This paper for the Pulp Studies Symposium at at James Madison University was an important stage of the project that would become From Hyperspace to Hypertext. For this presentation, I drew the connections between promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM to the study of science fiction. The full title of the paper was “Gender Bending in Pulp Fiction: The Scientific Interventions of Clare Winger Harris, Leslie F. Stone, Isabel Martin Lewis, and David H. Keller.”
Summary
Today, it’s tempting to assume that the gender imbalance in STEM fields is a longstanding historical situation. However, reading feminist histories of science like Londa Schiebinger’s Nature’s Body or Ann B. Shteir Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860, one realizes that there were many women in science before the nineteenth century.
It is in this context, I argue, that one must read the women writers of scientific fiction. Women were prominent in the world of the pulps, both as writers and as readers, but it is sometimes thought that they were not successful as science fiction writers until the 1970s. Erik Davin, for instance, in his 2006 study Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965, points out the many women writing science fiction before the 1970s. This is not surprising given the prominent place that women writers had in the pulps overall. The claim that women were marginalized could be in part due to the kind of women’s writing that appeared. When studying fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, today’s readers might not recognize what they would see as women’s themes or strong female characters.
Gender scholars have noticed a parallel change in the fields of applied science and notions of gender at the start of the twentieth century. Steven Garlick, in a gender studies article about gender and technology, notes that “being a man” showed itself differently in the nineteenth century, when men had to test and prove their manhood. This suggest that the effort to define science and engineering as a rational domain of problem solving that was conducted by men is historically contingent. It would lead to an understanding of a workforce that was endowed with equivalent skills and measurable abilities – and along with it, a growing sense that men needed to sublimate their emotions and act “like a man.”
By connecting their writing to contemporary scientific debates about sex, one can see how these authors attack the sort of scientific sexism that was behind science and industry at the start of the twentieth century. Popular magazines show clearly the complicated relationship between science and women, if one knows how to identify this approach. Taken together, these authors can be seen as making interventions into the ideology of supposed sexual differences in aptitudes based in biology. Pulp readers, who were accustomed to authors who weaved together different kinds of discourse, in science fiction are shown the consequences of different scientific frameworks: if women must be careful to avoid damaging the biological inheritance of their children because the race is so mutable, then would not one see the race changing all the time? If women are incapable of public affairs, then why do their organizations differ from those of men? These authors provide a valuable testing ground for the investigation of new scientific developments, helping their readers imagine the unexpected consequences of a changing paradigm.