Heather Hicks

Department of English
Villanova University
hhicks@email.vill.edu

 

In his historical review of various American theories of “postindustrialism,” Howard Brick makes the point that “[t]he historical reconstruction of the concept… helps to place the idea of postindustrial society in a new relation with the idea of postmodern culture. Rather than being regarded as corresponding definitions of ‘society’ and ‘culture’… postindustrialism and postmodernism might be taken to imply two distinct and alternative interpretations of contemporary social change and its significance.” Turning to the political stakes of adopting a “postindustrial perspective,” Brick speculates that viewing America through this lens might make us more likely to achieve “the long-standing social and political aspirations of the Left” than would attempts to make sense of American life in terms of postmodernism (350).¹

 

Brick’s suggestion strikes me as worth pursuing, for despite claims that the concept of postmodernism has “been able to welcome in the appropriate areas of daily life or the quotidian” (Jameson xiv) that other concepts, including postindustrialism, could not, the conceptual framework of postmodernism often functions as a surrender to abstraction rather than as an attempt to understand, much less change, daily life in America. It is more often in postmodern theories’ origins–as opposed to their current applications–that one finds specific insights about the “quotidian”; as Margaret Rose has demonstrated in her exploration of the relationship between theories of postmodernism and postindustrialism, most contemporary characterizations of American culture as “postmodern” begin from an understanding of Western nations as postindustrial.² Returning to this initial set of insights as a fresh approach to thinking about contemporary American culture, then, would seem a particularly promising way of moving beyond the limitations of various postmodern models.

 

Nonetheless, for the contemporary literary critic, taking the “postindustrial perspective” at first seems improbable. Aren’t postmodern poetics, after all, the cultural expression of what Fredric Jameson has famously referred to as the “impossible totality of the contemporary world system” (38)? In the cultural arena of representation as opposed to the domain of intellectual history from which Brick’s own work emerges, aren’t we fated to ponder only the residues of postindustrialism, the shattered remnants of narrative left in the aftermath of this (tidal) wave of capitalism? While I do not disagree that the formal traces of postindustrialism may reside in depthless, fragmented contemporary narratives, I also believe that a significant number of contemporary writers have attempted to engage with postindustrialism directly. In particular, a number of writers have, since 1945, attempted to represent changes in Americans’ experience as workers. The process of recovering the concept of postindustrialism in contemporary literary and cultural studies should begin with them.

 

One of the most fascinating of these writers is Joanna Russ. In what follows I would like to offer a reading of her famous novel, The Female Man, understanding it not (or not only) as a classic instance of narrative postmodernism, but as a narrative obsessed with the meanings of postindustrial work for women. As I have discussed elsewhere, America’s economic shift from manufacturing to services has had particularly complex ramifications for American women, whose entry into the work force in massive numbers has happened in concert with this economic transformation.³ Specifically, I will argue here that Russ’s text is an attempt to rethink “women’s work” in a historical moment when liberal feminists were campaigning to put women to work while the New Left–increasingly wedded to the concept of “postindustrialism”–was claiming that cybernetic automation would soon make work obsolete. By illuminating these dynamics, The Female Man lays bare the ideological tangle from which a crucial present-day formulation of postindustrialism as the “feminization of work” was born; in these terms, I will suggest the ways that Russ’s text historicizes and complicates Donna Haraway’s conception of contemporary female workers as “cyborgs.”

 

In The Female Man, which was written in the late 1960s but not published until 1975,⁴ Joanna Russ explores the lives and feelings of four female characters–Joanna, Jeannine, Janet, and Jael–each of whom is from what Russ terms a different “probability/continuum” (22). They are, in other words, women from four parallel universes that are characterized by very different economic and social histories. Joanna, based rather explicitly on Russ herself, is the product of our own “continuum.” She is a college professor living in a late-’60s America that is historically recognizable to the reader. Jeannine is a librarian who lives in a universe in which World War II did not happen, the Great Depression never abated, and the revolutionary social changes of the 1960s have not even been imagined. Janet, who is arguably the main character in this text, is an envoy from a point more than 900 years in the future–and a world in which a plague killed off the men, and the women built a utopian society, “Whileaway,” in their absence. Finally, Jael is an assassin from a future point closer to the present in which men and women are at war with one another.

 

Anything but a linear narrative, Russ’s novel weaves together a variety of genres, from dramatic monologues, to fairy tales, to excerpts from fictional book reviews of The Female Man itself, all the while playfully staging a series of encounters between the four women. The first three quarters of the text are structured around Janet’s adventures and impressions, using them as a framework to introduce not only her history and the history of Whileaway, but also extended passages where we are privy to the daily experiences and private thoughts of Joanna and Jeannine. In the last quarter of the text, Jael, who has previously made only fleeting appearances, takes center stage, and we learn that it is she who has engineered the time travel necessary for the four women to come together and talk. In the process of enlisting their aid in her war against the men in her continuum, she reveals that they all are, in fact, the same woman; their differences are the product of the different histories of their respective universes (161-62).

 

Critics who discuss The Female Man almost inevitably begin by identifying it, implicitly or explicitly, as a response to the burgeoning American feminism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, it would be almost impossible to imagine a characterization of this text that did not begin with that premise, since the problem of women’s oppression fairly saturates its every passage.⁵ Yet I believe the brand of feminism with which Russ engages in the text is more open to question. Most critics have treated The Female Man as an expression of radical, rather than liberal, feminist politics.⁶ However, perceiving the degree to which Russ’s text is a meditation on liberal feminism, I contend, is the first step to understanding its role as an equally complex meditation on postindustrialism.

