Not Lost in Space: Science and Technology as Women's Work in Postwar Science Fiction

Abstract

The new technologies that proliferated after World War II — including everything from atomic bombs and communication satellites to deep freezers and automatic coffee makers — radically transformed American thinking about science, society, and gender. In the first study of its kind, Professor Lisa Yaszek explains how women writing for the postwar science fiction community created the earliest body of literature to systematically explore these transformations. Yaszek begins by reviewing how cold war domestic industrialization fostered new notions of women’s work as the technoscientific management of home and family. At the same time, she contends, anxiety about early Soviet successes in the space race led to a growing conviction that American women should leave their homes and serve their country as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. Yaszek then demonstrates how Judith Merril, Kay Rogers, and Marion Zimmer Bradley merged these seemingly contradictory ideas in stories that celebrated women's domestic lives as inspiration for scientific and technological discovery. Thus these authors figured women's work in both the home and the laboratory as essential to the ongoing development of technoscientific society in particular and human progress as a whole.