I recently finished reading Joanna Russ’s novel The Female Man. The novel was not at all what I expected, but I still really enjoyed it. Russ interweaves four stories into a complicated premise that is not explained until late in the novel. The four stories feature four women– Joanna, Jeannine, Janet, and Jael– who live in parallel worlds and are all different versions of each other. Joanna lives on Earth in the 1970s; Jeannine lives on Earth in an America with an altered history in which the Great Depression never ended; Janet lives on the planet Whileaway and is the protagonist from the short story “When it Changed;” and Jael lives in a dystopia in which men and women waged war against each other and have separated into different nations. The women all come together across their parallel universes and it is interesting to observe their interactions and the differences and similarities of women in all of the worlds. I enjoyed the overall plot of the book, but I think the aspect of the novel that is the most powerful is not the SF setting and premise, but the way that Russ uses the novel to write a sort of feminist manifesto. The novel is riddled with quotable sections that I was highlighting left and right that apply to what it is like to be a woman today regardless of what world the character was set in. Furthermore, I thought Russ was extremely daring with her depictions of female sexuality, particularly lesbian relationships. She did not hold back or use innuendos despite the time that she was writing in and she portrayed queer women relationships and sexuality in an honest way that is often only seen with heterosexual relationships.