 

There are, of course, a number of grounds on which to read Russ’s feminism as radical. In an interview in 1984, Russ remarked that the genre of science fiction generally lends itself to “radical thought” because “it is about things that have not happened and do not happen” (“Dialogue” 29).⁷ Yet the formal experimentations of The Female Man are exceptionally radical, even by the standards of science fiction. On its most basic level, the fragmented, heterodox form of Russ’s novel, which Sally Robinson, in terms inspired by Julia Kristeva, has described as “the kind of radicalization that can disrupt the symbolic order through dissidence” (115), suggests a profound and revolutionary resistance to the rationalism on which the status quo in the West is predicated.⁸

 

That formal radicalism, moreover, is enlisted to make a number of points that were central to radical feminist thought of the late 1960s. According to feminist historian Alice Echols, “[e]arly radical feminists believed that women’s oppression derived from the very construction of gender and sought its elimination as a meaningful social category” (50). In Russ’s fragmentation of one woman across four different “universes of probability” (163), as well as her interest in the mingling of gendered identities that her title implies, we see her preoccupation with the social construction of gender. On a less abstract level still, in imagining her feminist utopia as one entirely free of men, Russ also defers to those radical feminists who claimed liberation meant separation of the sexes. It is also fair, I think, to concede the point made by Gardiner that the palpable anger that surfaces periodically in the text echoes the outrage expressed by many early radical feminists.⁹

 

Yet while reading Russ’s text as a response to the radical currents within American feminism in the late 1960s is clearly both appropriate and productive, I believe reading the text for its engagements with liberal feminism can open up discussions that make Russ’s text particularly relevant to current debates about both feminism and postindustrialism. Counterpointed to the many facets of radical feminism in Russ’s text is a persistent focus on the complex and in some senses paradoxical relationship between women’s liberation and women’s entry into the (public) work force.

 

The importance to the liberal Women’s Movement of women’s access to paid, prestigious work can scarcely be overstated. From its beginnings in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), liberal feminism focused doggedly on middle-class women’s equal right to work as a virtual panacea for their discontents. Friedan’s text set out to expose and give a name to what she termed, “the problem that has no name”–the nebulous misery plaguing American middle-class women. According to Friedan, the “feminine mystique,” as she came to call it, was quietly crushing the life out of a whole generation of women by telling them that rather than attempting to compete with men, they should seek “fulfillment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love” (43).

 

Once she had identified the problem, Friedan isolated work outside the home as the only conceivable solution to women’s quiet suffering:

 

...work can now be seen as the key to the problem that has no name. The identity crisis of American women began a century ago, as more and more of the work important to the world, more and more of the work that used their human abilities and through which they were able to find self-realization was taken from them. (334, emphasis mine)

 

According to Friedan, the public work place, as opposed to the housewife’s private domain, was “the sphere of our culture that is most morally worthwhile” (165). Friedan was careful, however, to spell out that she did not mean just any work. Her unapologetically classist project was willing to leave industrial work and menial forms of labor to some unspecified others; “busy work or punching a time-clock” (334) was simply not the sort of work she had in mind for her suburban sisters.¹⁰ “Honored and useful work” must be her female readers’ goal, she insisted again and again, and this sort of “work toward a greater purpose” was synonymous for her with work in a “profession” (335, 338).

 

On very rare occasions in the course of Friedan’s 400-page text, she conceded that the professional American work place was not all that it could be. Citing David Riesman’s and William H. Whyte, Jr.’s well-known indictments of American corporate work places as conformist and dispiriting, Friedan acknowledged that men were already coping with the realization that even a professional career was not enough to guarantee a fulfilling sense of identity:¹¹

 

It does not come from just making a living, working by formula, finding a secure spot as an organization man. The very argument, by Riesman and others, that man no longer finds identity in the work defined as a paycheck job, assumes that identity for man comes through creative work of his own that contributes to the human community: the core of the self becomes aware, becomes real, and grows through work that carries forward human society. (334)

 

Yet while Riesman in The Lonely Crowd argued for a revolutionary replacement of work with play,¹² Friedan’s text ultimately sets out a program that would provide white, middle-class women with full access to careers that “demanded ability, responsibility, and decision” without manifesting any serious intent to transform the structure of the economy or the category of “work” itself (252).

 

Friedan’s focus on women’s employment carried over, more or less unmodified, to later liberal feminist political efforts. Most of the language of the “Bill of Rights” adopted by the National Organization for Women at its first national conference in 1967, for example, concerned equal opportunity in employment. Of the eight rights this document demanded, five explicitly concerned employment, including an end to sex discrimination in hiring, maternity leave rights, tax deductions for working mothers, and daycare centers (512). A sustained concern with women’s relationship to work would, moreover, be reflected in the extended battle for the Equal Rights Amendment.

 

The imprimatur of this decade-long fixation on work as a means to women’s liberation is unmistakable in Russ’s text. At a number of moments throughout The Female Man, Russ uses set pieces to make it clear that whether or not women should be allowed equal access to the work place is the defining issue of feminism in most Americans’ minds. Early in the text, for example, her narrative takes us on a careening tour through a series of conversational fragments at a Manhattan cocktail party. We “hear” the offhand remark, “You women are lucky you don’t have to go out and go to work” (35). Later in the same scene we are moved through the room to another snippet of conversation, in which a man asks Janet, who is a guest at the party, “What do you think of the new feminism, eh?… Do you think women can compete with men?” (43). After establishing that he regards feminism as a “very bad mistake,” the male speaker answers his own question:

 

"You can't challenge men in their own fields," he said. "Now nobody can be more in favor of women getting their rights than I am. Do you want to sit down? Let's. As I said, I'm all in favor of it. Adds a decorative touch to the office, eh? Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Unequal pay is a disgrace. But you've got to remember, Janet, that women have certain physical limitations," (here he took off his glasses, wiped them with a little serrated square of blue cotton, and put them back on) "and you have to work within your physical limitations." (43-44)

 

Russ’s comical flourishes here, as the male speaker’s own physical limitations are subtly communicated, should not detract from the larger function of this passage. The party motif allows Russ to distill to its essence the public’s understanding of feminism. In the form of “small talk,” the complexities of feminism are reduced to the struggle for “equal pay for equal work.”

 

Later in the text, however, the depth of seriousness with which Russ herself regards the issue of women’s right to work is foregrounded. In another set piece in which an anonymous man and woman discuss their life together, a more thoughtful and complex version of women’s work dilemma is offered:

 

HE: Darling, why must you work part-time as a rug salesman?

 

SHE: Because I wish to enter the marketplace and prove that in spite of my sex I can take a fruitful part in the life of the community and earn what our culture proposes as the sign and symbol of adult independence–namely money.

 

HE: But darling, by the time we deduct the cost of a baby-sitter and nursery school, a higher tax bracket, and your box lunches from your pay, it actually costs us money for you to work. So you see, you aren’t making money at all. You can’t make money. Only I can make money. Stop working….

