WOMEN SF WRITERS

   In the opinion of many it was a woman, Mary SHELLEY, who created sf with Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818; rev 1831). But after such a strong start women's contributions to the genre, while never entirely absent, were not substantial until the late 1960s.As a commercial genre, sf was formed chiefly by the men who edited, wrote for and read the US PULP MAGAZINES of the 1920s and 1930s. For decades the belief that most sfreaders were adolescent males imposed certain restrictions on subject matter and style - women, and women's supposed interests, were sentimentalized or ignored, and SEX was TABOO. Yet women not only read but wrote sf, sometimes under androgynous bylines, real or assumed. Pamela SARGENT has drawn attention to some of the more memorable stories writtenby and about women in her excellent anthologies Women of Wonder (anth 1974) and More Women of Wonder (anth 1976). Among the most popular some,like Leigh BRACKETT, C.L. MOORE and Andre NORTON, wrote vivid, action-packed adventure tales, as ungendered as their names, while others, like Mildred CLINGERMAN, Zenna HENDERSON and Judith MERRIL, wrote often sentimental stories dealing with more acceptable feminine concerns. Other women known for writing sf prior to the 1960s include Marion Zimmer BRADLEY, Miriam Allen DEFORD, Clare Winger HARRIS, Joan Hunter HOLLY,Lilith LORRAINE, Katherine MacClean, Margaret ST CLAIR, Wilmar H. SHIRAS, Evelyn E. SMITH, Francis STEVENS, Leslie F. STONE and Thea VON HARBOU. In addition, there have always been women producing borderline sf in the MAINSTREAM or in sf-related fields such as FABULATION, surrealism andABSURDIST, experimental, GOTHIC and UTOPIAN fiction. And women have quite often been unattributed collaborators in works published under the names of their male partners, a role that has only recently begun to be recognized.By the 1960s the sf field was changing in ways that would make it more accessible and exciting to a wider audience. Younger writers, in particular, rebelled against the old pulp limitations and set about writing sf which would combine the old-fashioned SENSE OF WONDER with more sophisticated literary values. New editors, some of them women, none of them committed to the concept of a primarily adolescent readership, played a large part in this expansion. In particular, Cele GOLDSMITH encouraged many new writers during her editorship of AMAZING STORIES and FANTASTIC (1958-65). Ursula K. LE GUIN, now one of the most respected andinfluential of all contemporary sf writers, credits Cele Goldsmith with "opening the door to me".In 1972 Harlan ELLISON stated (in his intro to"When it Changed" by Joanna RUSS in Again, Dangerous Visions [anth 1972]) that "the best writers in sf today are the women" - an opinion echoed by other knowledgeable readers throughout the 1970s, occasionally with the caveat "excepting James TIPTREE Jr". Despite Robert SILVERBERG's now notorious claim that there was something "ineluctably masculine" in the Tiptree stories (in "Who is Tiptree, What is He?", intro to Tiptree's WarmWorlds and Otherwise [coll 1975]), in 1977 Tiptree was revealed to be Alice Sheldon. Of the response to her unmasking, Sheldon commented in an interview with Charles PLATT (in Dream Makers: Volume II [coll 1983]), "The feminist world was excited because, merely by having existedunchallenged for years, 'Tiptree' had shot the stuffing out of male stereotypes of women writers."The reason that sf began to change in the 1960s and 1970s was that increasingly writers were drawn to it not becauseof an interest in its pulp traditions but for its still largely unexplored potential. The effect of the (largely male) NEW WAVE is often cited, but the impact made on the field by such diverse writers as Le Guin, Kate WILHELM, Russ, C.J. CHERRYH and Tiptree was undoubtedly stronger and morelasting than that of any single, self-proclaimed movement. Others might agree with Suzy McKee CHARNAS (in Aurora \#26, Summer 1990): "My own view of the matter was and is that in the 1960s SF was a dying or at least moribund genre (the New Wave was an effort, not very successful in my opinion, to remedy this by importing some technical stunts from the mainstream), and feminism came along in the 1970s and rescued it." (FEMINISM.)Among the women sf writers who came to prominence in the 1960sand 1970s are E.L. ARCH, Bradley, Rosel George BROWN, Octavia E. BUTLER, Charnas, Cherryh, Jo CLAYTON, Juanita COULSON, Sonya DORMAN, Suzette HadenELGIN, Carol EMSHWILLER, M.J. ENGH, Gertrude FRIEDBERG, Phyllis GOTLIEB, Diana Wynne JONES, Lee KILLOUGH, Tanith LEE, Madeleine L'ENGLE, Le Guin, A.M. LIGHTNER, Elizabeth