Conventional wisdom holds that science fiction was written almost exclusively by men until the advent of feminism in the 1960s and ’70s. But when Lisa Yaszek, who teaches science fiction studies at Georgia Tech, went digging through old magazines, she discovered a very different story.

“I was so surprised to see how many women there were in science fiction before women really came into the genre in the 1970s with feminist science fiction,” Yaszek says in Episode 346 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I kept uncovering these anthologies with all of these women who were clearly well-known and celebrated in their day, and who I had never heard of.”

In fact, women writers were relatively common throughout the pulp era, and the proportion of women readers was even higher. “At least 15 percent of the science fiction community were women—producers—and reading polls suggest that 40 to 50 percent of the readers were women,” Yaszek says. “So there were always a lot of women in the genre.”

Some people also believe the small number of women who did write science fiction were forced to assume male pseudonyms in order to get published, but Yaszek says that’s mostly a myth. Pseudonyms were common in the pulp era for a variety of reasons, and men were just as likely to adopt female pen names as women were to adopt male ones.

“There are a few really well-known cases of women writing under male pseudonyms, and those two or three cases have somehow come to stand in for all the women in science fiction,” she says. “But when I went to look at this, most women didn’t publish under male pseudonyms.”

So why do we have such a distorted view of history? Yaszek says that the first science fiction anthologies were published during a backlash against first-wave feminism, and that male editors such as John W. Campbell and Groff Conklin specifically excluded women from their lineups.

“For whatever reasons, they had it in their heads that women couldn’t write,” she says, “and when they sat down to make the first anthologies—the genre was finally old enough to tell its own history—they really consciously dropped women out of that history.”

Listen to the complete interview with Lisa Yaszek in Episode 346 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Lisa Yaszek on galactic suburbia:

“‘Galactic suburbia’ is a phrase that was coined by feminist science fiction author Joanna Russ, and it was a way to talk about stories that did a really great job of imagining wild new scientific and technological futures, but then completely failed to figure out how new sciences and technologies might change society. So you’ll have these futures where we’ve colonized the universe and we have all kinds of new elements and superstructures, but everyone still lives in heterosexual families with 2.3 children in suburbs that look a lot like 1950s suburbs, and sex and gender relations haven’t changed. … And Russ was like, that’s so bizarre, because every time science and technology changes, society changes.”

Lisa Yaszek on the Library of America:

“The Library of America is a nonprofit organization that is designed to preserve and celebrate America’s literary heritage. The way I often explain it to people is, the books that you read in your English lit classes in high school and college are pretty much determined by the Library of America. So absolutely, if they say it’s literature, then we all accept that it’s literature. … One of the things they’ve wanted to do is to widen their mandate, and to think about popular variations of literature, and how it is that detective fiction and science fiction and fantasy and weird fiction are all part of the American literary tradition. So they had hired on three science fiction editors, and I got to come on as one of those, and that’s been really exciting.”

Lisa Yaszek on John W. Campbell and Judith Merril:

“[Campbell] was going on and on about how women can’t write science fiction, and [Merril] said, ‘Well, I bet I could write a science fiction story you’d buy,’ and he said, ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen,’ and she said, ‘I bet I could write a story you’ll buy, and you’ll beg me for more.’ … So she wrote [‘That Only a Mother’], and Campbell loved the story. He bought it from her, and he was like, ‘Oh my gosh. You were right, I was wrong. This is an amazing story. I want more from you.’ So she sent him her next story, which was a space colonization story—good standard science fiction fare—and he rejected it because he said, ‘There are no mothers in it. I don’t really want this from you. You should be writing more about mothers.'”

Lisa Yaszek on C.L. Moore and Joanna Russ:

“C.L. Moore says she always used to write her female characters to look like what she wished she looked like, so Jirel is a thousand feet tall, and has perfectly curled, flowing red hair, and she’s young, and she’s strong, and she’s cool—she’s actually kind of stubborn and stupid too, which is charming in its own way. And [Joanna Russ’] Alyx is so clearly a 1970s feminist response to that earlier heroine, because she’s nothing like Jirel, ultimately. She’s middle-aged, she’s getting thick through the middle, she’s not really thrilled about how she looks but she really likes her life. She has a husband. … And I love the idea that a dumpy middle-aged woman can be a hero too, and that we don’t all have to be beautiful supermodels in brass brassieres or anything like that.”

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