On a related (but opposite) note: I started following Daniel José Older on Twitter, because I like his writing. I kept following, because while he obviously promotes himself (as all writers must), he has made it a priority to promote black women writers.
I have learned names I don’t see in the bookstore, or maybe they have one copy of one title (while the white man has half the shelf). It’s nice to see someone actively fighting back, especially when they don’t have to.
That’s how you do it! Good on him!
I think you land on a really important point. The Theory of Theories of Justice (movement of movements for justice) must be one that is unified in landing on human domination and hierarchy, but that the same time injustices and justices are enacted in the deeply particular. It’s a “why not both?” sitch.
Yup! As soon as I noted the lack of Butler, I crosssd this book off my list.
Yup, that isn’t a point that can be argued…Hell, I cannot think of a single woman of color who was an author in the early pulp years (although I’m certain that they existed) - quite possibly because they may have used male pseudonyms and hidden their skin-tone from readers/publishers.
Even recently (I last worked in a book store about 10 years ago), authors of color sometimes are shelved in their section, other times in “Black Interest” sections or the like, sequestered away from the “mainstream”.
If you read the Delany article, he points out that there were several black men before him writing sci-fi that have been ignored. I am certain that’s true of black women as well.
That’s literally the entire point of the post, that women have been excluded from the historical narrative… I’m arguing it’s doubly true for black women.
Yes. Not acknowledging that is STILL a historical erasure… this is why we do revision history, to go back and set the record straight about that past. The idea that sci-fi was only written by white men is historically incorrect.
But maybe I’m misunderstanding your point here.
Thank you. As someone who loves to read, I find it frustrating that so many gifted authors are so hard to find because of something as basic as gender. Leigh Brackett is an absolute favorite of mine but finding anything by her? Not always easy.
Andre Norton was prolific enough to have books in virtually every used bookstore on earth. She made herself uneraseable by the sheer size of her bibliography…but many others did not share her success.
While Margaret St. Clair was undeniably influential in both the literary and cultural sense? These days I don’t know as many people have even heard of her. I don’t know as I would’ve ever discovered Brackett or St. Clair if I wasn’t a gamer involved in an Appendix N podcast. That I might have missed out on these women’s work? That thought makes me sad indeed.
I’m not arguing a point (I’m actually agreeing with your point) as much as trying to figure out why I haven’t been able to find them despite looking. It is just flat out depressing. As for it being male only? Like I state above, I agree that isn’t the case and really? Without a great deal of research it is virtually impossible to tell how many women were writing for pulps because of pseudonyms. A “minor” author who gained no real fame later is unlikely to have been “unmasked” at all…leaving them, wrongfully in obscurity and wiping away another part of the contribution that women have made to the genre.
Got ya then… thanks for clarifying and sorry if I jumped to the wrong conclusion.
I’d argue it’s the reasons noted in the article (the gatekeepers who work as editors), the fact that early pulp writers often used pseudonyms, etc, so it’s hard to know their gender or race unless they went on to greater fame.
Well, except that there are probably still people around who either wrote for the pulps or their children are around, at the very least, meaning they might have evidence of this in their family papers and the like. Plus, if it’s a business then there has to be some sort of paper trail for how author’s got paid, yeah? So, there would likely be some sort of connection made between the author’s real name and the author’s pen name in that sort of business paperwork.
It’s a question of knowing where to look, i guess, but that can be very hard to do. It’s a historical puzzle to be sure, but it might not be one that’s completely impossible to piece back together.
Agreed that that is the case. It’s very depressing. But I think even highlighting a few authors illustrates the point well enough for us to know that yes women and people of color contributed meaningfully to the evolution of sci-fi. It sucks that we might not know all their names and who they really were, but
Thanks for bringing MacLean and Emshwiller to my attention! A quick look at their Wiki pages tells me that these are women who’s work I need to be reading 
That rather depends, sadly, on the family. I mean, I’m sure the evidence must have at least existed at one point…but how many times do family papers get damaged, lost, or just get tossed in the bin? It is certainly a starting point but I think about how many stories from my father’s youth are new to me when he mentions them and I cannot think that an author who never achieved real success might not have mentioned it much. Socially, it probably wasn’t an “acceptable” career for a woman at the time…that plays into the scarcity of those records too I’m sure.
Totally agreed…and I think it a very important mystery to solve. Fans of the genre owe so much to so many, it is a shame that their contributions aren’t better known. It paints a very unrealistic picture that, sadly, gets beaten on by the wrong sort to try to bolster and excuse their misogyny and racism. Saying of authors that “women don’t write science fiction” is akin to saying to saying of comedians that “women aren’t funny”. A baldfaced lie.
Yup. Hell, with public domain starting to move forward again, I’d love to see someone really deep dive in and start republishing some of these works as they become available…or better yet, finding them BEFORE then so that their families may enjoy at least a taste of the commercial success that their families were denied.
There were rumours for years that the reclusive writer James Tiptree was actually a woman. Robert Silverberg, who loved Tiptree’s work, wrote “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.”
To compound the irony, this was in Silverberg’s introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise, that contained the profoundly feminist The Women Men Don’t See. 
