The Female Man is a feminist science fiction novel by American writer Joanna Russ.
Russ was an ardent feminist and challenged sexist views during the 1970s with her novels, short stories, and nonfiction works.
At the end, all four women discover that they are actually four different versions of the same woman and are able to free themselves of the patriarchal conventions of their respective worlds.
The title of the novel comes from the character Joanna, who transforms into a "female man" in order to be respected and seen beyond her sex.
[2] Joanna's metaphorical transformation refers to her decision to seek equality by rejecting women's dependence on men and mirrors the journeys made by the other three protagonists.
When Janet begins to explain to the interviewer how women in Whileaway "copulate" she is abruptly cut off by a commercial break.
Acting as a guide, Joanna takes Janet to a party in her world to show her how women and men interact with each other.
After the two have sex for the first time, Janet recounts to Laura how she met and fell in love with her wife, Vittoria, back in Whileaway.
A small Whileawayan child follows Joanna and tells her a story about a bear trapped between two worlds as a metaphor for her life.
Jael explains that she works for the Bureau of Comparative Ethnology, an organization that concentrates on people's various counterparts in different parallel worlds.
At first, the male leader appears to be promoting equality, but Jael quickly realizes that he still believes in the inferiority of women.
Jael reveals herself as a ruthless assassin, kills the man, and shuttles all of the women back to her house.
Jeannine and Joanna agree to help Jael assimilate the women soldiers into their worlds, but Janet refuses, given the overall pacifism of Whileaway.
Jeannine Nancy Dadier is a twenty-nine year old librarian who lives in a world that never escaped the Great Depression.
At the end of the novel, Jeannine appears to have broken from the expectations of marriage and welcomes the social revolution against men.
The feminist movement has just begun, and Joanna is determined to refute her world's belief that women are inferior to men.
In order to cope, she repeatedly refers to herself as the “female man” to indicate her adoption of the male gender role and separate herself from being identified as just another woman.
[2] Janet Evason Belin comes from a futuristic world called Whileaway where all the men died of a sex-specific plague over 900 years ago.
Janet becomes romantically involved with Laura Wilding, the teenage daughter of the family she was staying with in Joanna's world.
Jael has silver claws that are revealed when she pulls back the skin and metal teeth, which she uses as her weapons.
Laura Rose, nickname Laur, is the daughter in the family that Janet stays with when she is visiting Joanna's world.
Frank, also referred to as X, is a married man who takes Jeannine on a few dates while she stays at her brother's house.
Devoid of will, and possibly of all higher brain functions, he is connected to Jael's computerised home and is controlled by her facial cues and verbal commands.
The constant switching in point of view represents the women's, and Russ's, resistance to the male dominated genre.
Whileaway forms an idealistic image of an organic environment where nature is preserved despite the radical development of technology.
The novel also mentions the Great Depression, which started in 1929 when the world's economy was plunged into a long and deep recession.