Celebrating Women’s History Month!
I grew up reading a lot of science fiction: magazines such as Analog and Weird Tales; even the lesser known (but far more interesting) books, John Carter of Mars and Pellucidar, by Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs. Friday evenings in my hometown of Indianapolis always meant gathering in front of the TV late at night to watch local celebrity Sammy Terry present some weird or scary B-movie, many of which seemed to involve horrifyingly evil queens or Amazon women battling each other to the death.
Decades later, I’m still debating as to whether any of this was a good thing.
You see, the sci fi shows, stories and novels of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I began ingesting their messages, were, to put it baldly, ripe with misogyny. From cover art that usually featured half-naked, nubile females, right down to the chauvinistic tales within, most denigrated women. Even the original Star Trek, as advanced as it was for the distant era in which it was shown, endlessly repeated sad old tropes about women’s roles in society.
Meanwhile, I, imbibing all this, was an adolescent growing up in a landscape of blatant sexism. I lived in a world in which women were dismissed and demeaned in ways no Gen Y or Z woman could even begin to imagine. Employment advertisements were habitually separated into jobs for Men and Women (no, there were no other genders, or even the suggestion of such; homosexuality was still illegal in most states, and there was but one known transgender person, Christine Jorgensen. So let’s not traipse off into that interesting little detour!) No matter what job a woman applied for, she was administered a typing test. A married woman could not open a bank account or obtain a credit card in her own name without her husband’s signature; some banks even denied accounts to single women, as I learned to my dismay when trying to open a checking account at the age of 20, using the same bank where I’d held a savings account since early childhood. At 20, employed full-time and living on my own, my paycheck stub and savings account were not proof enough of my ability manage money; I had to present a letter from my employer.
Meanwhile, domestic abuse, no matter how brutal, was shrugged off as a personal problem between two spouses. The police would not intervene, except to possibly arrest the abuser for homicide when the problems escalated.
It was a harsh and pitiless environment through which we young women scuttled.
So I retreated, escaping to imagined futures, where a woman of any race could board an interstellar ship with at least the rank of lieutenant…while the male captain womanized his way throughout the galaxy. 2001: A Space Odyssey, taught me that I could aspire to being a stewardess on a starliner, waiting on male scientists. Reading Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars, I was assured that I might someday travel from Mars to Earth, and even save the planet Venus from terrorists…but my real job was to work in the on-board nursery of the starship. Women have more important things to do, I was instructed at the end of that novel, than building bridges or piloting a starship. A sci-fi magazine story told me of a future Earth in chaos, ruled by warring groups of women who spent their days battling over men. Reading a later Heinlein book, Time Enough for Love, I was reassured that it was all right for me, as a mere woman, to be a brilliant scientist, as long as I was pregnant with the child of the ultimate alpha male. And, horrifyingly, while paging through When Worlds Collide, I would discover that I could “earn” the right to sit on the all-male governing body of a new world, as long as I had slyly seduced and then committed the bloody murder of an enemy in order to get there.
Looking back now, I understand that my constant bewilderment about my role as a woman was promoted by the literature I read and the movies and shows I watched. Meanwhile, the novels I borrowed from my mother concerning the great queens of antiquity only underscored my sense of learned helplessness. Women could, it seemed, only be in charge if that right was gained by marriage to a powerful man. Reams of historical fiction was written about the famous Queen Nefertiti, whose sole importance to history was a bust of her beautiful face, but Hatshepsut, the powerful woman who ruled Egypt in peace and prosperity in her own right as Pharaoh for 15 years, received no such plaudits in literature.
Like the fictional Nell, I have lived a small life, and perhaps it was made smaller, more constricted and confined, by the books I read and the movies I watched in my youth, all of which, purporting to modern ideals, still defined women into roles that now seem shockingly archaic.
“And Miss Sands did!” one delightful time travel story ended, as the heroine, a genius without whom time travel would not have been possible, threw herself into her lover’s arms. But I now read that ending with a different take. While only a child, Miss Sands and her brother worked together to save themselves from interplanatery kidnappers; she became the primary scientist devising the time machine that would hurtle her lover back to prehistoric times to meet her in her childhood. She journeyed to Earth’s future to meet her beloved again as an adult. She was brilliant, accomplished, and a survivor.
Miss Sands did, indeed.
As always, feel free to repost any quotes from, or this full essay, with author attribution.
Speaking to the Heart of Many Matters 