On Strike Against God

A lost feminist masterwork by feminist and speculative fiction icon Joanna Russ about a young lesbian’s coming-to-consciousness during the social upheaval of the 1970s.

When Esther, a recently divorced professor, has her first lesbian love affair, the fallout brings her everyday miseries into focus and precipitates a personal crisis. She flees her small, upstate New York college town, grapples with gender confusion and the ghosts of therapists past, and fumbles her way through comedic sexual self-discovery, oscillating all the while between visionary confidence and debilitating self-doubt. Confronted with the homophobia of straight feminists and the misogyny of gay men, Esther is left to forge a language for her feminism and her burgeoning lesbian desire. On Strike Against God is quintessentially Russ: experimental but accessible, alternately wry and earnest, poignantly didactic, playful, and emotionally charged.

This new critical edition of On Strike Against God includes additional materials from Russ’s archive. An introduction by Russ scholar Alec Pollak opens the edition, and essays and interviews by contemporary writers Jeanne Thornton and Mary Anne Mohanraj grapple with Russ’s enduring influence on feminist authors today.

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. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire.

ALEX POLLAK is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her research investigates how the decisions of literary estates, the management of archives, and the mechanics of intellectual property law have influenced the legacies of early- and mid-twentieth century authors. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (winner of the 2022 Katharine Newman Best Essay Award), Feminist Theory, the LA Review of Books, and the Yale Review. She is the winner of the 2018 Ursula Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship and the 2023 Hazel Rowley Prize for her work on a biography of feminist science fiction author Joanna Russ.

Alec has received fellowships and honors from Cornell University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the New York Public Library, and Yale’s Beinecke Library, among others. She will be a Junior Fellow at the Rare Books School’s Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography beginning in 2023.