Joanna Russ (February 22, 1937 – April 29, 2011) was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire, and the story "When It Changed".

Background

Joanna Russ was born in The Bronx, New York City, to Evarett I. and Bertha (née Zinner) Russ, both teachers. Her family was Jewish. She began creating works of fiction at a very early age. Over the following years she filled countless notebooks with stories, poems, comics and illustrations, often hand-binding the material with thread.

As a senior at William Howard Taft High School, Russ was selected as one of the top ten Westinghouse Science Talent Search winners. She graduated from Cornell University, where she studied with Vladimir Nabokov, in 1957, and received her MFA from the Yale Drama School in 1960. She was briefly married to Albert Amateau.

Russ taught at Queensborough Community College from 1966 to 1967, at Cornell from 1967 to 1972, SUNY Binghamton, from 1972 to 1975, and at the University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1975 to 1977. In 1977 she started teaching at the University of Washington. She became a full professor in 1984 and retired in 1991. Russ was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1974-1975.

Science fiction and other writing

Russ came to be noticed in the science fiction world in the late 1960s, in particular for her award-nominated novel Picnic on Paradise. She published over fifty short stories. Russ was associated with the American New Wave of science fiction.

Along with her work as a writer of prose fiction, Russ was also a playwright, essayist, and author of nonfiction works, generally literary criticism and feminist theory, including the essay collection Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts; How to Suppress Women's Writing; and the book-length study of modern feminism, What Are We Fighting For?. Her essays and articles have been published in Women's Studies Quarterly, Signs, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Science Fiction Studies, and College English. Russ was a self-described socialist feminist, expressing particular admiration for the work and theories of Clara Fraser and her Freedom Socialist Party. Both fiction and nonfiction, for Russ, were modes of engaging theory with the real world; in particular, The Female Man can be read as a theoretical or narrative text. The short story "When It Changed", which became a part of the novel, explores the constraints of gender and asks if gender is necessary in a society.

Russ's writing is characterized by anger interspersed with humor and irony. James Tiptree Jr, in a letter to her, wrote, "Do you imagine that anyone with half a functional neuron can read your work and not have his fingers smoked by the bitter, multi-layered anger in it? It smells and smoulders like a volcano buried so long and deadly it is just beginning to wonder if it can explode."

Her first SF story was "Nor Custom Stale" in F&SF (1959). Notable short works include Hugo winner and Nebula Award finalist "Souls" (1982), Nebula Award and Tiptree Award winner "When It Changed" (1972), Nebula Award finalists "The Second Inquisition" (1970), "Poor Man, Beggar Man" (1971), "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand" (1979), and "The Mystery of the Young Gentlemen" (1982). Her fiction has been nominated for nine Nebula and three Hugo Awards, and her genre-related scholarly work was recognized with a Pilgrim Award in 1988.

She wrote several contributions to feminist thinking about pornography and sexuality, including "Pornography by Women, for Women, with Love" (1985), "Pornography and the Doubleness of Sex for Women", and "Being Against Pornography", which can be found in her archival pieces located in the University of Oregon's Special Collections. These essays include very detailed descriptions of her views on pornography and how influential it was to feminist thought in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Specifically, in "Being Against Pornography", she calls pornography a feminist issue. Her issues with pornography range from feminist critiques to women's sexuality in general, maintaining that porn prevents women from freely expressing their sexual selves like men can.

Gwyneth Jones wrote a 2019 book about Joanna Russ that was part of the University of Illinois Press series called Modern Masters of Science Fiction.

In a 2004 essay about the connections between Russ's work and D. W. Griffith's film Intolerance, Samuel R. Delany describes her as being "one of the finest - and most necessary - writers of American fiction" since she published her first professional short story in 1959.

Her papers are part of the University of Oregon's Special Collections and University Archives.

Critical writings

The late 1960s and 1970s marked the beginnings of feminist SF scholarship—a field of inquiry that was all but created single-handedly by Russ, who wrote many essays on feminism and science fiction that appeared in journals such as College English and Science Fiction Studies. Her article "Amor Vincit Foeminam: The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction" discussed men struggling against female-dominated dystopias and feminist utopias. She also contributed 25 reviews to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, covering more than 100 books of all genres. In their article "Learning the 'Prophet Business': The Merril-Russ Intersection," Newell and Tallentire described Russ as an "intelligent, tough-minded reviewer who routinely tempered harsh criticism with just the sort of faint praise she handed out to Judith Merril," who in turn was among the foremost editors and critics in American science fiction in the late 1960s. Russ was also described as a fearless, incisive, and radical person, whose writing was often characterized as acerbic and angry.

Russ was acclaimed as one of science fiction's most revolutionary and accomplished writers. Helen Merrick claimed that Russ is an inescapable figure in science fiction history. James Tiptree Jr. once commented on how Russ could be an "absolute delight" one minute, but then she "rushes out and bites my ankles with one sentence." For example, Russ criticized Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 The Left Hand of Darkness, which won both the 1969 Nebula and 1970 Hugo awards for best science fiction novel, arguing that gender discriminations that permeated science fiction by men showed up just as frequently in science fiction by women. According to Russ, Le Guin's novel represented these stereotypes.

Russ felt that science fiction gives something to its readers that cannot be easily acquired anywhere else. She maintained that science should be accurate, and seriousness is a virtue. She organized these attacks into seven categories, taken from the cited article: Russ came out as a lesbian. However, Russ remained protective of her personal life,

On April 27, 2011, it was reported that Russ had been admitted to a hospice after suffering a series of strokes. Samuel R. Delany was quoted as saying that Russ was "slipping away" and had long had a "do not resuscitate" order on file. She died early in the morning on April 29, 2011.

Bibliography

Novels

  • Picnic on Paradise (Ace Books, 1968)
  • And Chaos Died (Ace Books, 1970)
  • The Female Man (Bantam Books, 1975)
  • We Who Are About To... (Dell, 1977)
  • The Two of Them (Berkley/Putnam, 1978)
  • On Strike Against God (Out & Out Books, 1980) (novella)

Short fiction collections

  • Alyx (Gregg Press, 1976). Reprinted as The Adventures of Alyx (Timescape Books, 1983).
  • The Zanzibar Cat (Arkham House, 1983)
  • Extra(ordinary) People (St. Martin's Press, 1984)
  • The Hidden Side of the Moon (St. Martin's Press, 1988)

Children's fiction

  • Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic (Daughters Publishing, 1978)

Play

  • "Window Dressing" in The New Women's Theatre, edited by Honor Moore (Random House, 1977)

Non-fiction

  • Speculations on the Subjunctivity of Science Fiction (1973)
  • Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband: The Modern Gothic (1973)
  • How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983)
  • Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (1985)
  • To Write Like a Woman (1995)
  • What Are We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism (1997)
  • The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (2007)

References

Further reading

  • BBC Radio 4 Programme Cat Women of the Moon
  • Guide to the Joanna Russ papers at the University of Oregon
  • "Joanna Russ, the Science-Fiction Writer Who Said No", New Yorker, January 30, 2020. Accessed 7/7/2025
  • Joanna Russ obituary at NY Times
  • Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays, by Joanna Russ (1985)

; Databases

  • Joanna Russ, entry at The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
  • NovelGuide.com Biography
  • Joanna Russ at Library of Congress Authorities, with 23 catalog records