Joanna Russ, The Female Man, 1975

Some may have been thinking this inclusion on the SF Masterworks list is well overdue, and they’re probably right. Russ plays a part in her own novel (her most famous) about alternates of herself that may exist out there in the multiverse, with the broad differences between them being defined along the lines of their degrees of emancipation. By including herself in her novel even though she largely takes a back seat, this seemed to be the most honest way Russ could explore the subject of women’s unequal role in society by comparing four possible universes, one of which is her own. The most prominent is of course the Joanna Russ that is Janet Evason, inhabitant of a far future Earth renamed Whileaway in which men died out in a selective plague 800 years previously; then there’s the Russ that is Jeannine Dadier from an alternate present in which WW2 never happened and American women are universally the stay-at-home types, and the fourth Russ is Jael Reasoner, combatant in a protracted and violent future war against men, who brought the four of them together for purposes she will eventually reveal. Russ does not fire off her flaming arrows at only the men, as her female characters often come in for an equally tough critique. She wrote the story scattergun-fashion with the four different points of view interchanging frequently and denying the reader any chance of experiencing a straightforward narrative, however the novel still hangs together nicely and the unusual composition is a major part of the book’s originality.

On publication The Female Man may have been a wake-up call for the men at the time who were prepared to take it on, as it is undeniably didactic. As a sequel to her Nebula Award-winning short story ‘When It Changed’, it’s probably fair to say Russ’s prickly and often very humourous rants are a little less reflective, directly, of the experience of Western women today. However much things have improved and however much the battleground may have shifted, the objective hasn’t: the glass ceiling is still there and the ongoing battles for equality of opportunity in the West are still no less important than those that went before. The Female Man can still put fire in the belly of feminists everywhere, including myself, and while it’s probably a layer or two beneath the current strata of feminist experience and thinking (that evolution could certainly be commented on better by others, not myself) it was certainly pivotal to some of the feminist literature that came after. However much this was a product of its day, its age is beginning to show a little and that’s actually something to celebrate, as its impassioned and very likeable ending itself makes clear. Certainly a masterwork, and still an invigorating book which I’m glad to have finally read.  PY

MORE ON JOANNA RUSS : WIKIPEDIA

Gloria Lisé, Departing at Dawn, 2005

There are, fortunately, novels other than Nathan Englander’s excellent The Ministry of Special Cases that deal with Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ and that are available in English. Published by the Feminist Press in 2009, Departing at Dawn is clearly seen as a definitive novel of 1976-1983 Argentina, because by decree it’s now permanently available to read at every library throughout the country. It tells the story of Berta, who has seen her partner, a trade union organiser, thrown from a window to his death by the government’s goon squads, and she flees Tucumán to stay with remote relatives in the Argentine interior, escaping the junta’s relentless pursuit and disappearance of anyone even vaguely associated with Leftist politics. Curiously, given the subject matter, this is a novel written in delicate literary watercolours as opposed to oils, and I was expecting a much more immediate and punchier read. It does also have some strongly written passages such as the long and engaging description of the bleak backwater town of Olpa where Berta ends up, but the tone was set at the beginning with the first half of the novel mostly given over to delicate character studies using Berta’s family history as source. I did wonder if or when the novel was ever going to pick up the pace a little, which it thankfully did towards the last quarter of the book, but even that kept the political strife off-screen and instead used it as the background context for Berta’s eventual exile. Quietly powerful, and indeed a very worthwhile read.  PY

MORE ON GLORIA LISÉ : PUBLISHER'S PROFILE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!, 1966

A word about Ondrea Barbe’s great photograph that appears on the cover of this recent Penguin Modern Classics edition: it’s the perfect accompaniment to the alliterative nature of both Harrison’s name and the book’s title, and at the same time reflects the oppressive heat and claustrophobia contained in the book itself. Make Room! Make Room! occupies the other end of Harrison’s spectrum in relation to his satire and humour: a murder in an overcrowded and riot-prone New York in 1999 forms the backdrop to some good characterisation and a serious overpopulation message. What you get are characters to care about, a decent police-procedural plot and a strong dose of feminism; what you don’t get is the grafted-on horror aspect of the movie adaptation Soylent Green. This sits comfortably alongside some eco-conscious literature of the 1960s, published just a few years after the environmental preachiness of Silent Spring and at a time when overpopulation was not the major global concern it is today. Also, interestingly, it appeared seven years before Roe vs. Wade, and puts up a strong defence of the need for access to birth control which some at the time specifically wished to remove. Still a very good book indeed that always deserves to remain in print.  PY

MORE ON HARRY HARRISON : AUTHOR'S WEBSITE  |  WIKIPEDIA

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892

A psychological horror story that owes much in style to Edgar Allan Poe. The narrator, whose name may or may not be Jane, keeps a journal while she herself is kept in a room with disturbing yellow wallpaper, all as a way of curing her post-natal depression. During her descent into madness her husband only sees the situation without seeing the struggle of the woman inside; this aspect of the story I still find unnatural as, being a doctor himself, he would surely notice something unsettling going on with his wife. Gilman’s own experiences and the disastrous ‘resting cure’ she was proscribed by the renowned doctor S. Weir Mitchell for her own depression are the origins of the book; Mitchell, named in person in the story, took Gilman’s criticism seriously and to his credit abandoned this form of treatment for depression. The medical and Victorian family traditions that inform the story are the real mental confinements of the tale with the wallpaper a clever if slightly vague metaphor. Not a story I’ve ever actually enjoyed, but there are elements here that can apply as much to men as women when it comes to medical treatment that somehow ignores the needs of the patient.  PY

MORE ON CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN :  WIKIPEDIA

Nuruddin Farah, From a Crooked Rib, 1970

Post-colonial Africa saw many political commentators and writers urging a return to traditional African values that were suppressed by European colonialism, but the Somalian emigré Farah was not one of them: instead in his debut novel he set out to expose the mysoginy and hypocrisy of the Somalian cultural attitudes towards women: they are nothing more than property, and do we really want a return to this? Beneath the simplicity of the story this is a spare and angry book, convincingly told from the viewpoint of a young and powerless Somali nomad, married off to an old man and desperate to escape her life of poverty, oppression and servitude in a patriarchal culture. The book says plenty about the everyday frustrations of Somali women but Farah doesn’t always put his points across with crystal clarity: too many passages seem unnecessarily lengthened and he exhibits a tendency towards repetition. Even so, this is quietly memorable despite its occasional weaknesses.  PY

MORE ON NURUDDIN FARAH : WIKIPEDIA