A. LYNN, Anne MCCAFFREY, Vonda MCINTYRE, Janet MORRIS, Doris PISERCHIA, Marta RANDALL, Kit REED, Russ, Sargent, Josephine SAXTON, Jody SCOTT, Kathleen SKY, Tiptree, Lisa TUTTLE, Joan D. VINGE, Cherry WILDER, Kate WILHELM, Chelsea Quinn YARBRO and Pamela ZOLINE.Writers who became better known in the 1980s and 1990s include Gill ALDERMAN, ANNA LIVIA, Lois McMaster BUJOLD, Pat CADIGAN, Storm CONSTANTINE, Candas Jane DORSEY, Carol Nelson DOUGLAS, Sheila FINCH, Caroline Forbes (1952-), Karen Joy FOWLER, Sally Miller GEARHART, Mary GENTLE, Lisa GOLDSTEIN, Eileen Gunn, Barbara HAMBLY, Gwyneth JONES, Janet KAGAN, Leigh KENNEDY, Nancy KRESS, Kathe Koja, R.A. MACAVOY, Julian MAY, Judith MOFFETT, Pat MURPHY, Jane PALMER, Rachel POLLACK, Kristine Kathryn RUSCH, Melissa SCOTT, Joan SLONCZEWSKI, Sheri S. TEPPER and Connie WILLIS. In addition, a number of MAINSTREAM writers have made detours into sf, even if their publishers have not always labelled their novels as such. They include Margaret ATWOOD (THE HANDMAID'S TALE [1985]), Maureen DUFFY(The Gor Saga [1981]), Zoe FAIRBAIRNS (Benefits [1979]), Cecelia HOLLAND (Floating Worlds [1976]), Rhoda Lerman (1936-) (The Book of the Night [1984]), Doris LESSING (the Canopus in Argos series), Marge PIERCY (WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME [1976]), Fay WELDON (The Cloning of Joanna May [1989]) and Monique WITTIG (Les guerilleres [1969; trans 1971]). Writers as diverse as Jean M. AUEL, Christine BROOKE-ROSE, Angela CARTER, Anna KAVAN, Ayn RAND, Emma TENNANT and Christa Wolf (1929-) have also, upon occasion,been claimed for sf.The above lists make no claim to being anything like complete, but their very existence should make it clear that, while women writers of sf may still be outnumbered by men, they are by now far too numerous to be considered rare, and too various to be generalized about or compressed into a subset of "women's sf". Women contribute to all areas of the genre. Where once anthologies of stories entirely by men were customary, now they are unusual.Between 1953, when it was established, and 1967 there were no women winners of the HUGO; between 1968 and 1990 therewere 21 awards to women out of 92 in the fiction categories, while of the NEBULA awards for the years 1968-90 the figures are better still, at 28awards to women out of 91. Better again are the results of the JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD for Best New Writer, with 8 of the 19 awards to date goingto women. In all cases, more men than women vote.Have women writers been discriminated against? Such things are hard to quantify or prove, and, although most women in the field can cite occasional instances of sexism (the editor who declares that sf by women doesn't sell; the disgruntledauthor who scents a feminist conspiracy when his novel fails to win awards; the claim from an old-time fan that the values of HARD SF are being destroyed by female editors with an innately feminine preference for fantasy), on the whole the Old Boy Network of sf has been remarkably receptive to any women who care to join. The catch is one common to most societies: those who join are expected to do so on terms already established, to follow the rules and, as newcomers, know their place. Unfortunately, even after 30 years women are still considered "newcomers"by most men, and women who become too successful or break the unspoken rules and stretch the boundaries of sf, all too often arouse male hostility. Hence the antagonism so often directed at Joanna Russ - "the single most important woman writer of science fiction" according to Sarah LEFANU (in In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and ScienceFiction [1988]) - is probably as much for her challenging literary experimentation as for her uncompromising feminism. Presumably because she is so respected outside the genre, Le Guin is every so often unfairly accused by men who are not of having "renounced" sf.Women writers are by now a well established presence within sf, but this situation may not last. In How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983) Russ has argued, polemically but effectively, that even the most popular and influential female writers have been peculiarly subject to excision from the male-controlled canons of literary history. An economic contraction, followed by a redefinition of genre boundaries, might send written sf the way of Hollywood, where sf films are as narrowly confined to catering to the fears and desires of the adolescent US male as the old-fashioned pulp magazines ever were.

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   See also: WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.