How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
FIRST WOMAN: I'm perfectly happy. I love my husband and we have two darling children. I certainly don't need any change in my lot.
SECOND WOMAN: I'm even happier than you are. My husband does the dishes every Wednesday and we have three darling children, each nicer than the last. I'm tremendously happy.
[…]
ME: You miserable nits, I have a Nobel Peace Prize, fourteen published novels, six lovers, a town house, a box at the Metropolitan Opera, I fly a plane, I fix my own car, and I can do eighteen push-ups before breakfast, that is, if you're interested in numbers.
ALL THE WOMEN: Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. (6.5.1-6)
Through satirical scenes like this, The Feminist Man argues that patriarchy is most effective when women buy into it too, and when they learn to regulate one another's behavior by turning against any women who refuse to conform.
Quote #8
In my pride of intellect I entered a bookstore; I purchased a book; I no longer had to placate The Man; by God, I think I'm going to make it. I purchased a copy of John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women; now who can object to John Stuart Mill? He's dead. But the clerk did. With familiar archness he waggled his finger at me and said "tsk tsk." (7.1.3)
Liberal feminism argues that patriarchy will be overthrown when women are represented equally in positions of power (politics and business especially). In passages such as this, The Female Man suggests that liberal feminism won't cut it. Although Joanna has gained social status and wealth through her career, she is still condescended to by the men she meets at parties and out in public.
Quote #9
You will notice that even my diction is becoming feminine, thus revealing my true nature […] I am putting in lots of qualifiers like "rather," I am writing in these breathless little feminine tags, she threw herself down on the bed, I have no structure (she thought), my thoughts seep out shapelessly like menstrual fluid, it is all very female and deep and full of essences, it is very primitive and full of "and's," it is called "run-on sentences." (7.1.21)
This is another of the novel's satirical depictions of gender essentialism. Throughout the 1970s, a number of feminist artists and scholars argued that women really are essentially different from men, and that their art should reflect those differences. Joanna Russ wouldn't have had much of a chance to read Hélène Cixous's essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" before The Female Man was published (in fact, the two texts were published the same year), but if you give it a look, you'll get a good sense of what Russ is lampooning.