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History

Feminist science fiction (SF) distinguishes between female SF authors and feminist SF authors. Both female and feminist SF authors are historically significant to the feminist SF subgenre as female writers have increased women's visibility and perspectives in SF literary traditions, while the feminist writers have foregrounded political themes and tropes in their works. Because distinctions between female and feminist can be blurry, whether a work is considered feminist can be debatable, but there are generally agreed-upon canonical texts, which help define the subgenre.

As early as the English Restoration, female authors used themes of SF and imagined futures to explore women’s issues, roles, and place in society. This can be seen as early as 1666 in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World in which she describes a utopian kingdom ruled by an empress. This foundational work has garnered attention from some feminist critics, such as Dale Spender, who considered this a forerunner of the science fiction genre.[3] Another early female writer of science fiction was Mary Shelley. Her novel Frankenstein (1818) dealt with the asexual creation of new life and has been considered by some a re-imagining of the Adam and Eve story.[4] In 1818, Mary E. Bradley Lane authored Mizora: A Prophecy, in which women chemically synthesize food.

Among the first feminist SF writers those involved in the utopian literature movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These texts, emerging during the first-wave feminist movement, often addressed issues of sexism through imagining future worlds that challenged gender expectations. Two American Populist publishers, A.O. Grigsby and Mary P. Lowe, published a book that explored issues of gender norms and structural inequality titled NEQUA or The Problem of the Ages (1900). This recently rediscovered novel displays familiar SF conventions, which include a female protagonist who masquerades as a man, the exploration of sexist mores, and description of a future hollow earth society where women are equal. In addition to NEQUA and other early feminist works,The Sultana's Dream (1905), by Bengali Muslim feminist Roquia Sakhawat Hussain, engages with the limited role of women in colonial Bangladesh. Through depicting a gender-reversed purdah in an alternate technologically futuristic world, Hussain illustrates the potential for cultural insights through role reversals early on in the subgenre's formation. Along similar lines, Charlotte Perkins Gilman explored and critiqued the expectations of women and men by creating a single-sex world in Herland (1915).

During the 1920s and 1930s, much of the popular pulp science fiction magazines exaggerated views of masculinity and featured sexist portrayals of women.[5] These views were subtly satirized by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm (1932) and much later by Margaret Atwood in The Blind Assassin (2000). As early as 1920, however, women writers of this time, such as Clare Winger Harris (The Runaway World, 1926) and Gertrude Barrows Bennett (Claimed, 1920) published science fiction stories written from female perspectives and occasionally dealing with gender and sexuality-based topics.

The Post-WWII and Cold War eras were pivotal and often overlooked periods in feminist SF history. During this time, female authors utilized the SF genre to critically assess the rapidly changing social, cultural, and technological landscape. Women SF authors during the post-WWII and Cold War eras directly engage in the exploration of the impacts of science and technology on women and their families, which was a focal point in public consciousness during 50s and 60s. These women SF authors often published in SF magazines such as The Avalonian, Astounding, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy, which were open to new stories and authors that pushed the boundaries of form and content.

During the post-WWII and Cold War period, economic restructuring, scientific advancements, new domestic technologies (washing machines, electric appliances, etc.), increased economic mobility for the middle class, and an emphasis on consumptive practices carved out a new technological domestic sphere where women had a narrow, new job description: the professional housewife.

Literature published during this period contained feminist SF stories told from the perspectives of women (characters and authors) who often identified with traditional roles of housewives or homemakers. However, this was very much a subversive act in many ways given the traditionally male-centered nature of the SF genre and society during that time. In Galactic Suburbia, author LIsa Yaszek recovers many women SF authors of the post-WWII era such as Judith Merril, author of “That Only a Mother”(1948), “Daughters of Earth” (1952), “Project Nursemaid” (1955), “The Lady Was a Tramp” (1957); Alice Eleanor Jones “Life, Incorporated” (1955), “The Happy Clown” (1955), “Recruiting Officer” (1955); and Shirley Jackson “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts” (1955) and “The Omen (1958). These authors often blurred the boundaries of feminist SF fiction and feminist speculative fiction, but their work laid substantive foundations for Second Wave Feminist SF authors to directly engage with the feminist project. “Simply put, women turned to SF in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s because it provided them with growing audiences for fiction that was both socially engaged and aesthetically innovative” (Yaszek, p. 22).