The Female Man »

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.

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.

Gale Research

The Female Man is perhaps the novel in which Russ's feminist ideas are most completely expressed. The book's four heroines--each from a different time and place--represent different possibilities for women in society. "Each of these fictional realities," writes Barbara Garland in theDictionary of Literary Biography, "makes a statement about the self versus society and about male versus female: and each has a distinctive style." In their book Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision, Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin find that in The Female Man, Russ "has used the visionary potential of science fiction to convey the contrast between life as it is presently lived by many women and life as it might be. Among other things, Russ has demonstrated the unique potential of science fiction for embodying radically different life styles, which can hardly be conveyed in fiction bound by the customs of present literature."