This speech wasn't a major departure from Le Guin's preferred subject matter. Her reputation as an excellent science fiction author tends to undersell the amount of latent cultural activism that lingers in almost all of her works. Particularly evident in her Left-Handed Address is her belief in the differences between the genders that, together, should balance each other out.

As one author wrote:

Her motifs are drawn from the paired archetypal symbols common to poetry, myth and romance: darkness and light, male and female, speech and silence, seen not as opposed polarities, but rather as twin parts of a balanced, meaningful whole. (Source)

That, uhh… pretty much sums it up, right?

Throughout her speech, Le Guin parallels the differences between men and women, and argues that women haven't done enough to advocate or claim satisfaction for their half of the relationship. Sure, women are inherently different from men, but that's a good thing, according to Le Guin. They just need to stop playing by men's rules, and balance will be restored.

So, this address is a perfect example of her favorite motifs: the contrasting balance of darkness and light, male and female:

Well, so that is our country. The night side of our country. If there is a day side to it, high sierras, prairies of bright grass, we only know pioneers' tales about it, we haven't got there yet. We're never going to get there by imitating Machoman. We are only going to get there by going our own way, by living there, by living through the night in our own country. (58-62)

When you think about the cultural climate this speech was given in, you start to realize that the subject matter was a really important one. Think about the fashion of the "professional woman" in the 1980s. It involved largely cut business suits, with shoulder pads. The bigger the better. And what are shoulder pads, other than a way to make women look like they're built like men?

In order to succeed in a man's world, women were dressing more and more like their male counterparts, instead of playing up their own, more feminine attributes. Le Guin was arguing that women would never truly succeed that way – they needed to stop letting men call the shots and start taking things into their own hands.