The Female Man

INTRODUCTION

SF writers have been fascinated by the ‘many worlds’ or ‘multiverse’ concept since it first emerged as a marginally respectable scientific idea—usually credited to a graduate student, Hugh Everett III, 1957. Parallel universes allow for time travel without offences against causality. Parallel universes allow SF writers to play dress-up, and still claim they are not writing fantasy. And that’s not all they can do:

Arguably, every trivial decision we make creates a different self, with a different present and a different past. But not all decisions are trivial. In The Female Man (1975) Joanna Russ—already adept at mixing a keen appreciation of genre with a sharp grasp of the social politics of her times—combines a ‘many worlds’ science fiction plot with the phenomenon known in radical politics as raised consciousness. When it dawns on you that some classes and races are exploited; or that prejudice and corruption are rife in your society, all your memories change colour. All your hopes for the future vanish and are replaced: it’s as if you’re a new person, in a strange yet familiar new world. Three women, one from the far future, two from variants of the USA in 1969, meet in what seems a freak accident, a brief fusion of the ‘braided possibilities’. Janet, from far-off Utopian Whileaway; Jeannine, from a 1969 where the Great Depression never ended (and economic growth never generated Women’s Liberation); and ‘Joanna’, who is Joanna Russ herself, are independent characters in the plot. They are also the same person, the modern Everywoman, USA, at different stages of her life. Partly this story is a dizzying SF mind game; partly it’s a timeless road-map of the feminist route to self-realization. Partly it’s a very funny book about sexual mores in the New York of the ‘swinging sixties’—and by no means all of the barbed humour is directed against the men.

Despite Jeannine’s trapped and lack-lustre femininity; despite Joanna’s outbursts of grief and rage, as she struggles to escape from domestic helplessness by ‘becoming a Man’—and then struggles to ‘become a Woman’, because she hates pretending to be one of the boys—it seems (for a while) as if nobody’s going to get hurt. Janet, the down-to-earth police officer from the future, energizes and nourishes both Jeannine and Joanna; though she’s by no means morally irreproachable. She gets into fights at parties (Whileawayans have a swashbuckling penchant for violence); she falls in love—to Jeannine’s utter horror—with a delicious teenage girl, the ‘cinnamon and apples’ sweetheart of small-town America. The Utopian strand that weaves through the narrative is magically evocative, often unsettling; and rich in ideas for a future desired by as many male as female SF readers: where high tech, instead of paving the planet, brilliantly supports a ‘Green’ and vibrant social economy.

Then the fourth variant makes herself known—the shadow-self, the dark side. Jael Reasoner is an assassin, from a future where the battle of the sexes has created two armed camps, each set on destroying the other, and devastating the planet in the attempt. Manland constructs its own women, from weakling men. Jael, to satisfy her old-fashioned sexual appetites, keeps a pretty, mindless pet. She is the one, she reveals, who brought them together: the fusion of the braids was no accident. She offers Joanna and Jeannine a choice, and brings Janet a horrifying revelation. How will the ‘Js’ respond? Can wonderful Janet choose not to exist? Which of the two ‘former’ selves, Jeannine, the original doormat, or Joanna the angry feminist, will refuse the path of violence?

Joanna Russ was the most controversial of the outstanding US female writers of the seventies, science fiction’s feminist decade. In her sharp and witty action-fantasy stories (collected in The Adventures of Alyx, 1976); in the arresting strangeness of And Chaos Died (1970); and in a trio of significant novels (The Female Man, 1975, We Who Are About To, 1977, The Two of Them, 1978), she proved the scope of her genre talent. But she was made painfully aware of her position as a dazzling, unacceptable outsider. Her work, increasingly, became an interrogation of science fiction, and a clinical study of the predicament of its female readers and writers. Yet in a genre where ‘fandom’ had made the barrier between writers and readers uniquely porous, long before the internet, it was Russ who spoke most clearly for a generation and a community of women (‘Feminist SF’ itself was, arguably, a fan invention)—escapologists, god-game builders, dreamers and daredevils—who believed they had as much right as the boys to play with SF’s toys, and to imagine their own, female, independent futures.

‘Whileaway’, the wild frontier Utopia at the centre of the The Female Man, made its first appearance in the Nebula award-winning short story ‘When It Changed’ (Again Dangerous Visions, ed Harlan Ellison, 1972). Russ described this high-tech, hardworking, under-populated society—on a colonized planet where only the women survived a long-ago plague, and where the arrival of male ‘rescuers’ is a catastrophe—as her response to Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. The hermaphrodites of Gethen intrigued the SF public, but a pregnant king did not address Russ’ hunger for a world where female human beings could be the measure of humanity. In the same afterword she noted that ‘the premise of the story needs either a book or silence’. In 1975, Whileaway returned: no longer a fragment of an impossible dream, but an ingeniously crafted, strictly even-handed, forensic examination of gender, Utopia and the divided self.

Gwyneth Jones