Feminist SF timeline

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A Brief History of Feminist SF and Women in SF



Spoiler warning: This page and any other dealing with the content of works may have plot and/or ending details revealed.





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.

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 emerged from social and utopian movements. A conscious feminism picked up on many of the themes of the suffragettes, and produced specifically gender-based attacks on the patriarchy, positing that a female society might be wiser, more peaceful, more humane.

The late-19th century fascination with the supernatural led to many supernatural and ghost stories; relatedly, the themes in gothic novels continued to often include supernatural aspects.

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.

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

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

Strong socialist and fascist currents in reaction to economic crises in Europe and North America generated a number of radical critiques of fascism and totalitarianism, including several important works from female writers.

The 20th Century: 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 lacked 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.

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

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, Carol Emshwiller, 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.

The Eighties: Cyberpunk & "Post-Feminism" (1980-1990)

"I'll be a post-feminist in the post-patriarchy."

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, ultimately feeding into the New Age fiction trend. The Mists of Avalon also initiated a popular 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.

  • 1980 Octavia Butler publishes Wild Seed
  • 1980 Elizabeth Lynn publishes Northern Girl
  • 1980 Kate Wilhelm publishes Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
  • 1981 Julian May publishes The Many Colored Lands (first in Pleiocene Cycle)
  • 1981 New Victoria publishes WomanSpace: Future and Fantasy, Stories and Art by Women
  • 1981 Elisabeth Vonarburg publishes La Silence de la Cite; translated into English in 1988 as The Silent City
  • 1982 Tanith Lee publishes The Silver Metal Lover
  • 1982 Smith College hosted a 3-week symposium on feminist speculative fiction
  • 1988 Carol Emshwiller publishes Carmen Dog
  • 1988 C.J. Cherryh publishes Cyteen
  • 1988 Sheri Tepper publishes The Gate to Women's Country
  • Gaylaxicon, the first GLB SF convention
  • Lambda Literary Awards inaugurated, with a joint category for "mystery/sf"; first award given to a mystery.

The Gay Nineties: Queer Identity & Default Feminism (1991 onward)

Explicitly feminist themes in SF continued to be explored in feministSF, but the true triumph of the Secret Feminist Cabal is the acceptance of the goals and analyses of feminism in much other literature. Strong women characters have become a norm for male and female writers alike. Kick-ass woman heroes made a major splash on TV and film.

In the post-Feminist Sex Wars years, lesbian, feminist, and woman-centered erotica boomed, spawning many anthologies on every conceivable subject. And feministSF moved online, in all its forms: fanfic, geeky websites, mailing lists, and the like.

  • 1991 Jewelle Gomez publishes The Gilda Stories; Marge Piercy publishes He, She and It; Rebecca Ore publishes The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid
  • 1993 The X-Files reinvents the buddy film, debuting the skeptical scientific Scully playing straight man to Mulder's flirty believer; the two remain (mostly) platonic peers and equals for some half-dozen years into the series. The X-Files also accounts for a tremendous surge in FanFic which moved online in vast numbers.
  • 1993 Pam Keesey publishes Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories, one of the first explicitly lesbian anthologies of fantasy/horror, tapping into the lesbian vampire zeitgeist (they're lesbian! they're vampires!)
  • 1993 First known slash mailing list created: "Virgule"; membership limited to women.
  • 1994 First website on feminist SF (ultimately becoming http://feministSF.org ).
  • 1994 Nancy Kress publishes Beggars in Spain; Kathleen Ann Goonan publishes Queen City Jazz; Maureen McHugh publishes Half the Day Is Night
  • 1995 "Xena: Warrior Princess" series premiere airs in the US (1995 Sept. 9; UK airdate, 1996 Sept. 8)
  • 1995 Nancy Springer publishes Larque on the Wing

Sources & External Links

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