SOURCE: "Hens to Roosters: Isaac Bashevis Singer's Female Species," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 10, No. 2, Autumn, 1982, pp. 173-84.

In the following essay, Cohen considers the role of female characters in Singer's fiction through analysis of Enemies and Shosha. Cohen concludes that Singer's fiction is not misogynistic, as some feminist critics claim, but often portrays women as powerful symbolic figures that force male protagonists into uncomfortable revelations about themselves and the world.

Isaac Bashevis Singer takes issue with those female critics who say that his fiction is misogynistic. He claims that the "liberated woman [who] suspects almost every man of being an antifeminist" is like the "Jew who calls every Gentile an anti-Semite." Just as the Jew wants to be represented in literature as an exceptional individual, the staunch feminist, Singer contends, "would like writers to write that every woman is a saint and a sage and every...