schizophrenic, as characters slide in and out of their settings and the text switches from fiction to polemic and then back again. The author's voice dominates the entire text, sometimes because Russ can't seem to differentiate her characters' internal monologues and sometimes because she doesn't hesitate to comment on her own text or, in many places, criticize her characters for their show more attitudes. At times optimistic and gentle and astonishingly cruel and reductive at others, it seems a book that born out of serious emotional and political turmoil. It reminded me a bit of Frantz Fannon's "The Wretched of the Earth," which, for all of its insight into the colonial mindset, also presents a bunch of rather indefensible moral conclusions. Of course, a forgiving reader could point out that it was written right in the middle of the Algerian War for Independence. In that same spirit, "The Female Man" probably could have only been written in feminist circles in 1974. But so much of it doesn't work now, and I suspect that many parts of it never really did.

The sections set Whileaway, an all-female future utopia are perhaps the ones that are most worth rescuing, if only because they demonstrate, once again, how much our fantasies can tell us about ourselves. At once futuristic and decidedly agrarian, these sections describe a society that is fluid and protean, where physical and societal structures are constantly being unmade and remade. It presents a charmingly optimistic take on the coming computer revolution, and -- very productively, I think -- attempts to describe how social relationships and personal qualities such as strength, aggression and resilience, might evolve in a world where our gender binaries no longer apply. I found myself wondering how much these sections of the book owed to situationism, whose critiques of planning and permanent structures had such influence on Paris '68 protests and, later, on punk rock In another section of the book, a teenage lesbian who's still struggling to accept her own sexuality attempts to navigate family life in the seventies, which may be of at least historical interest to readers. The other sections, which depict a world in which men are pitted against women in a bloody, long-term conflict and a portrait of a woman with pre-feminist ideals in contemporary New York have aged rather less well, particularly the latter. While it's certainly possible that many of the attitudes and social constraints that Jeannine, the protagonist that calls this setting home, are depicted realistically enough, the author somehow manages to condescend to her even more than the various men in her life do. This section of the book feels less like a story than a particularly brutal consciousness-raising session and is a particularly joyless read. "The Female Man" may have been a wake-up call for writers looking to create more explicitly political science fiction, but, forty years on, the book seems overwhelmed by its own contradictions and knocked too far out of balance by the very force of the emotions it contains. It's more recommendable as a fascinating document than as a novel. Not an easy or satisfying read. show less

The Female Man is a novel about feminism, identity, and a time-travelling assassin with metal teeth. All of these parts are equally important.

It's a howl of rage against decades of sexism, of "women should be happy in their place", of "give me a kiss/you frigid bitch!" Janet comes from Whileaway, a world where men died out centuries ago, which has evolved into a classic women's utopia. Whileawayans are busy, happy, peaceful, ecologically sound and sexually liberated. At worst, they're prone to soliphism and sudden bouts of interpersonal violence limited by a duels. Janet is an emissary, sent to a world where World War 2 never happened and the Great Depression trundles on, where she falls in with Jeannine, a librarian who is unhappily show more engaged and looking for a man to put her life to rights. They then encounter Joanna, from our 1970s, an accomplished professor of English and modern women who never meets the receding standards of male acceptance, and fumes with impotent rage. And finally, there's Jael, from a world defined by the Battle of Sexes, where men and women live in separated countries and wage a deadly war and covert trade for necessities. She's the one with the metal teeth, a killer who specializing in subverting male societies across the multiverse.

The writing is a kaleidoscope of post-modern structure, shifting points-of-view and narration at will, moving from the sweep of history to outpourings of emotion and sudden philosophical knocks. It is not an approachable book. Russ has a lot of anger, and a dark outlook, seeing humanity as two crippled co-species, the inner wounds of men extroverted into violence of women who lack effective means of resistance. Still, this is a powerful classic. show less

"Woman is the gateway to another world; Woman is the earth-mother; Woman is the eternal siren; Woman is purity; Woman is carnality; Woman has intuition; Woman is the life-force; Woman is selfless love.
'I am the gateway to another world," (said I, looking in the mirror) 'I am the earth-mother; I am the eternal siren; I am purity,' (Jeez, new pimples) 'I am carnality; I have intuition; I am the life-force; I am selfless love.' (Somehow it sounds different in the first person, doesn't it?)"

It's an experience, it's worth reading, many of the ideas of second wave feminism present are still relevant today. Having said that, it's not enjoyable. Some might say that it's challenging, I would suggest it's obfuscating. On purpose, sure, but this show more type of surrealism and purposeful obtuseness annoys me more than anything else. Good ideas are made better by a clear narrative structure in my opinion, but maybe I'm just blind to its genius.

"Does it count if you love men's bodies but hate men's minds? Does it count if you still love yourself?" show less