Yeah, that's very true.

One of the things I'm noticing in my reading lately, though (Larbalestier's Daughters of Earth, the recent, already mentioned Secret Feminist Cabal) is just how many women there were reading and writing science fiction from the very beginning. The narrative seems to be "The New Wave brought all those girls in" or in other cases "Well, they all liked Star Trek and that's what got them interested in reading and writing science fiction and now here they are" as though women's participation dated from the sixties and took off in the seventies.

This is part of, it seems to me, the narrative that science fiction was a boy's game to begin with, and the women are recent arrivals--and in some versions of that narrative, "ruining" science fiction which before the sixties was all wonderful hard sciency perfection without all that girl stuff.*

But if you read old letter columns, and look into who was selling stories, there are a lot of women already there, it's just somehow they're invisible. They're just "real" fans' wives and girlfriends, they're just flukes, they're just...pick something off "How to Suppress Women's Writing" at random.

Something happened in the seventies to make the women more or less permanently visible. Just now I'm going with the "overt feminism angered enough people that they made a nice target for nostalgic whines about how science fiction was so much better in the past."


*IMO One of the results of the different versions of this narrative is the claim that science fiction publications have so many more male authors--maybe even exclusively male authors--because women just aren't interested in actual science fiction, not to mention science, that the audience and writers have always been until very recently mostly if not exclusively men, etc. I'm thinking this is not really true, and thus not, you know, a very good excuse.