Well no, since the whole basis of the story is that the aliens are regarding them as insentient life.
Also, I’m not sure humans are all that enlightened now, let alone when the story was written.
The aliens are regarding them as insentient life because their clothes have all rotted off them so that they’re naked, for reasons I’ve forgotten though the rot-causing organisms are part of it they have no tools with them, and they’re found fighting each other. The aliens have no idea what the fight was about ; so their conclusion that the humans aren’t sentient has nothing to do with human sexism.
The idea that women have a choice who to marry was not a new one at the time.
I briefly looked at the beginning of the story online. Not only don’t they have clothes but they don’t even have fire: it rains so constantly that there’s simply no plant matter dry enough to try to light.
Yeah. And because of all the moisture there’s really active mold or equivalent, which is what happens to all their clothes.
That part of the setup I don’t have any problem with. (I don’t remember what happened to their tools – maybe they had to leave their ship in such a hurry they didn’t take any?) But I don’t think they even needed to add in the fight; and if they did, they could have come up with a less stupid and less obnoxious reason for having one. Hell, they could have been having a practice boxing match for sport.
There’s also the bit where the men have “adopted” the little mouse-like creature as a pet, but the woman is terrified by it and insists the men “do something about him - at once!”
There’s only so much you can blame on the time. A woman would have written a very different story, even in the 1950s.
I’d forgotten that part.
And quite a lot of men would have also written a different story, even at the time. I’ll grant that the time accounts for its having been published in that form.
The passengers were led away from the ship by one or two of the crew tending them while the rest of the crew worked to keep the ship’s reactor from exploding. They failed.
Yes! I remember reading that, years back.
IIRC, the lizard people did not use fire but they loved warmth. One character dies in a fire, but basks in the “lovely, lovely heat” as she dies.