SOURCE: "Boyle's 'Astronomer's Wife'," in The Explicator, Vol. 46, No. 3, Spring, 1988, pp. 51-3.

In the following essay, Gronning explores the issue of androgyny in Boyle's short story "Astronomer's Wife."

Since Kay Boyle's mother, aunt, and grandmother all fought for women's rights, it is not surprising that "Astronomer's Wife" is a feminist story. What is surprising, though, is that Boyle, in 1936, not only depicted in one of her characters—the astronomer—the old conception of androgyny as sexless, but also anticipated in the characters of the plumber and Katherine the modern definition of androgyny as sex equality: namely, a condition "in which both sexes share in the positive traits that are now sorted out by gender."

While the old definition of androgyny is a biological one meaning a plant with both stamens and pistils, or in reference to humans, an hermaphrodite, a person who as Mary Anne Warren describes, "has...