Joanna Russ Quotes

Whether tentative or conclusively pessimistic, the invented, all-female worlds, with their consequent lesbianism, have another function: that of expressing the joys of female bonding, which-like freedom and access to the public world-are in short supply for many women in the real world. Sexually, this amounts to the insistence that women are erotic integers and not fractions waiting for completion. Female sexuality is seen as native and initiatory, not (as in our traditionally sexist view) reactive, passive, or potential. ("Recent Feminist Utopias")

This is the tale of a voyage that is of interest only as it concerns the doings of one small, gray-eyed woman. Small women exist in plenty-so do those with gray eyes-but this woman was among the wisest of a sex that is surpassingly wise. There is no surprise in that (or should not be) for it is common knowledge that Woman was created fully a quarter of an hour before Man, and has kept that advantage to this very day. Indeed, legend has it that the first man, Leh, was fashioned from the sixth finger of the left hand of the first woman, Loh, and that is why women have only five fingers on the left hand. The lady with whom we concern ourselves in this story had all her six fingers, and what is more, they all worked.

The point is to show how small the greatest of disasters can appear when seen from a distance of several billion miles or years.

Anyway everyboy (sorry) knows that what women have done that is really important is not to constitute a great, cheap labor force that you can zip in when you're at war and zip out again afterwards but to Be Mothers, to form the coming generation, to give birth to them, to nurse them, to mop floors for them, to love them, cook for them, clean for them, change their diapers, pick up after them, and mainly sacrifice themselves for them. This is the most important job in the world. That’s why they don’t pay you for it.

I began reading science fiction in the 1950s and got from it a message that didn't exist anywhere else then in my world. Explicit sometimes in the detachable ideas, implicit in the gimmicks, peeking out from behind often intolerably class-bigoted, racist, and sexist characterizations, somehow surviving the usual America-the-empire-is-good plots, most fully expressed in the strange life-forms and strange, strange, wonderfully strange landscapes, was the message:
Things can be really different

Leaning her silly, beautiful, drunken head on my shoulder, she said, "Oh, Esther, I don't want to be a feminist. I don't enjoy it. It's no fun." "I know," I said. "I don't either." People think you decide to be a "radical," for God's sake, like deciding to be a librarian or a ship's chandler. You "make up your mind," you "commit yourself" (sounds like a mental hospital, doesn't it?). I said Don't worry, we could be buried together and have engraved on our tombstone the awful truth, which some day somebody will understand: WE WUZ PUSHED. (p37)

You have to have conventions and rigid symbols and patterns before you can upset them.

Anger is a necessity. It's part of all radicalism. When Marxism isn't second-generation, academic, and establishment-theoretical, its motive is sheer fury. What else? When groups get past a certain point of oppression, it's a revelation to be angry. Prior to that you'd go through a stage of feeling you have to be so moral, so good, that anger seems inappropriate; you think you shouldn't get angry. Eventually you get to a place where you can more honestly express that anger, and that's fine. Mother Jones said, "Farmers in this state are raising too much corn and not enough hell!" There's a point where it's essential to get in touch with anger in situations where people or structures are dumping on you. You need this anger to resist looking at the structure and saying, "It's us, it's our fault"; or "What they're saying is true, we must be wrong." If you lose touch with this outrage, you wind up forgetting what you were mad about in the first place; you start feeling that you'd really rather not get involved, that you can't change things, that it's no use. Oppression is always mystifying and confusing. Lying, really.

I'm not anti-utopian in spirit. I'm just not so naive as to think that people can discard who they are. My point isn't that utopia is impossible-I think "Bodies" presents a real utopia-but that creating it isn't as simple as most SF implies.

Dismissing the whole thing as the world’s aberration and not mine, I went back to bed.

It’s that idea of disguise that I find myself coming back to. You can really, in a sense, be anybody or anybodies, plural, in writing.

After she had finished her work at the North Pole, Jannina came down to the Red Sea refineries where she had family business, jumped to New Delhi for dinner, took a nap in a public hotel in Queensland, walked from the hotel to the station, bypassed the Leeward Islands (where she thought she might go, but all the stations were busy), and met Charley to watch the dawn over the Carolinas. (beginning of "nobody's Home")

Fucking, if you will forgive the pun, is an anti-climax.

[about feminism] I'm going to propose as the primary demand of patriarchy what she chooses from Matilda Joslyn Gage (1873):n2 that women's resources be available, non-reciprocally and without pay, to men. If men have an unreasonable and unjust double amount of authority (intellectual and other), self-esteem, time, energy, leisure, cultural importance, wealth, freedom, and so on, this is precisely because they have stolen our time, our energy, our leisure, our authority, our labor and the wealth it produces, our self-esteem, our claims to knowledge and achievement, and our possibilities for autonomy and freedom. We are not merely excluded from male activities and institutions; our resources have been appropriated by men as their own in a massive theft lasting for centuries.

How withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil.