When it changed: women in 1970s Science Fiction

When It Changed

Introduction

There’s a tendency in Science Fiction studies—and in Prof. ----'s class they proved remarkably good at it, despite not being abject SF writers—to try to establish the “earliest” science fiction. War of the Worlds (1897)? Surely not! Remember Jules Verne? From Earth the Moon was 1867. But Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) predated that. Then I must nominate The Man in the Moone by the English cleric Francis Godwin, published in 1638, where a man is flown to the moon by swans. But that opens up Aristophanes’s The Birds (414 BC), does it not? Sure, and so I’m going to nominate the space flight undertaken in the Epic of Gilgamesh (2100 BC)!

The question of the first woman-penned feminist science fiction is not quite as thorny, but odds are someone will mention Frankenstein, a book about how a male scientist built a living human, a creative act formerly the province of women. I would point out that the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), may have been a feminist but she surely was not a feminist in the modern sense. In 1818, for one illustrative example, women didn’t have the right to vote.

Frequently cited as a first flowering of feminism is C L Moore, author of the Jirel of Joiry stories (and wife/co-writer of Henry Kuttner). Writing in the US in the 1930s and 1940s, she was credited as an early female fantasy writer. Jirel was a tough, beautiful fighter in Moore’s classic Sword and Sorcery stories. US women were able to vote by this time: The ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution took place on August 18, 1920. But even in 1950, women in the real US were often not able to open a bank account without a male co-signer. Only the previous year, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex. The concepts of feminism had just begun to trickle in. Jirel may have been a tough, redheaded babe, but neither she nor her author lived in the modern world.

SF men were going great guns, literally and figuratively. After Verne, men reacted to the rapidly developing conditions of the Enlightenment, Positivism, the Industrial Revolution and the opening of new frontiers by writing science fiction. Much early US SF was of the “pulp” variety. Still read today is E E “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen stories of the 1930s and 1940s. Tough, square-jawed and yet intellectual, the Lensmen brought peace to the galaxy/ies with the aid of superior alien technology, a dash of faintly fascist eugenics, endless mighty space battles and lots of blowing shit up. You won’t be surprised to hear that the female bloodline of the Lensmen were tough redheads. Despite the fact that many alien genders achieved Lensman status, somehow female humans were not worthy. (There is one exception, to make the story work, but she eventually eschews her lens. Probably not feminine enough for her.) “Doc” Smith’s Skylark series was similar. His hero? Think Captain America crossed with buff Elon Musk fighting giant space battles.

Endless space battles soon transferred to the Saturday Morning Serials, comics and the big screen, and SF disentangled from the pulpiest of pulps and attempted to explore the Condition of Man. The big three—Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke—produced vast quantities of work that adequately explored science (Asimov), innovation, society and law (Heinlein) and science tinged with vague religious symbolism (Clarke). They rarely explored the interiority of their male characters, who were mostly white male marionettes draped with opinions, and the writers couldn’t explore the interiority of their female characters (at least at first) as they didn’t seem to realize women had any thoughts of their own, merely a few story-motivating emotions like love, greed and spite.

Critics have argued that this lack of interiority is not due to “bad writing,” but arises from SF’s vastly different focus from the novel. The bourgeois novel arose contemporaneously with the concept of individual identity. It often set out to investigate the individual’s place in society. SF sets out to investigate the impact on society of an idea or radical change. Critic Darko Suvin introduced the concept of the “novum.” “SF is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional “novum” (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic.”

Noted critic Kingsley Amis, in New Maps of Hell, is pro-cardboard character. “[Science fiction’s] most important use, I submit, is a means of dramatizing social inquiry, as providing a fictional mode in which cultural tendencies can be isolated and judged.”

Writer Joanna Russ (1975) stated, “… science fiction’s emphasis is always on phenomena—to the point where reviewers and critics can commonly use such phrases as “the idea as hero.”

Scott Sanders goes further and describes SF as refusing to deal with individuals because the age of the individual has ended. ““Character” was the focus of the bourgeois novel, at a time when the individual was the kingpin of liberal ideology, and when the economic system was still primitive enough to make such an ideology convincing. During the nineteenth century the middle classes of Western Europe and America were still persuaded that the individual was an autonomous creature, the true unit of value, capable of determining his own destiny,” he wrote in 1977. “In this respect science fiction parallels developments in the twentieth-century mainstream novel. While such writers as Kafka, Musil and Beckett have recorded the dissolution of character under the pressures of recent history, science fiction as a genre begins by assuming that dissolution, and explores the causes. Science fiction deals, in other words, with the same social and intellectual developments whose intimate effects on personality have been explored in modernist fiction; the two literary modes examine the outside and inside of the same phenomenon,” Sanders continues.

Isaac Asimov split the difference. “Science fiction stories are notoriously weak on characterization as compared with mainstream stories. [If true] there happens to be a good reason for it. The characters are a smaller portion of science fiction than of the mainstream. The double task of building the background society and developing the foreground plot is extremely difficult, and it requires an extraordinary amount of the writer’s attention. There is that much less attention that is, or can be, paid to the characters. There is, physically, less room in the story for character development.” (Asimov, 1981 quoted in enotes.)

If men were reduced to cyphers in these multiverse-spanning tales, what became of the women? Apart from the occasional Swordswoman and Part-Time Lensman, they languished.

In the Seventies, things changed. In the US the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was signed into effect on October 28, 1974, making it illegal for financial institutions to discriminate on the basis of sex, granting women for the first time the right to apply for and obtain credit in their own names without needing a male co-signer. Birth control, including the pill, was available. Comstock had recently been repealed. Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973.

(Slight digression: There’s a concept called the Long Sixties which asserts that the societal changes of the Sixties stretch back into the Fifties and into the mid-Seventies. I can’t argue for the Fifties here, as any reader of Philip K Dick will quickly realize that societal changes had not reached the lofty heights of SF yet. I’m prepared to backdate the Change in Science Fiction to 1967, with Pamela Zoline’s boundary-smashing “Heat Death of the Universe.” But that was published in the British Magazine New Worlds, and the New Wave in SF washed up five years earlier on those shores.)

Feminism developed rapidly in the 1970s. So rapidly that a table may be easier on the reader’s attention span.

Key 1970s feminist Works (Books & Articles)

Author	Title	Year	Type
Laura Mulvey	“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”	1975	Article
Kate Millett	Sexual Politics	1970	Book
Shulamith Firestone	The Dialectic of Sex	1970	Book
Mary Daly	Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation	1973	Book
Adrienne Rich	Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution	1976	Book
Ann Oakley	Sex, Gender and Society	1972	Book
Juliet Mitchell	Psychoanalysis and Feminism	1974	Book
Luce Irigaray	Speculum of the Other Woman	1974 (French)	Book
Susan Brownmiller	Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape	1975	Book
Robin Morgan (ed.)	Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement	1970	Anthology
Germaine Greer	The Female Eunuch	1970	Book
Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, Sharon Thompson (eds.)	Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality	1983	Anthology of 1970s work

Though male science fiction writers may have remained more interested in Moon landings and Voyager missions, women were “doing the work” as the kids say these days.

In 1975 the zine Khatru devoted two issues to a “round-robin” of snail-mail letters exchanged between a number of women writers unhappy with the genre (Suzy McKee Charnas, Virginia Kidd, Ursula K LeGuin, Vonda McIntyre, Raylyn Moore, Joanna Russ, Luise White, Kate Wilhelm and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro), one man (Samuel R Delany), and one woman everyone believed was a man (James Tiptree,  Jr.) (Long story.)

In the early part of the Khatru document, writers take time to state that the genre has not done justice to either sex. Ursula K LeGuin wrote, “‘Golden Age’ writers were not writing a fiction of character or of passion; they were writing in an impersonalized genre of ideas-technology-adventure; and so all their characters were necessarily two-dimensional. Male characters were more frequent than female, but just as wooden, vapid, and stereotyped. SF now has vastly enlarged its artistic range, and so has room for people in it. Both sexes.”

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro wrote, “Many of the fans I know who read sf read it entirely for the ideas, and they don’t like characterization to get in the way. I find this incomprehensible, but I have seen enough of it to know that a significant number of our readers would prefer cardboard cutouts for people so that they don’t have to deal with anything more than the idea. This might be immature (I think it is, but that’s my opinion), it might be all kinds of unrealistic, but face it, my dears, a good number of those readers give out the Hugos [then as now the pre-eminent awards for the genre].”

As the round-robin progresses, the writers delve more and more deeply into the reasons why women rarely wrote, and even less rarely starred in, SF until the 1970s.

The Khatru conversation is worth reading in its entirety as it illustrates the extent of the writers’ dissatisfaction. The contributors and their fellow SF writers also, of course, attended symposia, and produced articles and books of theory of their own.

 

1970s Non-Fiction Books and Articles on Feminism by SF Writers

Author	Title	Year	Type
Joanna Russ	“The Image of Women in SF”	1970	Essay
Joanna Russ	“What Can a Heroine Do? Or, Why Women Can’t Write”	1972	Essay
Joanna Russ	“Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction”	1975	Essay
Ursula K. Le Guin	“American SF and the Other”	1975	Essay
Ursula K. Le Guin	“Is Gender Necessary?”	1976	Essay
Suzy McKee Charnas	Non-fiction essays on feminist SF (various articles)	1970s	Essay Collection
Marge Piercy	Review essays on feminist SF (various)	1970s	Essays

And of course, the contributors and their cohort continued to write SF books and short stories incorporating these modern theories.

1970s Feminist SF Novels

Title	Author	Year	Main Theme/Significance
The Female Man	Joanna Russ	1975	Multiple realities; gender and identity
Woman on the Edge of Time	Marge Piercy	1976	Utopian futures; mental health
Walk to the End of the World	Suzy McKee Charnas	1974	Misogyny, oppression, survival
Motherlines	Suzy McKee Charnas	1978	Matriarchal society, independence
Dreamsnake	Vonda N. McIntyre	1978	Healing, nontraditional heroism
The Dispossessed	Ursula K. Le Guin	1974	Utopia, anarchism, society
Kindred	Octavia E. Butler	1979	Race, gender, time travel
We Who Are About To...	Joanna Russ	1977	Bodily autonomy, anti-colonization

 

1970s Feminist SF Novellas and Short Stories

Title	Author	Year	Notes/Significance
“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”	James Tiptree, Jr.	1976	All-female society; male violence
“When It Changed”	Joanna Russ	1972	Gender & society on an isolated planet
“The Women Men Don’t See”	James Tiptree, Jr.	1973	Women’s alienation, survival
“The Girl Who Was Plugged In”	James Tiptree, Jr.	1973	Media, bodies, gender agency
“Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand”	Vonda N. McIntyre	1973	Healing, female protagonist
“The Funeral”	Kate Wilhelm	1972	Family, mourning, women’s experience

The change in SF demographics (both of readers and writers) that began in the seventies gathered momentum like an asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere. The SF landscape in 2015 barely resembles the landscape of 1955—which many would say is a good thing.

 Why 2015? I would argue that the gyroscope began to wobble with the advent of the Sad Puppies in 2013, but that’s a story for another day.

 

OK, fine. Here’s a short list of feminist, woman-written stories that I found compelling.

Recommended Reading

Writer	Type	Story Name	Date	Subject
Octavia Butler	Short Story	Bloodchild	1984	Male pregnancy
Joanna Russ	Short Story	When It Changed	1972	Gender & society on an isolated planet
Pamela Zoline	Short Story	The Heat Death of the Universe	1967	Entropy and womanhood
Joanna Russ	Novel	We Who Are About To…	1977	Bodily autonomy

 

Sources

Joanna Russ (1975) Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction

https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/6/russ6art.htm retrieved 07/23/25

Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, 1960

Jirel of Joiry basic background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jirel_of_Joiry

Darko Suvin1978 https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/14/suvin14art.htm retrieved 07/23/25

Khatru Issues #3 and #4 https://www.fanac.org/fanzines/Khatru/Khatru03.pdf retrieved 07/30/25

Scott Sanders 1977 https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/11/sanders11.htm Retrieved 07/23/25

Isaac Asimov: Asimov on Science Fiction. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1981

enotes: https://www.enotes.com/topics/golden-age-short-science-fiction/criticism/criticism-major-golden-age-short-science-fiction/patricia-ferrara-essay-date-summer-1987 retrieved July 23 2025

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The above was written for a class in Fiction writing. Given it isn't fiction, did it get a good grade? It was an ungraded class but the prof did say I "did a lot of work" and he "always enjoyed" having me "in the class," a masterwork of not actually grading it.  I did also submit some fiction. Those pieces did well.