Tiptree, of course, was the pseudonym of Alice Bradley Sheldon.
…and damn if that isn’t an ending to a career that’ll break your heart. 
Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction came later.
Not intending to downplay women of color, but along the same lines an excellent author of Afrocentric fantasy, Charles Saunders, is rarely mentioned these days and getting hold of any of his books is very difficult. I’m glad to see N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor getting traction, and all I can think is that it’s been too long a time coming.
Saunders! The original “Soul & Sorcery” author. His stuff is FANTASTIC and the Imaro series should be on everyone’s “must read” list.
Sure, but it also might mean some families are more interested in preserving those sorts of documents. And I’d say that black families, who are more aware of how they’ve been systemically erased from the past via white supremacy, are more likely to keep this kind of stuff. In my experience, black people tend to be more aware of this problem, and are far better about the so-called “unofficial archive” that tends to get built up by a family.
Absolutely… one note from the article mentions that Judith Merrill wrote a story that Campbell loved, but then he rejected another story later, because it wasn’t about what he considered a feminine topic. So, even in the case of women (and people of color) who did get included, they were often limited in what kind of work was accepted from them by editors.
I’m confident that there already are. Historians and literature profs who study sci-fi and fantasy have probably focused on this issue to some extent. I’d guess it’s taking a while to get out to the generally public from academic journals and writing… In fact, the person who wrote this article is a prof at GA Tech, so it’s getting out there, slowly, but surely!
I don’t really get the title.
I knew it was “Andrea Noton” in the late sixties or early seventies when I read the Time Trader books out of the library. I can’t remember if it was explained or I assumed.
I read a lot of the historical material that came out in the seventies, lots of collections, with intros for each story, actual autobiographies like “The Way the Future Went”, and books about The Futurians. The women were scarce, but they were there. I met Emily Pohl-Weary and her sister about a decade ago at a party, I knew about their grandmother. I bought the “autobiography” afterwards, and Judith Merrill wrote that up to a certain time, there was no difference between SF readers and writers.
So what’s the story here? Were they excluded, or not interested? The Golden Age had women authors, who were up there with the best, not because they were token women.
Were they excluded earlier? I don’t know, but nobody in the comments are talking about that early Women often did hide their gender, but maybe that was the bias of the readership. Women were often absent from technical hobbies, I’m not sure they were excluded so much as society made it hard, not just men but women too saying they didn’t belong.
Or was there later erasure? Suddenly there was a time when many women were writing, a change that did dwarf what came before. But they seemed more tied to the SF of the past. Post Star Wars it changed done more, you didn’t have to be in fandom and science-minded, which let many in, but not just women. It’s been a long time since I bought much new SF, something changed.
Yes, hiding isn’t a good thing. But at the same time, it reflects a greater world, and for those who wrote under an assumed name, maybe it gave them opportunity. We don’t know who was black, but maybe it gave them a platform to be heard, and respected, that every day life denied them. It didn’t help others like them enter that space, but maybe it gave them some freedom.
Weird niches may exclude some, but maybe the problem was society in general, rather than the niche. Maybe to be outsiders gives them insight into the general problem though they may not know how to fix things.
Home computers were pretty much all male in the early days. People like me who had wanted a computer since age 9, just to have one around. Did it exclude women, or were women not interested, or kept out by society claiming they wouldn’t be interested? It was very influenced by the “counter culture”, so the language in the magazines was more inclusive than generally, even as the women weren’t there. People lusted after the hardware. It was later, as home computers became more mainstream, that women were draped over computers in the ads.
Early SF, pre golden age, could be sexist, but so was society. Maybe in being SF there was a bit more flexibility on things like this, even if it was very homogeneous group of writers (or at least looked that way). When there was feminist surge in the seventies, there was diversity, because it wasn’t in the here and now.
I have always been an outsider, amateur radio, science fiction, early home computers, I’m not perfect, but I think I’m more inclusive than some. I never had to get rid of as much baggage as someone more mainstream.
It was never Andrea Norton. She used Andre as a pseudonym, and her name was Alice. You might have known her gender, but she never went by Andrea, as far as I know.
As for the rest, the article answers many of your questions - yes, they were systemically erased - the women that were writing sci-fi and fantasy were left out of later collections or people did not realize they were women, because they were often told to use pseudonyms.
And I suspect the same was true for early home computing as well.
Those of us who are women have experienced just as much misogyny in subcultural circles as from the mainstream culture.
I think some of it is timing.
Paperback did lots for publishing, and it was really pocket paperback that moved SF away from the magazines. It seemed almost cheap enough that anything could be published, so I have that pocket book on model rocketry and a Penguin Guide to Radio Astronomy, pretty esoteric subjects, but either enough demand, or a run was too cheap to not bother.
Anyway, pocket paperbacks got a lot into printing the sixties, and in the seventies they were harvesting the past. So a lot if authors were available.
But as time went on, so much more SF published, so even the big names fade. I’d find those names st used book sales, but the classic stuff I’d less available at the bookstores, and maybe some ir much if it has fallen out of print.
