I think you’ve left out a LOT of female characters who don’t fit that explanation, including most of the important female characters in Tunnel in the Sky.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
And speaking of short stories, while none of the novels were directly written for Boy’s Life, Farmer in the Sky was an expansion of a short story originally written for Boy’s Life.[/Chronos]
A direct quote from Grumbles From The Grave: “I am up to page 150 in the first draft of my current story {Farmer In The Sky}, intended for Boy’s Life and for juvenile book, and should have this draft finished in 10 days. It will probably take another month to shape it into a satisfactory serial version and book-length version.” (page 58)
Rik, I’m not so sure I agree. In Tunnel in the Sky Rod’s sister (whose name evades me at the moment) was a combat soldier, yes, and an officer to boot. Who then, on being put in close cooperation with ‘Deacon’ Masters finds the love of her life, marries him, and seems willing to be his helpmeet for his pioneering work that he’ll be finding in his own name. Likewise, Jackie is Jimmy’s wife at the end of the book, content to follow his career path. And Caroline made it very clear that her choices were to be an Amazon (The combat corps that Rod’s sister had belonged to.) or to marry. Even the medical team the castaways had was based on the boy being the ‘doctor’ or senior partner, and the girl being his ‘nurse.’ There is no sense that any of these women are less capable than the males around them, just an acceptance of more traditional gender roles. I don’t really think Heinlein’s books are all that sexist, honestly, but on the basis of stated gender role models, I have to admit there is room to make the accusation stick. This doesn’t mean I don’t think that the books are still great reading. I recommend them to all comers.
As for Orphans of the Sky, IIRC that was originally a serial for Astounding, and while it shares some of the traits I consider defining of Heinlein’s juveniles (The need to question athority; a rationalist approach to the world, etc.) I think it also has a lot bleaker a tone than any of Heinlein’s juveniles.
Just about every single one of Heinlein’s female characters are extremely interested in becoming married and/or a mother. No matter HOW competent or liberated the character, if it’s a Heinlein female, she wants to have kids or get married or both, ASAP. All of her other goals will be pushed aside in favor of the Holy Grail of motherhood or matrimony.
I’ve always really liked Heinlein’s works, except for that recurring theme, and except for the preaching that “rape victims usually want/invite it” in Stranger in a Strange Land. Since someone had tried to rape me in the summer before I read that book, I was absolutely miserable, thinking that I had somehow brought this upon myself. After all, if Heinlein had said it, it MUST be true, right? I was all of 12 years old at the time, btw.
As I said earlier, he’s a great storyteller, but I’ve always, ALWAYS found him to be sexist in the way that he handles women…though not as bad as his contemporaries.
But if you can’t, you can always read his preferred ending in Grumbles from the Grave
A couple of thoughts:
Heinlein’s 50’s teenagers don’t age well, to be sure, though I still enjoy the books very much, and have heard a number of young people say they liked them. But it seems unjust to me to be condemning him for writing to a canon regarding sexuality in fiction that has been outmoded for 30 years plus but was in effect when he wrote, and which he pushed the limits of – see the problems he had about several stories, notably Red Planet, with his editor Alice Dalgliesh, in Grumbles from the Grave.
Second, Heinlein operated on the theory that marriage is a partnership, and his women want, not subservience to their men, but a joint effort with them. He got explicit on this with the female lead characters in The Number of the Beast, but it’s implicit in several earlier stories – The Puppet Masters comes to mind, as does the very young female protagonist in The Door into Summer, which the story’s focus on Dan Davis tends to underplay, but who at age 11 (!) is very much in control of her own life. And notice who is the leader and who the follower in The Star Beast. That the young and egocentric male protagonists in his boys’ novels tend to assume that their girlfriends will go along with their wishes, is not necessarily Heinlein’s view, but verisimilitude in characterization.
I’ll gladly argue against any single book of Heinlein’s being sexist, as I hope my previous posts will show. But, Lynn does have a point: taken as a body of work, there is a certain sexism (Or at least expectation about traditional gender roles.) running through all his works. I think I’ve read most of his works, certainly all the book length works, and most of the shorter ones, and in that entire body of work, I can think of exactly one major female character who didn’t fit the mold Lynn pointed out in her post: Penny from Double Star. And even she, at the end of the book was married to the protagonist, it’s simply not shown as her driving ambition. Again, for any individual character, no problem, it’s only as a body of related works that things start to look a little skewed.
Carmen from Starship Troopers doesn’t count, to my mind, as a major character. And Poddy, while not romantically linked, seemed to be leaning towards the stereotype Lynn mentioned, though it’s been so long since I read Podkayne of Mars I’ll admit I may be wrong.
You have to read Glory Road. I read that one several times a year and it just never gets old.
Which was the one with the telepathic twins that are used as human radios for FTL space ships?
Time For The Stars.
Heinlein wasn’t sexist at all. He was a product of his age. I don’t hear anybody ragging on Dickens for being sexist!
No I rag on Dickens for being making maudlin too weak a word to describe him. 
