Russ created a repressed world straight out of the Arabian Nights so that she could examine the world in which she grew up. The mock Moslem planet Al-ed-deen is really America in the 1950s. It is a world which keeps women locked away in harems just like the suburbs of the 1950s which served to lock women away into Donna Reedlike homes with proper, clean-cut American children.

The Two of Them is concerned with the lives of women. How productive or fulfilling are the lives of individual women? What options do they have?

At the beginning of the book, Irene seems to be drifting without any goals.

Her mother also seems to have settled into a simple, comfortable existence.

There seems to be only two options for Irene (and other women). She can either drift through life and eventually become a wife and mother or she...