 

SHE: ... Why can't you stay home and take care of the baby? Why can't we deduct all those things from your pay? Why should I be glad because I can't earn a living? Why-- (117-18)

 

Despite its black-and-white theatricality and an honesty in presenting motivations that is, again, almost comical (“You can’t make money. Only I can make money.”), this scene finally takes very seriously the pain caused by women’s relegation to the domestic sphere. The passage not only echoes Friedan’s insistence that “‘Occupation: housewife’ is not an adequate substitute for truly challenging work, important enough to society to be paid for in its coin…” (248); if possible it actually intensifies the tone of desperate defiance that Friedan’s text communicates in its discussions of society’s unjust conception of “women’s work.”

 

Russ’s interest in liberal feminism’s claims regarding the liberatory potential of work is likewise apparent in the emotional struggles of her two most manifestly oppressed female characters. As both Joanna and Jeannine try to imagine happy lives for themselves, they repeatedly come back to a prestigious place in the work force as the most likely means to this end.

 

Jeannine, the most benighted of all, struggles feebly throughout the text to imagine some other role for herself than the one of wife-and-mother that she feels thrust upon her both by her family and her society. In one of the most complex and poignant moments in the text, Jeannine agonizes about the course of her life and is counseled by that part both of Joanna and of herself that has acquiesced to sexism:

 

"Jeannine, you'll never get a good job," I said. "There aren't any now. And if there were, they'd never give them to a woman, let alone a grown up baby like you. Do you think you could hold down a really good job, even if you could get one? They're all boring anyway, hard and boring. You don't want to be a dried-up old spinster at forty, but that's what you will be if you go on like this. You're twenty-nine. You're getting old. You ought to marry someone who can take care of you, Jeannine." (113-14)

 

Much of the force of this passage comes from its apparent truthfulness. While a reader invested in seeing Jeannine liberate and transform herself cannot help but resist the negative voice that whispers in her ear here, the text presents much evidence that corroborates the words of the naysayer. Jeannine’s world is so mired in sexism and economic torpor that she truly is precluded by complex historical forces from finding work that can sustain her. Later this taunting voice becomes even more strident as Jeannine’s resistance to marriage begins to slip away:

 

Do you want to be an airline pilot? Is that it? And they won’t let you? Did you have a talent for mathematics, which they squelched? Did they refuse to let you be a truck driver? What is it?…

 

I'm trying to talk to you sensibly, Jeannine. You say you don't want a profession and you don't want a man... so what is it that you want? Well? (122-23)

 

Ultimately, the effect of these passages is to bring work and its inaccessibility into focus as a key source of Jeannine’s sense of entrapment and despair. The jobs listed here, which are particularly associated with conventions of masculinity–the technology of airplanes and trucks, and the science of mathematics–reinforce the message that employment in her world has been carefully coded and mapped onto a gendered grid.

 

As a successful professor of English, Joanna, the most autobiographical character in the text, has achieved the professional status that Jeannine can scarcely dream of, yet she feels torn between societal expectations that she be “feminine” and her intense pleasure in her work:

 

I live between worlds. Half the time I like doing housework, I care a lot about how I look, I warm up to men and flirt beautifully…. There’s only one thing wrong with me:

 

I’m frigid.

 

In my other incarnation I live out such a plethora of conflict that you wouldn’t think I’d survive, would you, but I do; I wake up enraged, go to sleep in numbed despair,… live as if I were the only woman in the world trying to buck it all, work like a pig, strew my whole apartment with notes, articles, manuscripts, books, get frowsty, don’t care, become stridently contentious…. I’m very badly dressed.

 

But O how I relish my victuals! And O how I fuck! (110)

 

Again echoing Friedan, Russ’s text suggests that professional work can open the door to intense happiness, and even intense sexual satisfaction. And although Joanna concedes that despite her Ph.D. and prestigious career, her colleagues do not respect her, treating her as though she wore a sandwich board that reads, “LOOK! I HAVE TITS!,” she never abandons her hope that the public work place will be a site of further liberation in the future (133). Near the conclusion of the text, Joanna returns to the centrality of paid work to women’s identity:

 

It’s very upsetting to think that women make up only one-tenth of society, but it’s true. For example:

 

My doctor is male.

 

My lawyer is male.

 

My tax-accountant is male.

 

The grocery-store owner (on the corner) is male.

 

The janitor in my apartment building is male….

 

I think most of the people in the world are male.

 

Now it's true that waitresses, elementary-school teachers, secretaries, nurses, and nuns are female, but how many nuns do you meet in the course of the usual business day? Right? And secretaries are female only until they get married, at which time, they change or something because you usually don't see them again at all. I think it's a legend that half the population of the world is female; where on earth are they keeping them all? No, if you tot up all those categories of women above, you can see clearly and beyond the shadow of a doubt that there are maybe 1-2 women for every 11 or so men and that hardly justifies making such a big fuss. It's just that I'm selfish. My friend Kate says that most of the women are put into female-banks when they grow up and that's why you don't see them, but I can't believe that. (203-4)

 

Persisting in Joanna’s last extended meditation on work is a sense that bringing women into the public work place is a crucial aspect of asserting the equal significance of women in the world. As in Friedan’s text, public, paid work beyond the conventional confines of “women’s work” is equated with a visibility that will necessarily translate into liberation.

 

It is in the context of this feminism dedicated to the right to work that Russ’s engagement with New Left notions of post-scarcity becomes so interesting. In fact, I want to argue here that postindustrial, cybernetic technologies leave “women’s work” a deeply fractured and open category in Russ’s text. Despite the very fluid structure of The Female Man, Russ indisputably gives particular emphasis and detail to her account of Whileaway, the utopia from which Janet has emerged. Whileaway relies for its manufacturing on the sophisticated technology of the “induction helmet”–a cybernetic device which transmits brain waves directly to the controls of machinery without any physical exertion on the part of the user, making it “possible for one workwoman to have not only the brute force but also the flexibility and control of thousands” (14). Critic Tom Moylan, in his study of what he characterizes as the “critical utopias” of the 1960s, has discussed the extent to which The Female Man is a cultural artifact of the New Left’s interest in cybernetics. Moylan suggests that in her construction of Whileaway, Russ combines “post-industrial, cybernetic technology with a libertarian pastoral social system” (67). Indeed, Russ’s text bears the unmistakable mark of an element of New Leftist thought that is often overlooked.

