Elfriede Jelinek’s pre-feminist take on feminism doesn’t mince words. In the Austrian writer’s potent novella Women as Lovers, her own gender become »solid piles of hate«, »deformed bones« and »a necessary evil«. The text autopsies the sickening hopelessness of life without a penis in 1970s Alpine Europe in a linguistically sparse, brutally indifferent manner. The conversation may have sprawled into complication and obfuscation in the intervening years but Jelinek’s assessment of the problem – that female progress is hindered by a world controlled by men and money – still gets to the nub of things. 

The narrator of Women as Lovers presents readers with two factory workers driven by an urge to find men who might lift them out of the drudgery of life. The »good example«, Birgitte, fights off an educated, bourgeois rival to win the electrician Heinz, enjoying a degree of emancipation via his money but enduring a marriage deficient in affection. The »bad example«, Paula – the more imaginative and poetic of the two – gets pregnant on her first night with the lumberjack Erich but her mistaking of romance for love eventually drives her to prostitution.