Feminist Criticism and Science Fiction for Children

I have selected Le Guin's and Sargent's books because they each offer something unique to feminist criticism of science fiction. Many feminists have counted the number of females represented in titles or as protagonists, characters, or writers; many have identified the roles taken by females.¹ Such a focus discolses the facts. Science fiction (or SF) has been and still largely is the domain of men (or boys). Written by and about males about ninety percent of the time, it is read by males (often adolescents) about ninety percent of the time. Females serve as mothers, daughters, victims (to be rescued), and housewives. As amazons (or the dominant sex), they are dangerous; as scientists, they are spinsters; but as anything, they are predictable. They do not surprise because they do not spring from the imagination but rather satisfy traditional expectations. The genre that by definition supposedly extrapolates the future on the basis of the present is, for the most part, hidebound by mid-Victorian gender roles. These are the facts. Frequently, they are repeated and examined at length. Inappropriately, they are sometimes used to censure specific books.² And fortunately, they lead critics such as Le Guin and Sargent to place them in a context and to assess their importance. For Sargent, "the role of feminism in science fiction is ultimately a part of a more general desire to see the genre expand its horizons."³ For Le Guin, "the 'subjection of women' in SF [is] merely a symptom of a whole which is authoritarian, power-worshiping, and intensely parochial."⁴ For both, in other words, the number and roles of females are less important than the literary and moral implications of the genre's obvious catering to white, middle-class males.

Pamela Sargent's three books are a fundamental resource for critics interested in women and science fiction. Historical in perspective, they offer (in addition to stories by and about women) Sargent's three lengthy essays on the development of the role of females in science fiction. Primarily, these introductory essays survey the works of women writers of science fiction from its beginning in the early nineteenth century to 1977. Two other subjects, how male writers have dealt with female characters and how SF may predict and perhaps shape the future, are of secondary interest. Sargent's survey of women writers of SF is the only one in existence and is invaluable for the understanding it provides of women's effect on the genre's development. She traces the influence of women over five periods, from Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein (1818) has been called "the first real novel of science fiction,"⁵ to Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr. (actually Alice Sheldon), Vonda McIntyre, Kate Wilhelm, Suzy Charnas, and other women, whose novels in the seventies contain explicitly feminist elements.

During the first period, that of the nineteenth century, apparently only two women wrote SF, Mary Shelley and Rhonda Broughton. Shelley introduced three features which became important trends in SF: the potential destructiveness of technology in Frankenstein, the post-holocaust story in The Last Man (1826), and the absence of important female characters in both. Broughton's story about precognition, however, centers around a heroine. The work of both women exhibits features to become characteristic of SF in the 1960's. As opposed to the emphasis on "hardware"⁶ and adventure dominating the essentially masculine SF of the first half of the twentieth century, the women display concern for characterization and for the psychological and sociological effects of technology and extrasensory perception.

In the early twentieth century a few women were successful SF writers. Sargent...