 

Today, when one mentions the American “New Left” the discussion is likely to turn immediately to protests against the Vietnam War. And if the discussion broadens and deepens, a narrative takes shape which begins, alternatively, with Martin Luther King’s Freedom Walks of the mid-1950s or the Greensboro, North Carolina lunch-counter protest of 1960, and then stretches to those Vietnam protests across an expanse of middle-class student actions against the “multiversity.”¹³ I find that when I mention the role that cybernetic automation played in American New Left politics, I am met with blank stares. And yet automation, specifically, and postindustrialism, generally, was a consistently recurring issue in New Left thought from the very beginning of the Movement. Indeed, what one sees in reviewing the documents of the “most representative organization of the Movement” (Teodori 53), the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), as well as documents from other New Leftist groups, is a gradual embrace of automation as a route to utopia.¹⁴

 

As Massimo Teodori has suggested, in the early 1960s members of the newly formed SDS made America’s underclass their first cause (25-29). Appalled by the specter of poverty in an America where so many lived in resplendence, student groups fastened particularly on the problem of unemployment. In reflecting backward from 1967 on the early days of the Movement, activist Todd Gitlin remarked that the students believed that “the issue of jobs or income might be a single decisive lever of change” (138). This campaign against unemployment was marked by a set of fears distinctive to the post-World War II era; according to Gitlin, the basis of the SDS’s fixation on employment was “some naive expectations about the pace and effect of automation” (138).¹⁵

 

In his description of the activities of one early SDS program, the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), Richard Rothstein, writing in 1969, explained that a crucial articulation of those expectations regarding automation was a 1963 manifesto entitled “The Triple Revolution” (275). Written by a “coalition of liberals and radicals,” including Tom Hayden, Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, and Todd Gitlin, the manifesto claimed that revolutions in “cybernation,” weaponry, and human rights demanded radical changes in American society (275).¹⁶ In particular, the writers of “The Triple Revolution” considered “the cybernation revolution” the linchpin for their own national revolution. Describing a “machines-and-man drama” in which American jobs were “disappearing under the impact of highly efficient, progressively less costly machines,” the writers reasoned that this domestic crisis made the current economic system manifestly untenable (340).

 

Rather than calling for limits on the automation of manufacturing, however, the authors of “The Triple Revolution” advocated “the encouragement and planned expansion of cybernation” (347). Tapping a vein of social thought with deep roots in Western history, these writers characterized the U.S. as a post-scarcity society, a society in which “sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone… ” (342).¹⁷ Contrary to liberal conventions that treated welfare as the safety net for the unemployed, this more radical phalanx believed that an “unqualified right to an income… would take the place of the patchwork of welfare measures” once the society was fully automated (348). Nor would this “right to income” be predicated on full employment of American workers. Instead, the manifesto writers sought to eliminate the “income-through-jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand–for granting the right to consume” (343). Soon, work itself would simply no longer be part of the economic equation: “The economy of abundance,” they wrote, “can sustain all citizens in comfort and economic security whether or not they engage in what is commonly reckoned as work” (348). While uncertain of the specifics, they called for a society in which “work” was replaced by “many creative activities and interests commonly thought of as non-economic,” by “new modes of constructive, rewarding and ennobling activity” (348).¹⁸

 

It would be inaccurate to suggest that “The Triple Manifesto” immediately turned the rank and file of the New Left on to a vision of a fully-automated, work-free America. If anything, the elements of this document that had the most powerful effect initially were its dire warnings about short-term unemployment, which were echoed by another report in the same year that predicted unemployment of 13% by 1970 (Rothstein 275-76). Subsequent writings of the SDS produced in the first half of the decade tended to dwell on the immediate “threat of automation,” to borrow activist Carl Wittman’s phrase, rather than its long-term promise (129). In the statement generated by their 1963 convention, “America and the New Era,” the SDS made this threat a central theme. The pamphlet described a crisis in the work force produced by “a new type of automated production” which allowed manufacturers to “increase productive output by seventy per cent, with no increase whatever in the number of manufacturing workers” (174). Again in 1965, a group of older leftists active on the editorial board of Studies on the Left alluded to the threat of automation to American employment, writing that “discontent is widespread, the conditions of work continue to worsen and security will diminish steadily with the continued spread of automation” (“Up from Irrelevance” 214). And in the streets and poor neighborhoods of America, too, students focused more on the short-term threat of automation, counteracting it with various projects meant to respark the force and energy of labor unions, generate employment and, in cases where job loss was unavoidable, improve the welfare system.

 

Over the course of the 1960s, however, the more positive perspective on automation expressed by “The Triple Manifesto” gradually gained ground. In 1966, activist Richard Flacks predicted “the use of technology to eliminate demeaning labor, [and] the development of new definitions of work and status based on humanistic criteria” (195). And by the end of the decade numerous New Left thinkers were weighing in with wholesale paeans to full automation. Marvin Garson; Dave Gilbert, Bob Gottlieb, and Susan Sutheim; Martin Sklar; and Greg Calvert and Carol Neiman all produced economic and social analyses of the U.S. which called for the full automation of the society.¹⁹ In each of these accounts the conventional meanings of “work,” with all of their connotations of rationalization and social order, were unraveled by a vision of easy abundance.

 

The notion of “work” itself, of course, did not disappear from every account. As late as 1972, Alan Adelson remarked that, when and if the revolution was actually achieved, student radicals had little idea of what sort of society should replace the current one (119). Adelson’s assessment was half true. Most students radicals looked toward some variation of a “post-scarcity society” as the goal of their revolutionary efforts. The place of work in such a society was open, however, to considerable debate. Certainly, throughout this era of intensified interest in a work-free, post-scarcity society, there were those who were standing by the importance of “work” as a source of personal fulfillment.²⁰ Even in Calvert and Neiman’s book-length call for full automation, A Disrupted History, the writers seem unsure about work’s place in a post-scarcity world. At one point the writers argue that “living without working is the potential of capitalist economic and technological development” (86-87, emphasis mine), while at another moment they strategize for a “rational system of decentralized worker-controlled production and the creation of an ecologically sane environment” (137, emphasis mine).

