ALICE BRADLEY AND GENDER.

ALICE BRADLEY AND GENDER. Just as with the Brontes, a mystery developed as to whether James Tiptree was a man or a woman. Alice relished the opportunity that Tiptree gave her to write from what she considered to be a masculine point of view. Tiptree’s stories return again and again to issues of gender. Phillips says that Tiptree wrote of “women’s alienation in a world of men.” (p. 3) and uses as a chapter title this quote from Alice’s journals: “I live in my body as in an alien artifact.” (p. 364). Alice herself wrote in a telling passage (p. 363): “I am not a man. I am not the do-er, the penetrator. And Tiptree was ‘magical’ manhood, his pen my prick. I had through him all the power and prestige of masculinity. I was—though an aging intellectual—of those who own the world. How I loathe being a woman…..Tiptree’s ‘death’ has made me face my self-hate as a woman.”