The second paragraph was a repsonse to** Wolf**, of course.
Well, just to be fair, the men are schemers, too, who use any and all means. Dune’s is a particularly Machiavellian universe.
It’s long bothered me that Paul is special because he’s the firs [i[male* who could drink the Water of Life and use Bene Gesserit techniques, so that the combination of those powers and abilities with his maleness makes a potent and dangerous combination. This impliesthat all those Bene Gesserit women, even the best and most gifted of them in the past, weren’t Great because they were girls. Denied Greatness because of their girl cooties, no doubt.
In Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, the ‘Free Trader’ culture was a matriarchy, with women running the show. They were very assertive, very smart, and considered the men to be somewhat thick.
In Starship Troopers, women were considered to be grade-A starship captain material, and were very important in the military. They were also depicted as being very tough and very competent. I can’t remember any of them wanting to be pregnant.
And the tragic part is, there is a vaccination for those.
I think that Turek meant “among the juvenile novels”. Though Heinlein did have other short stories starring females, and adult novels, Podkayne was his only juvenile novel with a female protagonist.
I think the most gender-balanced of Heinlein’s works was probably Tunnel in the Sky, where all of the main characters of either gender are pretty much the rugged survivalist type. The protagonist is a male, due no doubt to the Boy’s Life audience, but his sister teaches him some valuable lessons at the start, and the most competent hunter in his group is a woman. But even there, the predominant religion of the day was patriarchal, and one of the major characters feels the need to hide her gender at first.
Another example from Heinlein which might be of interest is the short story “Over the Rainbow”, a sort of optimistic look at how bright the near future might potentially be. The president of the United States in the story is a woman (and a black woman, at that), and portrayed as quite competent. She was originally an actress, and was put on the vice-presidental ticket primarily for purposes of face recognition, but the elected President died in office, and on succeeding, it turned out that she was a better president than he was. But even at that, it’s not really showing a gender-equal society (since a woman was still considered unelectable as President), just perhaps that society should be gender-equal.
Something like what the OP is looking for can probably be found somewhere in James Tiptree’s works, though I don’t know of any specific examples. Much of her[sup]*[/sup] work involves exploration of gender roles in society, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she wrote something about a truly gender-equal society. All of the stories I can think of, though, are based on extraordinary situations resulting in a change in gender roles, which the OP specifically ruled out.
*“James Tiptree” is a pseudonym for Alice B. Sheldon. Much of her best work (including all of her early material) was written under a male pseudonym, for fear that a female SF author wouldn’t be accepted.
So says self-serving Gene Roddenberry. This is not corroborated anywhere else. In fact, Herb Solow and Robert Justman go into this falsehood in their excellent, balanced book “Inside Star Trek.”
Herb tells of the executives watching the pilot. After it was over, he, knowing for some reason that Roddenberry wanted her in the role badly, tried to pitch them on keeping Majel Barrett, telling them she was a fresh young talent.
Finally one of the execs looked at him and said something like, “Herb, you dumbass, she’s his girlfriend!” Solow was not aware of this and wound up with egg on his face.
So, final line, Barrett was given the door by the male executives because of her acting talent (or lack thereof), not because they (or this made of wholecloth women test audience) didn’t like a female second-in-command.
Solow goes on to relate that when the series went on the air, there were bets of when he would try to sneak Barrett back onto the show, and while watching dailies, they whooped “There she is,” when they spotted her in her blonde Nurse Chapel wig.
Read the book if you still doubt me. I don’t mean to sound irritated, and it is not at you, just at these Goddamn Roddenberry bullshit myths.
Sir Rhosis
I’m skeptical of this. I think Sheldon’s attitude is better summed up in this quote from Wikipedia:
My understanding of her is that she lived much of her life as if she were a man, for complex psychological reasons relating to her youth. I think she liked being James Tiptree. Jr.
It’s also hard for me to believe that a female writer wouldn’t be accepted in sf in 1967 (or 1968, depending on which source you believe). 1957, maybe, though even that would be late. But not 1967.
Besides, she received her Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1967 and it’s hard not to think that her whole career wasn’t just an experiment that she was putting the field through. 
The first full biography of her is slated to see print later this year, BTW.
While I’m nitpicking, all her best stuff right to the end of her career was written under her male pseudonym. She did write a few scattered stories as by Racoona Sheldon, and one even won an award, but none were her best work, IMO, and she didn’t revert exclusively to it at any time that I’m familiar with.
Actually, my source was hearing Majel Barret say it herself. So it comes down to conflicting sources.
OK, I’ll buy that. Most of what she’s written about herself is a bit confusing, I think perhaps deliberately on her part. In any event, my point wasn’t about why she chose a male pseudonym, just the fact that she did. And that was only even relevant for purposes of explaining my use of pronouns.