 

Yet despite such oscillations, there was unquestionably a new enthusiasm for a life without work. In summing up his overview of the New Left’s history and looking to the future, Teodori wrote, “The society dominated by the work ethic is being replaced by one in which creativity and imagination can play an important role in the realization of human potentialities” (83). In their later reflection back on the end of the 1960s, the editors of Social Text likewise identified a new contempt for work:

 

Zero work, unwork, the merging on the [assembly] line of work and play, this signalled a new politics of labor. It also created new space, cleared by freeing time normally subordinated to capital. This is no longer the unemployment of the economic crisis: it is workers turning away from labor itself, abjuring the income ineluctably tied to it. As capital aims to fill all spaces in the day with activity that produces surplus value, labor aims to free itself from these spaces, to create its own space inside the work place. In the 60s, the anti-work ethic was thus introduced. (Sayres, et al. 3)

 

Cybernetic automation underwrote these dreams of “unwork” and play, offering the possibility that work places might soon be a thing of the past, that men and women might soon be able to organize their lives not in terms of a regimented schedule of formal tasks, but in response to those highly personal desires revealed by the absence of the demands of production.²¹

 

One would be hard-pressed, indeed, to find a society that more completely replicates the spirit of the New Left’s vision of post-scarcity than Whileaway. The “induction helmets,” which represent Russ’s version of cybernetic automation, have produced in Russ’s utopia precisely the sort of eruption of creativity that the New Left made its goal:

 

...there is, under it all, the incredible explosive energy, the gaiety of high intelligence, the obliquities of wit, the cast of mind that makes industrial areas into gardens and ha-has, that supports wells of wilderness where nobody ever lives for long, that strews across a planet sceneries, mountains, glider preserves, culs-de-sac, comic nude statuary, artistic lists of tautologies and circular mathematical proofs (over which aficionados are moved to tears), and the best graffiti in this or any other world. (54)

 

Such descriptions prompt Moylan to describe Russ’s vision of Whileaway as largely inspired by the “the deep changes advocated by the all-male new left of the 1960s” (66). Yet I differ from Moylan and other critics who have discussed Russ’s text by resisting a reading that sees this notion of post-scarcity as readily compatible with Russ’s feminist politics.²²

 

Russ’s mixture of New Left post-scarcity politics with her liberal feminist enthusiasm for work, which I mapped earlier, yields strange results indeed. Despite its remarkable advances, Whileaway still has a number of social problems, and among these, one is given particular emphasis. No point is made about Whileaway with greater regularity than that the women of Whileaway work much too hard: Russ writes, “Whileawayans work all the time. They work. And they work. And they work” (54, original emphasis). In speaking of the hiatus from incessant toil Whileawayans enjoy during the five years in which they raise their infant daughters, Janet explains: “There has been no leisure at all before and there will be so little after…. At sixty I will get a sedentary job and have some time for myself again” (15). Her interlocutor in Joanna’s continuum, taken aback by this characterization asks, “And this is considered enough, in Whileaway?” to which Janet replies, “My God, no” (15).

 

Yet, where work is concerned Whileaway is a riddle. For we are also told that Whileawayans do not work more than sixteen hours a week, or for more than three hours on any one job (56, 53). While the recent advent of the induction helmet may have somewhat abruptly reduced what had previously been more constant labor (Russ does not make this clear), the repeated complaints about too much work are framed as a current issue, not one of the past.²³ These enigmatic formulations allow for a number of possible interpretations. Critic Frances Bartkowski, untroubled by the apparent contradictions concerning work on Whileaway, implies in her reading of the novel that Whileawayans’ laments about their work reveal that even sixteen hours of formal employment have come to seem excessively burdensome within the enlightened society of Whileaway (73). Yet one might also understand Russ’s treatment of work in her utopia to imply the opposite–that every female activity, even those not formally understood as work, has been colored by a pervasive work ethic. Finally, it is possible that the text simply sets up separate, irreconcilable accounts of Whileaway–that the moments when Janet claims that Whileawayans work all the time and those when she claims they work only sixteen hours are meant to be two alternative visions of Whileaway–just as Russ occasionally allows to coexist different, contradictory accounts of certain events elsewhere in the text.²⁴

 

I would push things a bit further here, however, and maintain that none of these readings is complete without being situated in the context of Russ’s extended engagement with liberal feminism’s celebration of work. It is only in these terms that we can understand Russ’s persistent representation of “work” in a society so clearly modeled after the “zero-work” societies being advocated by the New Left. It is not just any work that is happening in Whileaway, we must conclude, but a version of “work” that has its roots in the liberal feminist appropriation of this category in the 1960s. This women’s work, so brazenly, ostentatiously out of place amidst the industrious circuitry of her utopia, demands that the reader interrogate whether “work” indeed should remain an important category for women when there is no longer an economic imperative to participate in it.

 

In other words, looking forward from a point at which automation seemed to promise the end of work, Russ reexamines what a feminist notion of women’s work should be. Is “work” a means to an end–that end a state of leisure? Is it a concept that women should embrace as a constant source of respect and power–a term that should become so permeable with the concept of feminism that the two become synonymous? Or is it possible that Russ, in her attention to the endless work that plagues life on Whileaway, is suggesting that by striving toward a life of work at the moment that the New Left was dismissing work as obsolete, women were fettering themselves to a confining rather than liberating set of practices–that women instead should disown and resist work?

 

At least part of the answer lies, I believe, with the character Janet, the emissary from Whileaway whose arrival in Joanna’s continuum in 1969 opens the novel. Janet’s work as an emissary is strictly temporary. Her regular work on Whileaway is as a “Safety and Peace” officer (1). Specifically, what she does in this job is to track down those who are “unable to bear the tediousness of [their] work,” and, if they cannot be persuaded to return to their job, to kill them (55). In other words, Janet, who stands in metonymic relationship to Utopia itself, is also the one who forces women to work. To simplify that equation a bit further, feminist utopia is in some sense epitomized by, even the equivalent of, the necessity to work.

