Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Recovering the domestic decades in feminist history and feminist science fiction studies

  The domestic decades are usually depicted as a low point in feminist history, a period when women were encouraged to become “domestic patriots” by exchanging their jobs in the public sphere for the more important work of raising children and tending their new suburban homes.1 Over the past two decades, however, a growing number of scholars have suggested a more complex picture of women’s lives at midcentury.2 Women may have shied away from feminism in this period, but they did not abandon politics altogether. Instead, they channeled their energies into those causes that seemed most pressing at the dawn of the atomic era. Such activists usually made their arguments for progressive social change by invoking (and subtly revising) some of postwar America’s most dearly-held beliefs about motherhood in particular and femininity in general. For instance, as Harriet Hyman Alonso has persuasively demonstrated, antiwar activists portrayed themselves as mothers reluctantly moved to action in the public arena by fear for the fate of all children born in the shadow of the mushroom cloud (131). In a similar vein, Susan Lynn argues that women in the civil rights movement made persuasive arguments for the logical connection between women’s private duties as the primary facilitators of communication between family members and their public roles as mediators between members of different races (106). Thus activists positioned themselves as a new and more progressive breed of domestic patriots who translated their private-sphere skills into public-sphere action.

  Unfortunately, new feminist histories of midcentury women’s political praxis rarely involve an extended consideration of these same women’s literary endeavors. For instance, in her otherwise comprehensive monograph Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s, historian Eugenia Kaledin carefully chronicles the extensive aesthetic achievements of postwar women in a variety of canonical literary genres including fiction, poetry, and drama as well as popular genres including horror, romance, and detective fiction. Although she acknowledges that these authors often used fiction writing to “assert their individuality and their social imagination,” she ultimately concludes that they almost never “attempted in any fictional way to comment on the real political anxieties of the time” (125, 136).

  I find it significant that Kaledin did not include science fiction in her survey of midcentury women’s writing, nor have many other historians done so since then.3 This oversight is perhaps to be expected. As feminist SF scholars have long noted, our counterparts outside the SF community tend to dismiss SF as an aggressively masculine genre that had little to offer women readers and writers before the advent of second-wave feminism in the 1970s.4 I suspect that this dismissal has been compounded by the enduring legacy of Betty Friedan’s classic study, The Feminine Mystique (1963). As Joanne Meyerowitz notes, historians have questioned some of Friedan’s claims about women’s experience with domesticity at midcentury, but most have accepted her argument that women’s magazine fiction uncritically glorified conservative notions of proper femininity (230). According to Meyerowitz, this has led to a nearly total silence about how women might have written differently—and more progressively—in other kinds of magazines or popular literary venues (231).

  While it is certainly true that midcentury SF was dominated by men, over the past few years SF scholars have demonstrated that a significant number of women were actively involved in the genre at that time.5 In contrast to a few well-known authors like Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore, and Andre Norton, who are remembered primarily for having written stories that were “as ungendered as their names” (Clute and Nicholls 1344), authors including Judith Merril, Mildred Clingerman, and Zenna Henderson produced tales that clearly addressed women’s concerns with life in a high-tech era—and that were, as their bylines indicated, clearly written by women. In doing so, as Justine Larbalestier suggests, they paved the way for the more radical critiques of patriarchy launched by later feminist authors (172).

  As these brief histories of feminist history and feminist SF scholarship might suggest, academics in both fields seem to be moving toward similar conclusions about women’s political and literary praxis at midcentury. To date, however, there has been very little discussion of how the two areas of inquiry might productively inform one another. Accordingly, the rest of this essay is devoted to just that kind of discussion. In the following pages, I draw upon new research in both fields to show how postwar activists and authors alike engaged in the kind of future-oriented, extrapolative thinking most commonly associated with science fiction writing. I also show how they both deployed rhetorical strategies common to the progressive activism of the time, appealing to women as political subjects based on their common situation as wives and mothers (or potential wives and mothers) and advocating a feminine ethos of social reformation through interpersonal dialogue between members of different races and genders.

  Midcentury peace activism and SF’s nuclear holocaust narrative

  Although the peace movements of the 1950s and 1960s were modest compared to their Vietnam-era counterparts, they were nonetheless a significant outlet for women’s political energies. At first, it might seem surprising that women raised on the twin rhetorics of cold war patriotism and the feminine mystique might have joined such movements at all. As Elaine Tyler May points out, the dominant professional and popular discourses of this time told American women that they could best serve their country as cold war patriots by carefully tending their suburban homes (105). Thus women were encouraged to embrace the feminine mystique not just because it was the natural thing to do, but because it was essential to the proper workings of national defense.

