The Female Man
by Joanna Russ
Summary
Four women, versions of the same person split across parallel timelines, meet and clash across the length of the novel. Janet Evason comes from Whileaway, a peaceful, technologically advanced future nine hundred years on, where a plague killed every man centuries earlier and the surviving women built a stable, functioning all female society that no longer misses what it lost. Jeannine Dadier lives in a 1969 where the Great Depression never ended, anxious and underconfident, drifting toward a marriage she does not actually want because nothing around her seems to offer a better option. Joanna, closest to Russ's own nineteen seventies, works as an academic and struggles visibly against the era's constant demand that she prove herself twice over for half the recognition, eventually declaring herself, half in earnest, an honorary man simply to be heard at all. Jael, from a future where the sexes have split entirely into two warring nations, Womanland and Manland, arrives last and reveals that she has orchestrated the other three women meeting each other specifically to recruit support, offering Whileaway's advanced technology in exchange for joining her war outright. Janet refuses flatly, unwilling to see her peaceful world remade around Jael's violence, while Jeannine and Joanna respond with more ambivalence, neither fully endorsing nor fully rejecting what Jael is offering them. The novel does not resolve the disagreement between them; each woman returns to her own timeline changed by having glimpsed the others, and Russ closes by addressing her own book directly, wishing it well and hoping it survives long enough to become a curiosity rather than a warning anyone still needs.
The narration fractures constantly, switching narrators, tenses, and even direct address to the reader without warning, closer in method to essay and manifesto than to a conventional novel, and it can be genuinely disorienting on a first read; Russ intends the difficulty, using the book's own broken form to argue that no single woman's story can stand in for every woman's experience.
Historical Context & Significance
Russ wrote most of the novel around 1970, but Bantam did not publish it until February 1975. It was a finalist for the 1975 Nebula Award for Best Novel, losing to Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Its most significant honor arrived decades later rather than at publication: in 1996 the Tiptree Award jury named it one of three Retrospective James Tiptree Jr. Award winners, an award created in 1991 specifically to recognize science fiction exploring gender, reaching back to crown books published before the award itself existed. It later won the 2002 Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame Award as well.
Contemporary critics inside the genre recognized its ambition even where mainstream reviewers mostly overlooked it. Douglas Barbour called it a work of frightening power, and Elizabeth Lynn described it as stunning and screamingly funny in places despite its anger. It has since become one of the defining texts of feminist science fiction, cited repeatedly by later writers as a direct influence on how differently a novel about gender could be structured from the inside out.