Feminist Ca

100 / The Secret Feminist Cabal
to the real world examples of women who have trained as physicists,
chemists, astronomers, and engineers (54). 49 DeFord’s rebuttal of Dr.
Richardson could be extended to much of the sf culture at this time:
It is pretty disheartening, after all these years, to discover
how many otherwise enlightened and progressive-minded
men still retain in their subconscious this throwback attitude
toward half of humanity which relegates women to the
position of possessions, of ancillary adjuncts to men — what
Simone de Beauvoir calls the “second sex.” (56)
In her defense of women’s scientific abilities, and her condemnation
of the “covert” sexism that informed “merely intellectual” scientific
hypotheticals, deFord here raised one of the first critical feminist voices
in sf. 50 Such challenges to the masculine world of sf were the basis
49 Along with the other attributes of women personnel, deFord stated that “there is
much less bickering and backhand knifing in conventions of feminine organizations
than in those of masculine” (1956: 54).
50 DeFord published her first sf story in 1946 (at the age of 58) and went on to
publish over seventy stories (including a number in F&SF), but no novels, which
may account for her obscurity today. Born in 1888, she was also a noted Suffragist
(see Fran Stallings 1984).
One of the first analyses of sf to recognize the exclusion of women as a significant
characteristic of the genre appeared in Ednita P. Bernabeu’s “SF: A New Mythos”
in a 1957 issue of Psychoanalytic Quarterly (1957: 527-35). I have not included it in
my analysis because it appeared outside the sf community; however, it provides
a remarkable discussion of feminine symbolism in sf. Although somewhat dated
in its positivist application of Freudian psychoanalytic readings, Bernabeu’s use of
this theory to read popular fiction led her to insights that foreshadowed later
feminist readings. Outlining the various psycho-dynamic elements of sf, Bernabeu
remarked that sexuality and women were “conspicuously absent,” and argued
that this constituted a “denial of femininity and feminine strivings.” Her analysis situated
the exclusion of women as deliberate (although perhaps unconscious) and
integral to the sf mythos, rather than symptomatic of a general conservatism, or
a narrow focus on “science.” The presence of “Woman” — whether actual, threatened,
or symbolically represented (i.e., as an alien) — signified concerns and fears
immanent in even the most scientifically pure, technically focused sf. Bernabeu
argued that:
Women are feared as mothers and as sexual objects; yet there is a
persistent preoccupation with “seeding” the outer galaxies with the human
race… The insoluble question of childhood — where do babies come
from? — is reopened on a cosmic level, denying the female as mother and
conferring on the male the exclusive processes of direct reproduction.
(1957: 532)