The Female Manpartially shares the radical materialist feminist premise that positions women as a sex–class in a dual system of oppression formed by patriarchy and capitalism. To demonstrate precisely how the novel uses and departs from this premise, I will put it in dialogue with the materialist feminist classic, The Dialectic of Sex (1970) by Shulamith Firestone. Firestone was one of the first ‘secondwave’ feminists to utilize Marxist concepts for the interpretation of patriarchal power structures, taking sexual difference as the most fundamental category of social division. This view of sex–class as a natural category has been subject to severe attacks by feminists, since it is based on the assumption that the unequal power distribution in the biological family is inherent, but Firestone envisioned a social system that goes beyond the limitations she thought biology imposed upon women. In The Dialectic of Sex, the sexed human body determines the most basic power structures in human society, structures which predate all human socio–economic systems. According to Firestone, women's childbearing functions necessitate the original division of labour and establish the biological family as basic unit of reproduction. Since women as a class are oppressed because of their reproductive function in society, she greets the advent of new technologies capable of interfering with a destiny predetermined by biology:

Within this logic, technology, particularly artificial reproduction as a tool in the hands of a feminist revolution, severs the (supposedly) transhistorical tie that fixes women in a state of oppression and liberates both the child and the mother from domination by the father.