OK, this I won’t dispute. The best stories I’ve read by her were all under the Tiptree name, as well. I just phrased that the way I did because I haven’t read all of her work, and I was hedging the possibility that she maybe had some good material under her own name as well.
Since you seem to be better informed than I on whatever-you-call-her, do you know if any of her stories meet the OP’s criteria?
The OP specified before 1960, which would leave Tiptree out. Properly so, because she was just part of a small feminist movement in sf in the 60s, along with Joanna Russ, Pamela Zoline, Kit Reed, and Ursula K. LeGuin, to name a few.
Tiptree’s stories are often feminist in tone, at least in more or less explicit critiques of male-dominated societies and maleness in general. “The Women That Men Don’t See” and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” pop into my head immediately and I’m normally bad at remembering story titles.
Her pseudonym was spelled Raccoona, BTW. I can’t explain that, but it would be a nifty username.
There is also a James Tiptree Jr. Award for stories that break down gender barriers, by males or females. The last winner, Geoff Ryman’s Air, though not as wonderful as I thought it would turn out to be from its beginning, is a fascinating look at technological change from an unusual perspective. I’m currently reading the 2002 winner, Light by M. John Harrison. Harrison is a terrific British writer who didn’t get his due from the mainstream awards. Light is like the first Velvet Underground album: nobody bought it but those who did immediately wanted to run out and write their own novels.
I was, as I said, just nitpicking. This is the kind of SF that I like, so I’m protective of it.
In Heinlein’s defense, he admitted that he wasn’t very good at creating female characters (in Grumbles From The Grave. He tried (Podkayne of Mars, The Menace From Earth, and the Puddin’ stories), but he didn’t have a good grasp on the female perspective. He did try to portray women as at least equals and in cases superior to men, but they didn’t generally play major roles in his works.
There was a brief exchange in his juvenile novel The Star Beast where the protagonist’s girlfriend, Betty, reveals that she divorced her parents at a young age because they tried to force their religion on her. Heinlein received a great deal of flak for that particular detail from the Librarian’s Guild (or whatever it’s called), but refused to take it out of the book, although he may have toned it down some in the final version. This was not a major plotline or even mildly necessary to the story, but he wanted it left in there because it illustrated that women (and children) are individuals, not things, and should have every freedom available to everyone.
In all of his stories that I can recall, women were present in any role that men might fill, and if one were shown to be superior to the other, it was a matter of individual character, rather than race or gender. So while you might not think any of his novels were overtly feminist, they were definitely not the misogynistic tracts that many of his contemporaries were selling.
Many good points have already been made; I won’t repeat.
I recall that, in one of Asimov’s books in the Lije Bailey/R. Daneel Olivaw series (either Caves of Steel or one of the later ones), Det. Bailey is under orders from a Federal official who - he is surprised to learn, as his immediate superior carefully hasn’t told him ahead of time - is a large-breasted woman. Bailey is a little nonplussed, even distracted, but she’s of a higher rank and seems capable, so he just says “Yes, ma’am” and does as he’s told.
For all of the myths which Roddenberry later wove around Star Trek, and for all the times that women on the show were just eye candy, IIRC it was still the first major SF show to show women in professional roles and as respected officers and crew of a ship.
Sometimes progress is three steps forward and two steps back.
I’d like to point out that, although it was a movie and not a TV show, It! The Terror from Beyond Space has two women in its crew as full and equal members (although not in command positions, and I note that it’s the women who make and serve the coffee. Even in the future it’s the women who are expected to get the coffee.)
And it’s not a great film, by any means, but The Angry Red Planet has a woman as 1/4 of the crew, and it’s through her eyes that the story is told. Furthermore, she’s the one who comes up with the much-cleverer-than-it-deserves-to-be solution that finally defeats the Space Amoeba. Again, though, that said, I have to observe that she seems to be the Designated Screamer and Fainter on this trip. But it’s more dignified than being the Designated Body, like Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage.
Yeah, that drives me nuts. Women have all these great powers…but they still just need a good man. And that is the sum of all of their lives.
Very few writers in any genre have written good female characters.
A point: Men have all these great powers, but they still need a good woman and to settle down, at the end of things, and that is the sum of all their lives.
Seriously, that attitude tended to be expressed as well. It’s just that ‘settling down’ was defined as giving up your career in… hm. Most books and pictures of the era.
How about Hazel Stone from the Juveniles? She certainly was something.
Again, the ‘Free Trader’ society in Citizen of the Galaxy is a pretty strong matriarchy where the women really are in control. Even the ‘society girl’ near the end of the book turns out to be strong-willed, morally upright, and willing to do what it takes. I don’t think there’s a weak female character in the book.