Teaching Joanna Russ’s Consciousness-Raising Novels of the 70s: Three Decades Later by Batya Weinbaum, Femspec Issue 16.1

Since the turn of the millennium, I have had the wherewithal to create opportunities to teach three literature courses in times and places as seemingly remote as they possibly could be from the energy and spirit of the times and the movement in which Joanna Russ had originally written the two novels I taught -The Female Man and We Who Are About To… In this article, I describe materials used in courses and various student reader-responses especially in terms of term papers undertaken. I offer the observation that what seemed to attract the students in my second attempt to teach The Female Man were her fast-paced in-the-now flashes which apparently transcended the distance between the time of origin and the time of reception for the students much better than slow-reading plodding narratives of lives beginning with conservative values nothing like those held by most of the students years after we had created our movement.