In an introduction to her 1976 novel The Left Hand of DarknessUrsula K. Le Guin wrote that “science fiction is not predictive, it is descriptive.” In other words, no matter how many futuristic technologies, alternate dimensions, or alien races are introduced in a science fiction story, it ultimately springs from and relates to the reality in which it is written. Le Guin’s work is a prime example of how speculative fiction by women riding the second wave of feminism gave writers a powerful tool to describe and combat a sexist world. The same is true of the work of Joanna Russ, whose novel The feminine man is still in print almost 50 years after its publication and next to The Left Hand of Darknessis considered a fundamental text of feminist science fiction.
But a genre that rejects the limitations imposed by reality can only represent reality to a certain extent. Although Russ, who died in 2011, remains known for science fiction, she also published works of fantasy, drama and criticism. She also wrote a single realist novel. On strike against Godfirst published in 1980 and recently reissued, Russ directly examined and described sexism and homophobia as they existed in her milieu—forces that are also portrayed elsewhere in her novels through the distorted lens of metaphor.
On strike The title comes from the words of a judge who reprimanded a woman arrested for participating in the New York City workers’ strike of 1909, declaring: “You are striking against God and against nature, whose law says that man shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. You are striking against God!”
Russ may well have sensed that she too was striking against “God and Nature” when she wrote to poet Marilyn Hacker in October 1973: “I have pretty much come to the conclusion that heterosexuality is the worst mistake I could possibly make in the rest of my life.” Only a few months later, the American Psychiatric Association downgraded homosexuality to a mental illness; the fight for gay civil rights was just beginning to gain national attention, and Russ herself, in her mid-30s, was still coming to terms with her own homosexuality.
On strike is essentially a coming-out story, told by Esther, a divorced English professor who falls in love with and has an affair with her friend Jean. Reading that synopsis, you might think the novel is contemporary, one of a growing number of books by LGBTQ authors being published today. But for its time, the book was extraordinarily radical; it’s openly queer, with explicit (and wonderfully awkward) sex scenes, and its feminist politics are impossible to miss or misunderstand.
Soon after its first publication in a small feminist publishing house, On strike went out of print, was reprinted only briefly in 1985 and 1987, and then disappeared again. It has been reprinted several times in recent years, including a new critical edition that includes commentary from other authors as well as essays by Russ. Alec Pollak, the editor of the new edition, notes in her introduction that Russ “attempted… to curate experiences and simulate emotions that changed readers’ feelings about themselves and their relationship to the world around them.”
In her science fiction, Russ explored nonexistent worlds that nevertheless reflected the rigid gender expectations, sexist social norms, and impossible double standards that she and her primarily female audience faced. In a 1974 letter to fellow science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, she asked, “How can one write about something that really didn’t happen?”
Science fiction, a commercial genre that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, allowed her to do just that – to explore taboo subjects like feminism and queer desire that were not widely covered in mainstream literature and culture. As Russ writes in her essay “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write” (included in the new edition of On strike), the traditions of science fiction are “not stories about men qua Man and woman qua woman; they are myths of human intelligence and human adaptability. Not only do they ignore gender roles, but they are – at least in theory – not culture-bound.”
But many of the topics that interested Russ were absolutely gender-specific and culturally bound, and in On strikeshe confronts them directly. In the opening pages of the novel, Esther, the irreverent narrator, describes the tiring interaction she is about to have with a man she knows casually who has sat down with her in a restaurant without being invited:
First we talk about the weather… and then I listen appreciatively to his account of how difficult it is to maintain a suburban home… and then he complains about the number of students he has… and then he compliments me on my looks… and then he finally gets around to talking about His work.
When Esther dares to mention that she has received the same scholarships he is now applying for, he wonders aloud why women have careers. “You are strange animals, you intellectuals,” he tells Esther. Frustrated, she imagines shooting him, but then she reins in that fantasy and decides to “be mature and realistic and not care, not care. Not anymore.”
Today we have one word to describe this man’s behavior:mansplaining– but Russ had probably never come across any literature depicting the phenomenon, let alone making fun of it, and so she probably gave it birth. On strikeRuss uses Esther’s encounters with men to illustrate how incredibly exhausting it is to deal with everyday and systemic sexism. “I remember being infinitely fed up with this world that is not mine and will not be mine for the next hundred years,” says Esther. “I can spend almost a whole day thinking that I live here, and then some ad or something comes along and gives me a nudge – and just reminds me that not only do I have no right to be here, but I don’t even exist.”
It is in moments like this that what Russ calls her “implicit science fiction perspective” emerges. She recognized that the world was not made for women and that years would pass before they achieved an equal place in society. Russ knew that a woman could not be open, honest, and confident in public without encountering frustrating and condescending resistance, so she created a world in which Esther, a queer feminist professor like Russ herself, can and does speak her mind. At a party hosted by Jean’s parents, both academics, for example, Esther announces that her “politics… and that of every other woman in this room are waiting to see what you men are going to do to us next.”
The novel’s lesbian love story – especially the erotic passages – were also particularly daring for their time. Even Rita Mae Brown’s classic lesbian coming-of-age novel, Rubyfruit Jungle (which was published in 1973, the same year Russ began On strike), does not contain any such explicit sex scenes, nor are vibrators on bedside tables or the word clitoris.
Even more remarkable than the excitement Russ’s writing style can have is her refusal to glorify her narrator’s first time with a woman. In such moments, the better world Russ invents is firmly anchored in cheerful realism. She makes the encounter between Esther and Jean deeply human, and lets sex be strange and sometimes silly. When the two women meet with the explicit understanding that they are going to sleep together—and this despite the fact that neither of them has ever slept with a woman before—Jean arrives armed with a bottle of wine to help them both relax. After Jean’s clothes come off, Esther remarks that “she looks beautiful but is very oddly shaped,” later describing her as “a huge amount of pink—fields and forests.” Their lovemaking is full of interruptions and new beginnings, moments of frustration and embarrassment, until finally the “formalities are over. (Thank God.)” They can lie around naked, crack jokes, and have a toe fight.
Jean soon leaves town, leaving Esther heartbroken and looking for a confidante. She comes out to a gay man she has been friends with for years, and he takes offense, deciding that their affair is just a temporary capitulation to “lady’s lib.” Esther then spends time with straight, married friends in upstate New York. She knows she can’t tell them about Jean, but hopes she can “talk to them about feminism, because it permeates everything.” They, too, disappoint her.
After a brief but healing reunion between Jean and Esther, Russ ends the novel by addressing a broad, changing “you.” First, Esther speaks to her antagonists: men who think feminists need her to have someone to hate, liberals who turn up their noses at radicals, male students who disparage women writers. But then Esther also includes her potential allies in the “you”: “There’s another you. Are you out there? Can you hear me?” That “you” seems to encompass all women, whether they’re regular women on the street, other lesbians, or even homophobic feminists in a consciousness-raising group. The novel ends with a statement of openness and hope: “I don’t care who you sleep with,” says Esther. “I really don’t care, you know, as long as you love me. As long as I can love all of you.”
On strike against God is so powerful in part because it is so representative of what many lesbians have experienced in a discriminatory world. But it also stands out from Russ’s other works because it invites the reader to see themselves directly in Esther, leaving behind the metaphors, dystopias, and utopias of science fiction. That is not to say that Russ’s genre novels do not address the social issues that were important to her. But On strikeThe realism is more direct, funnier and in some ways more optimistic. The fact that the book still reads so contemporary today shows us how far we still have to go.
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