I felt it was somewhat inevitable that these four women would eventually be revealed as one person, though all under different circumstances and whatnot as Jael apparently points out later in the book.  If nothing else, we are beginning to realize that our writer Joanna Russ is slowly making her presence felt as the ‘creator’ of these characters.  Understanding that Jeannine is also Joanna, in a different time and place, makes our discussion of how Joanna, Janet, and Ms. Russ feel about her more problematic.  We’ve all noted that she is the more obsequious character thus far, being manipulated by Cal.  Her compensatory, intense relationship with Mr. Frosty, her inner turmoil of her looks rooted in Cal’s perspective, and her willingness to attach herself to someone who will not commit to her future present a portrait of a woman submitted to an unfulfilling and subordinate life.

Keeping in mind that ‘these are all the same woman’, we are forced to assume Jael’s criteria primarily account for these women’s differences.  Janet may be the most deprived member of the group, but to my thinking, even as independent a woman as Janet and as fierce a woman as Jael would be overtaken by this male mentality in power during Jeannine’s elongated Depression.  The hostility we perceive in Joanna or Janet’s feelings toward Jeannine perhaps are more rooted in a knowledge of a woman’s limits, their frustrating susceptibility to the powers of someone else.  With the knowledge of a future’s fraility due to the probabilities and possibilities inherent in each atomic movement of each organism, how enfuriating it must be for those women to see a woman such as Jeannine allow herself to be so controlled and belittled because of the caprices of time?

It seems that Ms. Russ may intentionally diminishing a woman’s actual ability to progress from the social constraints of society.  If the possibilty or the power for success and equal identity is resigned to shfiting circumstance,  where is the ability to forge one’s own destiny, to make something of oneself?  I do not think Ms. Russ wants us to believe that only men decide a woman’s circumstance.  I doubt it was a decision of men to remove themselves from female companionship for too many obvious reason; women on Whileaway have been creating their own circumstance for thousands of years.  But does that not count as a default, with men not being an option?  I’ve yet to meet Jael, who exists in a quite separate reality with men, so we’ll see, but it seems to me that Ms. Russ would have strengthened her feminist stance by not taking men out of one equation, and having them the dominant ‘variable’ in the other two women’s lives.  Joanna would be most upset with Jeannine because Jeannine seems to have laid down an unfortunate path of subordination that Joanna, in the most recent future, is forced to travel.  This relationship points to a profound disappointment Joanna has with her precedents, her former self, her very self–but again, is it Jeaninne’s fault or the male hierarchy embodied in Cal which reduces her so?  The implication of these women all being the same women, varied by mere circumstance and not individual will (where’s the feminism in that?), strikes me as conflicted enough to shape most of the events later on, and whose importance in any later convergence will very likely experience some turbulence.  Vroom Vroom