  Of course, not all women were persuaded by this logic, and the more active of these dissenters were drawn into peace organizations such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the Catholic Workers and War Resistors’ League (WRL), and Women Strike for Peace (WSP). These organizations also invoked specific equations between patriotism and domesticity, but to radically different ends than their governmental counterparts. For instance, throughout the 1950s WILPF recruited new members by appealing to common feminine experience, arguing that it was only by joining together in the peace movement that “you and I—and all the mothers in the world—can go to sleep without thinking about the terrors of the Atomic Bomb” (in Alonso 131). For WIPLF, it was the American woman’s civic duty to protest against—rather than acquiesce to—the cold war status quo.

  Peace organizations also justified their activities by aligning maternal instinct with scientific knowledge. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s WSP distributed educational pamphlets quoting Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, the Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S. Public Health Service, and the Federal Radiation Council on topics ranging from the dangers of irradiated milk to the futility of preparing for life after nuclear war. Thus WSP activists positioned themselves as rational beings reluctantly driven to public action by an understanding of nuclear weapons similar to that of the experts themselves.6

  Similar political sensibilities and rhetorical strategies informed many of the nuclear war stories written by women in the midcentury SF community. As Edward James notes, SF authors of the 1940s and 1950s often used nuclear war stories to explore “how societies decline into tribalism or barbarism. . . or develop from barbarism to civilization” (90). In the hands of writers like Judith Merril, Carol Emshwiller, and Alice Eleanor Jones, these stories showed readers how nuclear-age civilization inherently tended toward barbarism, especially for women and their families.7 Indeed, these authors made their appeals to readers precisely by describing in sometimes grisly detail the nightmare fates of forced marriage, reproductive mutation, and familial destruction that inevitably awaited those women who managed to survive World War III. Writ large upon the postnuclear future, such stories were also clearly in dialogue with the progressive sensibilities of the midcentury peace movement. Indeed, as we shall see, they provided women writers with an ideal narrative space in w
hich to make concrete those “terrors of the Atomic Bomb” that could only be hinted at in peace activist literature.

  As a self-identified leftist and feminist at a time when it was unfashionable to be either of those things, it is appropriate that Judith Merril produced one of the earliest and best-known of these domestic nuclear war stories. Published in 1948, “That Only a Mother” brings together two of the primary fears of the early atomic age: the possibility of mutation from radioactive materials and the probability that an international nuclear war would effectively destroy all humanity (Trachtenberg 355). Set in a near future where exposure to radiation from an on-going nuclear war has produced a generation of radically mutated children, Merril’s tale depicts an insane world where mothers struggle to protect their children against fathers who commit infanticide, juries who acquit the men of any wrongdoing, and journalists who report the whole process with tacit approval. Although such events are initially presented as part of a terrible new moral and social order located specifically in postwar Japan, the land of the enemy other, Merril ultimately suggests that this new world order—much like radioactivity itself—has no respect for national borders. The majority of “That Only a Mother” follows the story of Margaret and Hank, an American couple who give birth to Henrietta, a “flower-faced child” whose stunning intelligence is offset by her limbless body (349). Margaret responds to her child’s deformity by retreating into her own insanity and insisting that “my baby’s fine. Precocious, but normal” (345, 351), while Hank—equally horrified by both his child and Margaret’s response to her—seems destined to repeat the insanity of his Japanese counterparts as he prepares to kill his child at the close of the story. Thus Merril’s story effectively anticipates the kind of warning that peace groups like WILPF would issue in the 1950s: that “a bomb doesn’t care in the least whether you are wearing a soldier’s uniform or a housewife’s apron” (in Alonso 130).

  Alice Eleanor Jones’s “Created He Them” (1955) also merges contemporary understandings of nuclear war with the maternalist sensibilities of women’s peace activism. By the mid-1950s many Americans had exchanged their earlier convictions about the apocalyptic nature of the bomb for the new belief that a limited nuclear war was fightable and that society would simply have to adjust to this new reality (Trachtenberg 355). At the same time public concern about nuclear fallout continued to grow, especially as reports about unexpected illnesses filtered in from the Nevada Test Site and from the Marshall Islands, where the first H-bomb tests were performed in 1954 (Hafemeister 437-38). It should come as no surprise, then, that in Jones’s story families do indeed survive World War III—but only because the government creates a ruthless breeding program that forces the few remaining healthy men and women into loveless marriages. When the offspring of these unions reach the age of three, they are taken away to mysterious Centers where “if any child were ever unhappy, or were taken ill, or died, nobody knew it” (132). Although the children produced by this breeding program are indeed physically healthy, family relations are anything but that. Instead, men like Henry Crothers treat their children as mere commodities to be exchanged for government bonuses. Meanwhile, women like Ann Crothers are forced to “lend” their babies to childless neighbors in exchange for black-market goods including eggs, cigarettes, and the Seconal they so desperately need to endure their husbands’ nightly embraces (129-30). Much like Merril, then, Jones insists that the brave new world of the nuclear age will inevitably affect the soldier and the housewife alike in terrible—and terribly unexpected—ways.

