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.