 

A slightly different, but not uncomplementary, reading that the text seems to make available is that a conventional gender binary, with its categories of “man” and “woman,” is itself essential to the distinction between work and leisure. That is, Russ’s text allows for an interpretation in which, in the absence of men, all binary structures disappear. The resulting, prevailing epistemology on Whileaway, spurred by the feminist drive to enter the public world of work, constructs work as a totalized category.²⁵ The women of Whileaway “work all the time” because work has become tantamount to existence itself. Certainly the very public and private spheres which have traditionally defined male and female sites of work are abandoned in Whileaway. Janet remarks of Whileawayans at work:

 

[T]hey work outdoors in their pink or gray pajamas and indoors in the nude until you know every wrinkle and fold of flesh, until your body's in a common medium with theirs and there are no pictures made out of anybody or anything; everything becomes translated instantly into its own inside. (95)

 

While the elimination of binaries such as public/private and subject/object seem to signal profound liberation, Russ’s insistence that work has simply taken over the binary of work/leisure once again returns us to the question of the meaning of “work” in such a fluid sphere.

 

I would argue that despite her sense that “work” was in the process of being evacuated of its original economic meanings in the late 1960s, Russ was convinced that women should not relinquish their new-found purchase on this concept. Both Janet’s role as an embodiment of the need to work, and the apparent absence of a meaningful alternative to work, suggest that, while Whileawayans complain about work, they also claim it as their ontology. Even as their lives move closer to complete freedom, their notion of themselves as workers bound to a collective future continues unabated. For Russ, it appears, the course on which women had set themselves in the early days of the second wave was inextricably connected with a notion of “work.” The female worker was, de facto, a feminist, and, conversely, the feminist was a female worker.

 

It is precisely here, from within Russ’s contradictory utopia of automated feminist work, that we should place her text in dialogue with one of its theoretical progeny, Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” For the distance between Russ’s complex notion of the continuation of work in an automated society as feminist and Haraway’s understanding of it as feminized suggests the particular relevance of Russ’s thinking about women and postindustrial work for us today. Reading Russ’s text at the intersection of New Left and liberal feminist politics begins to answer Mary Ann Doane’s implicit invitation to historicize Haraway’s contemporary notion of the “cyborg.”²⁶

 

Russ’s characterization of life on Whileaway as one without binaries–where “everything becomes translated instantly into its own inside”–is strikingly similar to what Donna Haraway describes as “the eradication of ‘public life’ for everyone” in her contemporary meditation on cybernetics and feminism (192):

 

Let me summarize the picture of women's historical locations in advanced industrial societies, as these positions have been restructured partly through the social relations of science and technology. If it was ever possible ideologically to characterize women's lives by the distinction of public and private domains--suggested by images of the division of working-class life into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market and home, and of gender existence into personal and political realms--it is now a totally misleading ideology, even to show how both terms of these dichotomies construct each other in practice and in theory. (193-94)

 

In some senses, the superficial similarity between Haraway’s and Russ’s visions here is not difficult to understand. Haraway explicitly names Russ as one of the inspirations for her thinking about contemporary workers as “cyborgs.” Unlike Russ, who celebrates the evaporation of the public/private binary as part of her utopia, however, Haraway characterizes this “privatization” as part of a trend that she describes as the “feminization” of work:

 

Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. (190)

 

Both Russ and Haraway generate visions of societies that, despite their remarkably productive machines, still require extraordinary amounts of work from their human–especially female human–populations. Yet the significance of this merging of women and work in their respective accounts could not be more different. In her discussion of paid, postindustrial work as “feminized,” Haraway presents an ironic twist on earlier liberal feminist projects of ushering women into the work force. Rather than work transforming the meanings of “woman” in American society so that it came to connote strength and independence, it appears, in Haraway’s account, that the binding together of work and woman has instead transformed the meanings of “work,” to a degree negating its positive valence–or, in those cases where it was already regarded negatively, increasing that negativity.

 

Certainly, both Russ and Haraway see the cyborg as a means to epistemological transformations that can empower women socially and economically. Jael, whose steel teeth and cybernetic claws mark her as an archetypal cyborg, is the character in The Female Man who most straightforwardly communicates the transformative power of work for women. In the future she inhabits, Manlanders have increasingly “farmed out” work to Womanlanders, producing an effect not unlike that which Haraway identifies with contemporary postindustrialism. Yet Jael perceives this trend not as a diminishment of the value of work but a strengthening of women’s cause. Emphatically stating that, “Work is power” (170, original emphasis), Jael permits herself occasional moments of leisure, but finally she makes sense of her life as one of work:

 

Sometimes I go into one of our cities and have little sprees in the local museums; I look at pictures, I get a hotel room and take long hot baths, I drink lots of lemonade. But the record of my life is the record of work, slow, steady, responsible work. (192)

 

Near the conclusion of the text Jael reveals that her war efforts are part of the same historical continuum that will produce Whileaway–that her world and her work are necessary to achieve Janet’s utopia (211).²⁷ Similarly, Haraway treats her “cyborg myth” as a vehicle for utopian politics, seeing the trope as a figure for “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (178).

 

Yet in Haraway’s account, it is unclear what status work would be assigned in the enlightened cyborg society she calls for.²⁸ Perhaps what understanding the complex social context of Russ’s text can provide us in our current discussions of cyborgs, then, is an increased awareness that incorporating technology more centrally into our understanding of ourselves is not enough to produce a more just world. In these terms, while Russ’s embrace of work qua work may seem anachronistic in our era of multinational capitalism, her insistence that we make work integral to our discussions about feminism and technology could not be more timely.²⁹

 

In her 1977 essay, “SF and Technology as Mystification,” Russ decries the tendency of academics to obscure the reality of human work and workers with “false abstractions” (35). She suggests that academics “are insulated from the solid, practical details of their own lives by other people’s labor; they therefore begin their thinking about life by either leaving such practical details out or assuming that they are trivial” (34). Russ’s intervention in the historical collision between liberal feminism and the post-work politics that emerged around automation in the 1960s, when placed next to Haraway’s highly influential tract, forces us to ask what new meanings feminists need to attach to work in the cyborg world we inhabit.³⁰ As committed to utopian possibilities as Russ, Haraway invites us to reimagine ourselves as intimately linked, like Jael, to the cybernetic circuitry that surrounds us. Yet, finally, placing Haraway’s text in the context of The Female Man reminds us that another manifesto waits to be written, a document that will rearticulate not women’s imaginative relationship with technology, but their relationship to work in a postindustrial context. Such a document would be the next step in the process of rethinking contemporary postindustrial “work” in ways that will help us transform it from the feminized state in which Haraway finds it to the feminist form Russ dreamed it might take.