  Carol Emshwiller’s story “Day at the Beach” (1959) literalizes the terrors of nuclear war in more subtle but equally tragic ways. Although expert discourses and public polls of the late 1950s continued to reflect the belief that America could (and should) fight a limited nuclear war if the situation arose (Trachtenberg 354), this period also saw the publication of numerous books that suggested otherwise (Stone 192). Popular novels such as Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) both insisted that even the most limited of nuclear wars would affect all peoples across space and time. Emshwiller’s story offers readers a similar, if more specific, warning. At first, the family depicted in “Day at the Beach” seems to have survived World War III fairly successfully. Although Myra and Ben are bald and toothless and their child, Little Boy, is a feral creature who can only communicate through physical violence, the couple remain deeply in love with one another and struggle to give their child a reasonably normal life. This includes outings such as the one that gives the story its name; indeed, the beach feels so safe compared to the rest of war-torn America that it leads Ben to dream that the couple might resume the sexual relations they have refrained from since Little Boy’s birth. Myra, however, quickly negates this dream, pointing out that “I don’t even know a doctor since Press Smith was killed by those robbing kids and I’d be scared“(280). Herein lies the tragedy of Emshwiller’s story: in a postholocaust world the family can only survive by avoiding normal reproductive activities since the birth of a new child might well mean the death of its mother. And yet, without more children, there can be no more family whatsoever. Thus Emshwiller appeals specifically to women readers as potential mothers and potential antiwar activists by insisting that there can be no future for children in a world where nuclear war (or at least its immanent possibility) has become one of the central facts of life.

  As all of the above stories demonstrate, SF—especially in its short story form—provided midcentury women writers with a powerful narrative form through which to explore what might happen to women and their families if America continued down the path it seemed to have set for itself at the beginning of the cold war. But how might women prevent these nightmare futures from happening? What other futures might be available, given the then-current scientific and social situation?

  Full-length novels like Judith Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth (1950) suggest one answer that anticipates the maternalist politics of peace organizations like WSP: women can prevent these scenarios from occurring in the real world by allying themselves with other women and with scientists to build an anti-war community. Shadow on the Hearth begins much like its short-story counterparts by establishing a nightmare future designed specifically to hail women readers based on their common situation as mothers haunted by the possibility of nuclear war. The novel follows the story of Gladys Mitchell, a Westchester housewife and mother who is the epitome of domesticity, dispensing nuggets of wisdom about the effects of French toast on ill-tempered children while struggling with her conscience about whether or not she can abandon the laundry to attend a neighborhood luncheon (87). With the advent of World War III Gladys’s life turns upside-down: her husband Jon is presumed dead in New York City, her daughters Barbara and Ginny are exposed to radioactive rain at school, and her son Tom, a freshman at Texas Tech, seems to have vanished off the face of the planet. In this brave new world, even the most familiar aspects of suburban life become terrifyingly strange: basic utilities fail and men become monsters who abuse their power as civil defense officers to harass the women and children they are meant to protect.

  Of course, this is only the beginning of Shadow on the Hearth. The majority of Merril’s novel follows Gladys’s transformation from helpless housewife to activist mother who helps to prevent this world from becoming the kind of full-blown dystopia imagined elsewhere in midcentury short stories. First, Gladys allies herself with the other women populating her world, by rescuing her housekeeper Veda Klopak from the local civil defense officials who believe she is a Communist spy and by giving shelter to her neighbor Edie Crowell, a self-absorbed, aristocratic woman who fears being trapped alone in her home when the American government declares martial law. In turn, Veda quickly adapts the Mitchell household to the rhythms of its new circumstances (a good thing, since Gladys is a lackadaisical housekeeper at best), while Edie uses her sharp tongue to fend off the civil defense officers who hope to break up t
he household and regain control over the women. Thus Veda, Gladys, and Edie create a quasi-utopian community of women who work together—however temporarily—to protect themselves and their children from the dangerous new social and moral orders that threaten them.8

  Much like her counterparts in the peace movement, Merril also suggests that women can most effectively challenge the new social and moral order of the cold war status quo by forging alliances with another group of like-minded people, namely scientists. The potential effectiveness of such alliances are made clear in Merril’s novel through her depiction of the growing friendship between Gladys and Garson Levy, the local nuclear physicist-turned-high school math teacher who has been under surveillance by the government for years due to his antiwar activities. Gladys first meets Levy when he defies his house arrest and comes to warn her about the radioactive rain that her daughters have been exposed to at school; impressed by his concern for her children, Gladys invites him to stay with her and the other women. Significantly, it is by working together that Gladys and Levy manage to ensure the future well-being of the Mitchell household, pooling Levy’s scientific knowledge with Gladys’s social skills to secure medical attention for the Mitchell girls and to prevent the civil defense officials from evacuating (and thus breaking up) the household on what turn out to be rather dubious grounds.