Books

Proud Man
List Price:$14.95
FP Price:$11.96

KATHARINE BURDEKIN was born in England in 1896 and, often writing under the name Murray Constantine, published more than ten novels before her death in 1963. Her dystopian novel Swastika Night (1937) was reissued by The Feminist Press in 1985.

more about this author

Proud Man

Katharine Burdekin

Foreword by Daphne Patai. Afterword by Daphne Patai.

Proud Man is told from the perspective of a "Genuine Person" who has been thrown back in time thousands of years from a peaceful future society. The Genuine Person comes from a people that are androgynous, self-fertilizing, and vegetarian; they live without a national government and artificial social divisions of gender and class. Taking on first female, then male form, the "Genuine Person" confronts the deeply troubled reality of England in the 1930s, still battered after one World War and on the road to another. This searing, timely novel offers an incisive critique of the politics of privilege, violence, and militarism in the West.

"Proud Man is an interesting and compelling novel of social criticism. I expect this novel to become a crucial text for women's studies courses."

—Susan Squier, associate professor of English, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and co-editor of Arms and the Woman: War, Gender and Literary Representation (1989)

"Change, both future and past, is inexorable in Burdekin's work, a constant and necessary Hegelian struggle toward a comfortable state of nature. Burdekin . . . may prove more visionary that her contemporaries George Orwell and Aldous Huxley."

—The Village Voice

"Katharine Burdekin is a long neglected, fascinating, and important feminist critic of the cruel dimensions of our society."

—Blanche Wiesen Cook, author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume One, 1884-1933