Feminist Ca

40 / The Secret Feminist Cabal
and epitomized by “Science.” For many women, the association of sf
with science was enough to deter them from looking at such stories,
or from at least admitting that they did so — an association of ideas
that, World War II notwithstanding, continued into the atmosphere
of “professional housewifery” of the 1950s and of course continues in
an attenuated but still effective way to the present.
A number of women still managed to read and enjoy this most
“unfeminine” of subjects. Over a decade later, in 1939, Charles Hornig,
editor of the unambiguously-titled Science Fiction was also surprised
to receive mail from female readers:
I have received so many letters from women who read science
fiction lately, that I must confess many of the fair sex
have well-developed imaginations. Their group has grown
to such proportions that they must certainly be taken into
consideration by the male adherents. (Hornig 1939: 119)
Intriguingly, in this narrative, readers of the “fair sex” must possess
“well-developed” imaginations to read sf, while presumably their
male counterparts read it as an extension of their serious and rational
interest in science and its future potentiality.
Another editor, Sam Merwin, also perceived a change during the
pre-WWII years, noting the arrival of women writers and readers “at
some indeterminate point in the nineteen thirties” (1950: 6). Merwin’s
editorial for the December 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories
is worth citing at length:
This metamorphosis — called either the Great Invasion or
the Great Erosion depending upon the point of view — is too
well and too long established to be regarded as any mere
passing trend. The girls are in and in to stay.
A number of women writers, ranging from adequate to brilliant,
began to turn out science fiction stories of such excellence
that in magazine after magazine they grabbed their
share not only of inside short stories but of lead novelets and
novels, hitherto an exclusively masculine prerogative.
Certainly the fantasies of C. L. Moore were and are as fine
as any in the field. And right up alongside her work we have
today that of E. Mayne Hull, Leigh Brackett, Margaret