Feminist SF timeline

A Brief History of Feminist SF and Women in SF

BF (Before Frankenstein)

SF per se did not exist, but many of the stories that were told, and eventually published, relied on fantastical premises of one sort or another, often including magical, religious, and mythical imagery, beings or events. The imagined civilization, whether it be utopian, the Kingdom of Heaven, or otherwise, cropped up here and there.

• 1405 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies
• 1666 Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
• 1762 Sarah Scott, A Description of Millennium Hall
• 1794 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (quintessential gothic novel; supernatural events ultimately shown to be non-supernatural)
• 1798; rev. 1803 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (a satirical gothic novel)

Nineteenth Century CE: After Frankenstein (1818-1919)

The early 19th century formats were still shaping and being developed. Gothic novels remained popular, with supernatural or possibly supernatural elements. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein emerged in part from this tradition.

In the mid-later part of the 19th century, a wide variety of utopian stories coming out of social and utopian movements; also many supernatural and ghost stories.

The late 19th and early 20th century saw a suffragette backlash in literature: novels in which humorless women take over the world, for good or for ill; valiant men with a sense of humor often took it right back to the satisfaction of both sexes.

• 1818 Mary Shelley, [[Frankenstein]]
• 1827 Jane Webb Loudon, [[The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twentieth Century]]

• 1872 J. Sheridan Le Fanu, "Carmilla" (an early, possibly the first, lesbian vampire story published)
• 1880-81 Mary E. Bradley publishes Mizora: A Prophecy
• 1892 Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes "The Yellow Wallpaper" turning the ghost story on its head in an early feminist critique of what Betty Friedan later named "the feminine mystique".
• 1915 Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes Herland
• 1918 Frances Stevens publishes Citadel of Fear
• 1918 Gertrude Franklin Atherton publishes The White Morning

The 20th Century AF: After the Great War (1920-1945)

The pulp era begins, and brings with it women writers, often writing pseudonymously or under gender-ambiguous names, such as C.L. Moore.

• 1926 Thea von Harbou publishes Metropolis
• 1926 Sylvia Townsend Warner publishes Lolly Willowes
• 1928 Virginia Woolf publishes Orlando
• 1935 Katharine Burdekin publishes The End of This Day's Business

The 20th Century AF: After WW2 (1945-1967)

SF popularity continues to grow, and male and female writers enter the field in increasing numbers. Women still frequently write with pseudonyms or gender-ambiguous names, or pseudonymously with male writers using a male pseudonym.

In US SF, anxieties over nuclear war, Communism, and the changing roles of women during and after WW2 sometimes played out in gender-related SF. A number of "war of the sexes" stories appeared, often depicting the society run by women as a hive-like metaphor for socialism. As in the suffragette backlash, the societies run by women were authoritarian, humorless, dull, and lack creative fire and ingenuity, and they were often static or even dying societies.

Prominent new writers in the 40s include Judith Merril, Leigh Brackett and Miriam Allen deFord.

• 1948 Judith Merril publishes "That Only a Mother"
• 1948 Shirley Jackson publishes The Lottery
• 1948 Lisa Ben publishes "New Year's Day", the first modern "gay identity" SF story
• 1948 Wilmar Shiras publishes "In Hiding", which was later developed into a novel, Children of the atom (1953)

Prominent new women writers in the 50s include Katharine MacLean, Margaret St. Clair, Zenna Henderson, and Andre Norton.

• 1954 "Femizine" An "all female" SF fan zine created in England, later revealed to be a hoax.

• 1960 Theodore Sturgeon publishes Venus Plus X

Prominent new women writers in the 60s are almost too many to name here but a selection include: Marion Zimmer Bradley, Rosel George Brown, Sonya Dorman, Sylvia Louise Engdahl, Phyllis Gotlieb, Madeleine L'Engle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Naomi Mitchison, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr., Kate Wilhelm, and many others. Plus, Samuel R. Delany.

The Golden Age of Feminist SF (1968-1979)

Lesbian separatism and Gay Liberation made strong impacts on feminist SF, and the developing world of fanfic. Many more women entered the field. A feminist backlash became prominent, focusing less on hive-like socialist societies and more on lesbianism and male fears of sexual redundancy.

• 1968 Joanna Russ published Picnic on Paradise

• 1968 Samuel Delany published Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, a major novel with a gay protagonist

• 1969 Ursula K. Le Guin published The Left Hand of Darkness

• 1971 Monique Wittig published Les Guerilleres

• 1971 Dorothy Bryant]] published The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, which stylistically echoed late 19th century threads of metaphoric fiction and paved the way for New Age fiction

• 1972 Joanna Russ published "When It Changed"

• 1973 James Tiptree, Jr. published "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"

• 1974 Suzy McKee Charnas published Walk to the End of the World, first in the Holdfast Series
• 1974 Pamela Sargent published Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women, the first anthology dedicated to women in SF
• 1974 Diane Marchant published the first known Star Trek slash, "A Fragment Out of Time," an oblique Kirk/Spock story

• 1975 Marion Zimmer Bradley publishes The Heritage of Hastur
• 1975 Tanith Lee publishes The Birthgrave
• 1975 Naomi Mitchison publishes Solution Three
• 1975 Joanna Russ publishes The Female Man
• 1975 Robert Silverberg described James Tiptree, Jr.'s writing as "ineluctibly masculine" in the introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise, apparently attempting to dispel rumors that Tiptree was female

• 1976 Susan Wood set up a feminist panel at MidAmericon; this was apparently the first panel on "women and science fiction", and led ultimately to the founding of A Woman's Apa.

• 1976 Samuel R. Delany published Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

• 1976 Marge Piercy published Woman on the Edge of Time

• 1977 The first WisCon was held in Madison, Wisconsin.

• 1978 E.M. Broner published A Weave of Women
• 1978 Vonda McIntyre publishes Dreamsnake

• 1979 The gay/lesbian (eventually glbt) bookstore "A Different Light" opened, naming itself after Elizabeth Lynn's novel of the same name.
• 1979 Octavia Butler publishes Kindred
• 1979 Sally Miller Gearheart publishes The Wanderground

Cyberpunk, "Post-Feminism", Queer Identity (1980-present)

The feminist sex wars reach their peak in the 80s, not coincidentally at the same time that women's erotica is enjoying a boom. SF in general shows a much greater level of sexual explicitness, and fanfic gets naughty and needs a spanking.

Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon kicks off a new thread of novels portraying women's spirituality and goddess-based religions, and also a new trend of reenvisioning histories, myths, and iconic stories from feminist or subaltern perspectives.

Numerous women's presses and bookstores are founded in the 1970s with the collective energy of the feminist movement and lesbian separatists; lesbian & gay-themed lines, presses, and bookstores followed shortly thereafter.

The English-speaking world discovers magical realism, and numerous important new works are published or translated into English.

The bisexual, goth, androgynous, vampire thing picks up steam in the 80s.

Sources & External Links

• Laura Quilter, 2001-2006, A Brief History of Feminist SF/F and Women in SF/F, available at http://feministsf.org/community/history.html