{"id":238,"date":"2001-12-23T19:18:00","date_gmt":"2001-12-24T03:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2001\/12\/23\/238.html"},"modified":"2001-12-23T19:18:00","modified_gmt":"2001-12-24T03:18:00","slug":"protofeminist-sf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2001\/12\/23\/protofeminist-sf\/","title":{"rendered":"Proto-feminist sf"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Somehow in discussions of early feminist sf it never occurs to me to mention John Wyndham's \"Consider Her Ways<\/a>,\" reprinted at Sci Fiction<\/cite> back in August.<\/p>\n

It was originally published in 1956, in an odd little volume called Sometime, Never<\/cite> which consisted of three novellas: one by William (Lord of the Flies)<\/cite> Golding, one by Mervyn (Gormenghast)<\/cite> Peake, and one by John (Day of the Triffids)<\/cite> Wyndham. It portrays an all-female society; in that regard, it prefigures Tiptree's 1976 \"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?\" and Russ's 1972 \"When It Changed.\" It makes some interesting (if heavy-handed) political arguments about the oppression of women in modern society, but there's one thing it misses: it supposes that there can be no romantic (nor, presumably, sexual) interaction between women. (It even mentions Sappho in passing, but fails to follow up on that line of thought.)<\/p>\n

Which makes me wonder about the development over time of single-sex societies in sf. If you don't count historical and mythological situations, when was the first fictional portrayal of such a society? Do later portrayals build on earlier ones? (Surely Russ and Tiptree and Tepper and others had read this Wyndham story; were their versions of all-female societies partly in reaction to Wyndham's?) Yet another thing I'd pursue if I were an academic: some sort of comparative study of such works, perhaps specifically heterocentrism and\/or homophobia in such works. One would have to also look at Cordwainer Smith's \"The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal,\" which portrays one of the few all-male societies I can think of in sf, and which, despite having one of my favorite framing devices of all time, is appallingly homophobic.<\/p>\n

If anyone wants to read the political arguments in the Wyndham story without reading the entire 24,000-word (roughly) novella, part 3 of the 4-part presentation at Sci Fiction<\/cite> consists mostly of the political debate. But I think the rest of the story's worth reading too, even if it's a bit slow to start by modern standards.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Somehow in discussions of early feminist sf it never occurs to me to mention John Wyndham’s “Consider Her Ways,” reprinted…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}