Home > Kindred Summary & Study Guide > Essays and Criticism > Time Travel as a Feminist Didactic in Works by Phyllis Eisenstein, Marlys Millhiser, and Octavia Butler

Kindred | Time Travel as a Feminist Didactic in Works by Phyllis Eisenstein, Marlys Millhiser, and Octavia Butler

In the following excerpt, Beverly Friend asserts that Kindred reveals weaknesses in modern women and inequities in their treatment that have not been eliminated despite the relatively better conditions of contemporary society.

[Dana, the] heroine of Kindred, is … at the mercy of an outside force. An unpublished writer, she is working at a mind-stultifying job with a temporary employment firm when she meets and marries co-worker and fellow author Kevin. They are just setting up housekeeping in a new residence when Dana is suddenly pulled back to the year 1815 to save a little boy, Rufus Weylin, from drowning. But this tale goes far beyond a mere recitation of twentieth-century woman facing nineteenth-century life, for while Kevin and Rufus are white, Dana is black. Even more important, Rufus, son of a...

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