Notes

 

1. Brick is particularly dedicated to reviving interest in those postindustrial theories that worked toward a type of “social change in which new forms of community emerged as counterweights to market-based norms of organization” (350). My own use of the term “postindustrialism” in this discussion more broadly encompasses the historic shifts in American work and its conceptualization that occurred in response to the extensive automation of production after World War II.

 

2. Rose states this generalization explicitly (20, 167-68) and supports it throughout her text using specific instances of both theories.

 

3. See my “‘Whatever It Is That She’s Since Become’: Writing Bodies of Text and Bodies of Women in James Tiptree, Jr.’s ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ and William Gibson’s ‘The Winter Market,'” esp. 62-69.

 

4. According to Samuel R. Delany, fragments of what would resurface in Russ’s novel as the feminist utopia, Whileaway, were first developed in 1966, as she began writing the short story, “When It Changed”; Marilyn Hacker has indicated that Russ began writing the novel itself in the spring of 1969 (as qtd. in Moylan, 219, 3ff; 57).

 

5. For accounts that situate The Female Man in relation to specific feminist currents and/or critics, see Ayres; Bartkowski (17, 49-78); Gardiner; Moylan (55-90); and Robinson. For discussions that assume Russ’s feminism as their starting point, see DuPlessis (182-84); McClenahan; Spector; and Spencer. Only one critic, Marilyn J. Holt, has explicitly resisted contextualizing Russ in terms of the development of second-wave feminism, insisting that Russ’s text is “more understandable if it is viewed as preceding, rather than proceeding from, the feminist movement” (488). Admittedly, Holt’s reminder to us that because Russ completed her book in 1971, “she owes many fewer debts than the 1975 publication date indicates” (488), is not without some value in helping us to historicize The Female Man. Yet the critic’s statement that “Russ invented the modern feminism and the dialectics she wrote” (488) overlooks Russ’s own explicit acknowledgment of her debts to “Friedan, Millet, Greer, Firestone, and all the rest” in the final chapter of the novel (213).

 

6. They identify Russ’s politics with Women’s Liberation, that is, as opposed to the Women’s Movement. The Women’s Movement emerged in the early 1960s in response to the almost simultaneous publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and the findings of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, and was comprised largely of middle-aged, professional women. Women’s Liberation, on the other hand, emerged in the late 1960s as a result of the frustration of female members of the New Left with the blatant sexism of that movement (Lauret 52-64; Ryan 309-17). Sara Evans has documented the details of the emergence of Women’s Liberation from the New Left (156-211). For discussions that foreground the tensions as well as points of intersection between Women’s Liberation and the older Women’s Movement, see Evans (19-23, 217-18); and Ryan (309, 312-17).

 

7. Russ first explored this way of understanding science fiction in her 1973 essay, “Speculations: The Subjunctivity of Science Fiction.”

 

8. Robinson’s essay, which analyzes the “multiplicity and heterogeneity” of Russ’s text, among others, to demonstrate “the affinity… between French theory and American fictions” is an interesting–if somewhat essentialist–example of how a postmodern perspective can be effectively brought to bear on The Female Man (115, 122).

 

9. Ayres’s essay, “The ‘Straight Mind’ in Russ’s The Female Man,” offers the most thorough analysis to date of the ways that “gender roles are indeterminate and contingent” in Russ’s novel (32). Tom Moylan has discussed the link between Russ’s novel and the separatist wing of the feminist movement (75-76). A number of critics have identified the importance of anger in the text; Moylan (74-90) and McClenahan (118-125) characterize it as an essential–and positive–element of the liberation Russ is enacting (and Russ herself has corroborated this interpretation in a 1993 interview with Donna Perry [291]; Bartkowski, on the other hand, associates it with a dangerous “false future” (61). It is Gardiner, however, who specifically contextualizes Russ’s uses of anger in The Female Man within the history of “radical feminists who focus on women’s united need to confront and attack male dominance and patriarchal institutions” (104).

 

10. Friedan’s text addressed two groups of middle-class women, both of which she felt were selling themselves short: women who stayed home and did no paid work, and women who had accepted work in industry that required no “training, effort, [or] personal commitment” (186). In the case of the former, Friedan’s occasional references to “canning plants and bakeries” as well as automatic household cleaning devices suggest she felt much of this work would be taken up by automation of one form or another (254, 216-17). As to who would take over factory work, Friedan does not say.

 

While Daniel Horowitz has recently argued persuasively that Friedan’s early leftist activism and journalism place her, and hence liberal feminism, further to the left politically than has been previously acknowledged, I maintain that Friedan shows little concern for or interest in the working class in The Feminine Mystique.

 

11. See Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and Whyte’s The Organization Man.

 

12. Riesman’s remarkable text argued for the continued expansion of automation–to a degree that would drastically reduce human work–and the elevation of “play” to a new status as the crucial activity in American life: “Objectively,” he wrote, “the new situation surrounding work permits a reduction of hours; subjectively, it permits a withdrawal of the concern work demanded in the earlier era and the investment of this concern in non-work” (263). As Howard Brick has noted, Riesman’s ideas regarding automation and work would eventually contribute to the visions of a post-scarcity America promoted by the New Left (350-62).

 

13. I do not, in fact, mean to imply that these forms of action were not crucial to the history and identity of the New Left. When I refer to the “New Left” throughout this section of my discussion, I mean specifically the American political movement that emerged in the late 1950s–a movement comprising both liberals and radicals that departed from the American “Old Left” in its resistance to the “hierarchical party structure and systematic ideology of the Communist Party” (Trimberger 434). I find Howard Zinn’s characterization of this movement as “that loose amalgam of civil rights activists, Black Power advocates, ghetto organizers, student rebels, [and] Vietnam protestors,” quite appropriate (56). It is my interest here, however, to demonstrate the underlying fascination many of these activists shared in the cybernetic technologies that were proliferating throughout the 1960s.

 

14. I am indebted to Howard Brick’s essay, “Optimism of the Mind: Imagining Postindustrial Society in the 1960s and 1970s,” for first leading me to many of the sources I cite in my discussion of the New Left’s interest in automation. Brick treats 1967 as the date after which the New Left largely lost interest in the concept of postindustrialism, remarking that by 1967, “anti-imperialist perspectives were more salient on the Left than postindustrial ones” (351). In my own discussion here I maintain that, despite the increased attention directed to Vietnam after 1967, visions of a fully automated post-scarcity America continued to flourish among New Leftists through the end of the decade.

