oanna Russ's classic 1970s SF novel features four women from alternative Earths that each have very different relations between the sexes. Joanna is from modern Earth and is striving to find a feeling of personal self-worth that is difficult to attain in a male-dominated society. She provides stream-of-consciousness commentary on her society, its social mores and sexual stereotypes. Jeannine is a meek librarian from an alternative Earth with even more restrictive gender roles. She yearns for more than her bleak second-class existence and indifferent male-chauvinist boyfriend. Janet is from an alternative future Earth, called Whileaway, where all of the men died centuries ago and an all-female society has evolved, without wars or poverty. She finds men both arrogant and repelling. Jael is from an alternative future world where men and women live in separate armed camps. She is an assassin who enjoys killing men and who lives in isolated luxury with a male sex slave.
Janet travels interdimensionally to our Earth where she meets Joanna and Jeannine. Janet is on Earth to study men, since there are none on her world. On Earth, Janet learns from Joanna and Jeannine about the peculiar relationships between men and women, and the limited roles and expectations of women, while also teaching Joanna and Jeannine about the relatively peaceful society on Whileaway. Jael comes to Earth to visit Janet, since it is impossible for her to travel directly to Whileaway. She takes Janet, Joanna and Jeannine on a trip to her brutal world of separate male and female societies, hoping to impress Janet into allowing her to use Whileaway as a training camp for female soldiers. Janet is not impressed with Jael's violent world, but Jeannine agrees to assist in a war to exterminate men.
Radical in both style and substance
Joanna Russ's The Female Man was one of the most controversial novels of the 1970s, both in terms of its New Wave style and its radical feminist views. The novel was actually completed in 1971 and took nearly four years to find a publisher. It is best remembered for its further depiction of Janet and Whileaway, introduced in Russ's Nebula Award-winning short story, "When It Changed," and for its extended polemic on contemporary sexual roles and stereotypes.
The style of the book is relentlessly New Wave: The majority of the novel consists of stream-of-consciousness diatribes, either by the characters or the omniscient narrator (who at times is clearly the author herself), interspersed with sections of narrative vignettes from the characters' present or past. The plot is almost nonexistent. Where most SF novels are built on idea and plot, The Female Man is built almost solely on idea and character. This may prove difficult reading for many contemporary SF readers used to simpler narrative styles.
The radical feminist anger that permeates the novel is another of its distinguishing features. Things have progressed a lot in society since the early '70s, and younger readers might find Russ's characterization of male attitudes specious, the male characters mere straw-men created to be easily denigrated. The male attitudes towards women that Russ depicts were far too real, however, and occasionally persist today, especially in other countries.
The novel contains many powerful vignettes, including two memorable, and controversial, sex scenes--a touching one between Janet and a teenage Earth female whose family considers her desire to be a writer unfeminine, and the other between Jael and her male slave.
The four female archetypes Russ creates are also powerfully delineated, and together Joanna, Jeannine, Janet and Jael remain four of the most memorable characters from 1970s SF.
