The Sci-Fi Writer Who Found Liberation—In Realism

In a 1976 introduction to her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula 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 sci-fi narrative, it ultimately grows out of and relates to the reality within which it was written. Le Guin’s work is a prime example of the way speculative fiction by women, riding feminism’s second wave, gave authors a powerful tool for both describing and battling a sexist world. So, too, is the work of Joanna Russ, whose novel The Female Man is still in print nearly 50 years after its publication and, alongside The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered a foundational text of feminist science fiction.

But a genre that rejects the limits imposed by reality can go only so far in depicting the real. Though sci-fi remains her claim to fame, Russ, who died in 2011, published works of fantasy, drama, and criticism. She also wrote a single realist novel. In On Strike Against God, first released in 1980 and recently reissued, Russ directly explored and described sexism and homophobia as they existed within her milieu—forces depicted elsewhere in her fiction through the slanted lens of metaphor.

On Strike took its title from the words of a judge who, scolding a woman who was arrested while participating in the 1909 New York shirtwaist strike, declared: “You are striking against God and Nature, whose law is that man shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. You are on strike against God!”

Russ might well have felt that she, too, was on strike against “God and Nature” when, in October 1973, she wrote to the poet Marilyn Hacker, “I’ve just about decided heterosexuality is, for me, the worst mistake I could make with the rest of my life.” The American Psychiatric Association would declassify homosexuality as a mental illness only a few months later; the fight for gay civil rights was just starting to gain national attention, and Russ herself, in her mid-30s, was still coming to terms with her own queerness.

On Strike is essentially a coming-out story narrated by Esther, a divorced English professor who falls in love and has an affair with her friend Jean. Reading that synopsis, you’d be forgiven for thinking the novel is contemporary, one of the growing number of books by LGBTQ writers being published today. But in its day, the book was exceptionally radical; it’s openly queer, with explicit (and wonderfully awkward) sex scenes, and its feminist politics are impossible to miss or misconstrue.

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Soon after its original publication by a small feminist press, On Strike went out of print, only to be reissued briefly in 1985 and 1987 and then disappear again. It has been rereleased multiple times in recent years, including in a new critical edition, which contains commentary by other writers as well as essays by Russ. Alec Pollak, the editor of the new edition, notes in her introduction that Russ “sought … to curate experiences and simulate emotions that changed how readers felt about themselves and related to the world around them.”

In her science fiction, Russ explored nonexistent worlds that nonetheless reflected the rigid gendered expectations, sexist social norms, and impossible double standards that she and her primarily female audience faced. In a 1974 letter to her fellow sci-fi author Samuel R. Delany, she asked, “How can you write about what really hasn’t happened?”

Science fiction, which in the 1960s and ’70s was a flourishing commercial genre, allowed her to do this—to examine taboo topics such as feminism and queer desire, which weren’t being widely addressed 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 women qua Woman; they are myths of human intelligence and human adaptability. They not only ignore gender roles but—at least theoretically—are not culture-bound.”

But many of the issues that interested Russ were absolutely gendered and culture-bound, and in On Strike, she confronts them head-on. In the opening pages of the novel, Esther, the irreverent narrator, describes the tiresome interaction she recognizes is about to occur with a man she vaguely knows who has sat down with her, uninvited, at a restaurant:

First we’ll talk about the weather … and then I’ll listen appreciatively to his account of how hard it is to keep up a suburban home … and then he’ll complain about the number of students he’s got … and then he’ll tell me something complimentary about my looks … and then he’ll finally get to talk about His Work.

When Esther dares to mention that she’s received the same grants he’s now applying for, he wonders aloud why women have careers. “You’re strange animals, you women intellectuals,” he tells Esther. Frustrated, she imagines shooting him, but then she curbs this fantasy, deciding to be “mature and realistic and not care, not care. Not anymore.”

Today, we have a word to describe this man’s behavior—mansplaining—but Russ may not have encountered literature portraying, let alone poking fun at, the phenomenon, and so she arguably wrote it into existence. Throughout On Strike, Russ uses Esther’s encounters with men to exemplify how utterly exhausting dealing with casual as well as systemic sexism is. “I remember being endlessly sick to death of this world which isn’t mine and won’t be for at least a hundred years,” Esther says. “I can go through almost a whole day thinking I live here and then some ad or something comes along and gives me a nudge—just reminding me that not only do I not have a right to be here; I don’t even exist.”

In moments like this one, what Russ called her “implicit science-fiction perspective” shows up. She recognized that the world was not made for women, and that years would pass before they gained an equal place in society. Russ knew that a woman couldn’t be open, honest, and assertive in public without encountering frustrating and belittling pushback, so she created a world in which Esther, a queer feminist professor like Russ herself, can and does speak her mind. For instance, at a party thrown by Jean’s parents, both academics, Esther pronounces that her “politics … and that of every other woman in this room, is waiting to see what you men are going to inflict on us next.”

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The novel’s lesbian love story—its erotic passages in particular—were also especially bold for their day. 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), doesn’t include such explicit sex scenes, nor does it mention vibrators on bedside tables or the word clitoris.

Even more remarkable than how titillating Russ’s writing can be is her refusal to glamorize her narrator’s first time having sex with a woman. In such moments, the better world Russ invents is firmly grounded by gleeful realism. She makes the encounter between Esther and Jean deeply human, allowing sex to be strange and sometimes silly. When the two women meet with the explicit understanding that they’re going to make love—and that neither of them ever has with a woman before—Jean comes armed with a bottle of wine to help them both relax. Once Jean’s clothes are off, Esther remarks that “she looks beautiful but very oddly shaped,” later describing her as “a vast amount of pinkness—fields and forests.” Their lovemaking is full of stops and starts, moments of frustration and embarrassment, until finally the “formalities [are] over. (Thank goodness.)” They can lie around naked, crack jokes, and have a toe fight.

Jean skips town soon after, leaving Esther heartbroken and looking for a confidant. She comes out to a gay man she’s been friends with for years, and he takes it badly, deciding her affair is simply a momentary capitulation to “Lady’s Lib.” Esther then spends time with straight married friends in upstate New York, knowing she can’t tell them about Jean but hoping she can talk with them “about feminism because that cuts across everything.” They, too, disappoint her.

After a brief but healing reunion between Jean and Esther, Russ ends the novel with an address to a broad, shifting “you.” At first, Esther is speaking to her antagonists: men who think that feminists need them in order to have someone to hate, liberals who turn their noses up at radicals, male students who belittle women writers. But then Esther brings her potential allies into the “you” as well: “There’s another you. Are you out there? Can you hear me?” This “you” seems to encompass all women, whether they’re average women on the street, other lesbians, or even homophobic feminists at a consciousness-raising group. The novel ends with a statement of openness and hope: “I don’t care who you sleep with,” Esther says. “I really don’t, you know, as long as you love me. As long as I can love all of you.”

On Strike Against God is powerful in part because it is so representative of what many lesbians experienced in a discriminatory world. But it also stands out from Russ’s other work because it invites the reader to recognize themselves directly in Esther, forsaking the metaphors, dystopias, and utopias of science fiction. This is not to say that Russ’s genre novels don’t address the social issues she cared about. But On Strike’s realism is blunter, funnier, and in some ways more optimistic. That the book still reads as so contemporary, too, tells us just how far we still have to go.