 

15. The degree to which New Left expectations about “the pace and effect of automation” were actually naive is, of course, very open to question. For an account that underscores the dramatic and frightening effects of automation on production workers, see Denby’s “Workers Battle Automation.” For a more skeptical account of the New Left’s ideas about automation, see Adelson (251).

 

16. Gilbert, Gottlieb, and Sutheim define “cybernation” as “the automated control of automation” (426). For discussions of the impact of “The Triple Revolution,” see Rothstein (275), and Brick (353-54).

 

17. First and foremost, of course, this view was articulated by Marx, who, as David Harvey suggests, understood that “[r]evolutions in technology… had the effect of… opening up the capacity to liberate society from scarcity and the more oppressive aspects of nature-imposed necessity” (110). In the U.S., as Andrew Ross has demonstrated, the notion of a technologically enabled post-scarcity state was entertained as early as the World’s Fair of 1939 where, “technology’s potential to create a postscarcity culture out of machine rather than human labor” was one of the “principal elements of the Fair’s philosophy” (128). Yet while the Fair was billed as “the first fair in history ever to focus entirely on the future” (128), and its conception of post-scarcity was framed in these terms, the students of the New Left believed that the technologies were already available to make their vision a reality. David Riesman also anticipated a work-free America before the New Left had taken up this idea, both in The Lonely Crowd (1950) and in “Leisure and Work in Post-Industrial Society” (1958) (Brick 351-353).

 

18. In this regard, the neo-Marxists of the New Left were updating Marx’s own view that “the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases…. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom” (qtd. in Harvey 111).

 

19. See Garson, “The Movement: It’s Theory Time” (1968); Gilbert, Gottlieb, and Sutheim “Consumption: Domestic Capitalism” (1968); Sklar, “On the Proletarian Revolution and the End of Political-Economic Society” (1969); and Calvert and Neiman, A Disrupted History (1971).

 

20. In their description of their activism within the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), for example, Marge Piercy and Bob Gottlieb call for the creation of “alternative jobs, alternative ways of living in the society,” while also stressing that “we must take into account the degrees to which a person identifies with his work” (408). They envision a post-revolutionary society in which “new work-places must enable a man to sort out what is truly creative in his field, the real meat of it, from the part that is merely professional obfuscation” (408).

 

21. Given the centrality of the concept of labor to the notion of the human itself in Marx’s thought, the forms of activity that arose in a post-scarcity society would still be understood as labor from a Marxist perspective. Yet, clearly, this version of human work departed dramatically from the paid, public activities being touted by liberal feminists. My interest in this discussion, then, is how Russ fuses these apparently incompatible modes of work in her feminist project.

 

22. Moylan, for example, suggests no conflict in Russ’s portrayal of “the use of an advanced technology in the service of a female humanity” (72). Nor does Bartkowski isolate such tensions between the feminism and leftism of The Female Man, despite her reading of such tensions in another text of the same period, Woman on the Edge of Time (63-64).

 

23. The helmet is represented as currently, “turning Whileawayan industry upside down” (14).

 

24. For a discussion of such contradictory moments, in which “the sequence of events makes sudden and disorienting leaps, back and forth, across time probabilities wherein some of the events never happened or happened differently,” see Moylan (84-85).

 

25. This theory seems to be supported by the fact that the only period in which women enjoy leisure on Whileaway is when they tend their children during the children’s infancy. This is the period when there is an “other”–another kind of identity distinguished from their own. It is merely distinguished in the register of age rather than sex.

 

26. Doane writes that “The cyborg is born all at once, fully developed, a full-fledged member of the work force…. Haraway’s aim is to detach the cyborg from a past and an origin–effectively to dehistoricize it” (210). Later, Doane admonishes that “[o]riginary narratives are not the only way of conceiving of history” (211). What I offer here is not the originary narrative of the cyborg, but one of many.

 

27. The most feminized “worker” in Russ’s novel, on the other hand, is–significantly, I think–the one to whom the term “work” is never attached in any way. Late in the text Russ graphically describes a sexual encounter between Jael and her cyborg, Davy. Generated in a lab from monkey DNA, and outfitted with cybernetic components, Davy most directly embodies Haraway’s characterizations of the cyborg; he is literally part human, part animal, and part machine. Perhaps the strongest message Russ’s text offers in its creation of a notion of postindustrial “women’s work” is its presentation of a male cyborg who is socially coded in a traditionally “feminized” sense by his identity as Jael’s sex toy. Obediently dwelling in her house, where he plays, exercises, and awaits Jael’s commands, Davy represents everything Russ’s text refuses to signify as feminist work–although it was, during the years Russ was writing and until very recently, activity condescendingly characterized as “women’s work.” What Davy does is not “work” in the sense in which Russ intends this term; and what he represents is not what women should be. Rather than feminizing the meanings of work, Russ expunges an outmoded notion of femininity and reserves the term “work” for the empowering activities of Davy’s contemporary, Jael. In so doing, the text associates weakness with automated leisure and projects both onto the only male body portrayed in any detail in the text.

 

28. In the first chapter of Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, Haraway identifies with the Marxist view that “the labour process constitutes the fundamental human condition” (28). Yet if, for Haraway, “labor is the humanizing activity that makes man,” it is less clear how labor figures in the construction of the “disassembled and reassembled, post-modern collective and personal self” that is her cyborg (“Manifesto” 182, 187).

 

29. While a host of contemporary books document the crises of postindustrial labor, two of the best are the collection edited by Fraser and Freeman, and the economic study by Schor. The increasing centrality of work to American women’s lives is demonstrated most graphically by the latter, which indicates that the number of hours the average American woman works annually has increased by 305 hours since 1969 (29).

 

30. The degree to which automation put pressure on Russ’s thinking about women’s work is evident in the differences between her original conception of Whileaway in “When It Changed,” and the version she creates in The Female Man. In the early story the technology of Whileaway is characterized in mechanical rather than cybernetic terms, and there is no significant attention given to the concept of “work.” Moreover, both Russ’s 1968 novel Picnic on Paradise and her 1970 novel And Chaos Died weigh images of gendered work and leisure against a backdrop of automated societies.

 

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