Maybe I am misremembering, but wasn’t the story Cold Equations about facing an unavoidable death with dignity. Sure it was contrived, but most fiction is. Oh, there just happens to be a comet heading to hit earth and THIS character with these particular problems has to hook up with her ex husband to save the day?
Sure, you can pull some misogynistic overtones, but you have to put it in the context of the time. For the time, it was about a naive woman mastering her courage to face death. This is like going back to look at Mark Twain and finding the racism in it, and utterly ignoring how progressive it was for the time.
