The women sf writers men don’t see

In the ongoing struggle to get greater recognition for female writers of science fiction, one of the fronts surely has to be that of history. One of the points Joanna Russ made in How to Suppress Women’s Writing is that each female author is seen as something singular, a freak, standing outside a history almost entirely defined by male writers. This goes for science fiction as much as for literary fiction: in both cases it’s much easier to imagine a history written without references to women than it is to imagine the opposite. I saw this happen two years ago with the Racefail debate in online sf fandom circles as well. When pushed upon it, well meaning liberal (white) sf & fantasy readers could mention two-three writers of colour, but these were always the same two-three (Delany, Butler, perhaps Barnes or Hopkinson) everybody knows, rather than any of the hundreds of other candidates, of whom most sf readers were ignorant to a degree they were not of their white counterparts. Most of Racefail was a struggle to teach this insight to people (willfully) blind to this and to find ways to make sure this insight was not lost, through e.g. the Carl Brandon society I linked to above.

Consciously or not, like writers of colour, female also sf writers get written out of science fiction’s collective awareness and sense of history, the vast mass of female writers ignored in favour of always the same outliers, their history lost in a way that means that every new high profile female science fiction writer is a novum, rather than standing in the same sort of tradition granted to male sf writers. instead she’s either evaluated in terms of that explicitely male tradition or seen as somebody who breaks with it. It’s not just that feminist or female themes and concerns get ignored and sidelined, but that the whole history of the genre can be and is defined in terms of the accomplishments of male writers, with only the occasional token female writer.

It’s this background that makes an effort like Pre-1923 Utopias and Science Fiction by Women: A Reading List of Online Editions, hosted by the Online Books Page, so important. Inspired by L.Timmel Duchamp’s list of Science Fiction and Utopias by Women, 1818-1949, it does exactly what it says on the tin, providing a list of science fiction and utopian writing by women written before 1923 and available online. Lists like these provide context to the male dominated mainstream history of the genre, by showing how many more writers other than Mary Shelly were active before Gernsback “invented” science fiction, that the genre is build as much on a now largely submerged field of female writers as it is on their much better known male colleagues.