Seriously, it doesn’t detract from Heinlein’s works to admit the man did have some gender bias. And for his day and age, good Lord, he was a radical. But ignoring the differences in tone when talking about the books to readers today doesn’t do him any favors, either.
Frankly I think the whole thing is overblown. A lot, probably the majority of women, today want to get married and have kids eventually. It was even more the case in the 50s. Now, there are many, many more women today who want to keep their careers AND have a family than there were in the 50s, but things change and sometimes even great SF writers don’t predict those changes accurately.
There are hundreds of copies available at abebooks.com, starting at $1.45.
I think that one of the reason’s that Heinlein’s female characters are so interested in having children is that because RAH and Ginny never had any children. (Why, I don’t know.) If we assume that RAH, like a great number of authors, based his characters on himself and people that he knew (I’d like to point out that a great number of Heinlein’s females were red heads just like Ginny), then the desire for children becomes understandable (since it seems to have been something that both RAH and Ginny wanted, but could never have).
Lynn, Heinlein addressed rape in his Expanded Universe, in which he said, IIRC, that if women were trained to fight back, then rape would never happen.
Frankly, I think that the reason many of his later adult novels aren’t as good as his earlier works has to do with him realizing that his time was short, and that if he was going to get anything done, he’d have to combine a lot of the ideas into one book, and to keep things interesting, he threw in the incest. (Unlike Arthur C. Clarke just slaps together a grab bag of ideas and calls it a novel.)
friend rikwriter wrote
i am also a fan. i re-read citizen of the galaxie last week
Eh, the majority, yes…but Heinlein’s females had matrimony and maternity as their overriding priorities in life. I know a lot of women. Some DO want kids more than anything else. Some want to be married more than anything else. But I know lots of them who don’t want kids or to be married to the exclusion of their other goals. Even in Heinlein’s youth, there were such women. He just didn’t write about them. This is probably partly because of the sex role expectations of the time, but I believe that it’s also a fundamental part of Heinlein’s philosophy.
Which is false. Men can be raped, too, and men are trained to fight back. Heck, I fought back, and probably escaped being actually raped because of it…but I still maintain that his statement that any woman who was raped was probably asking for it. I’m sorry, I don’t have the book in front of me, and I don’t remember the exact quote. But it was a female character who said it.
Again, I think that Heinlein was a fine writer. I’m just saying that he had his flaws and blind spots, like any other human.
To be fair, at the time Heinlein wrote his juveniles admitting that would have been anathema.
I agree.
I’d also like to go one step further: I do not support the idea the Heinlein himself was a sexist. But, the stories he chose to write does leave him open to that charge, with some justification.
When recommending his works to modern readers, however, it does both the prospective reader and Heinlein a disservice not to point out that there will be some cognitive dissonance because of the assumptions in the book that will look strange to the modern mind.
To some extent men are trained to fight back (unless, of course, you’re a geek, like me, then you’re given some kind of nonsensical advice which doesn’t prevent you from getting your ass kicked), but of course, unless you’re a martial arts expert, you’re going to be pretty much helpless if ten guys jump you all at once.
I’m certainly not going to argue that Heinlein didn’t say it (I believe one of the female characters says something similar in Friday), I mention it solely because what Heinlein says in his commentaries about his writings often contradicts the interpretations many people have of his fiction. A prime example being Starship Troopers which some folks seem to think is either a closeted gay novel or an ode to fascism (which, of course, it is neither).
Given that a larger number of women are raped than are willing to talk about it, I think that it’s possible that Heinlein never had a conversation with any woman who brought the subject up, and so didn’t have much understanding of the matter. (My first girlfriend was raped by her grandfather when she was ten, and quite understandably had a lot of emotional problems because of it.)
When I was 9, my father decided that I should be reading better science fiction than Tom Swift, Jr. He went down to the library, checked out Rocket Ship Galileo and Have Space Suit, Will Travel, and handed them to me. I could not read another Swift until I had finished both books.
Galileo was so unmemorable that I haven’t read it since I was 9.
HSSWT, on the other hand, hooked me on space travel, science, and science fiction. I have dreamed about every aspect of that suit. I dreamed about owning one! I don’t know how many times I’ve read the book, but it has to be at least 10, which is a lot for me. I can still remember all the big details: the soap contest, the suit, the spaceship, Tombaugh station, Peewee, Mother Thing, the station on Pluto, the trial (and the Spanish legionnaire), and so forth.
Heinlein was sexist, but that’s just part of his amazing quirkiness and forthright outrageousness. He said whatever he damn well wanted, and never worried about criticism. A lot of people dislike him. Heck, I dislike him, particularly for his constant attitude that we should kill the other guy/thing (preferably with a knife) before he/it kills us. Read Starship Trooper; it was clearly written by a lifelong military man who had never been in battle. Then read Haldeman’s The Forever War (I’ve also read that one at least 10 times).
Nonetheless I admire Heinlein for his originality and his storytelling. He knew what people (men?) wanted to read, and he wrote it well. If he was preachy (Trooper is fascist philosophy masquerading as sci-fi) he was also entertaining (his short stories in particular). I stopped reading him because his preaching overwhelmed his entertaining, but I still miss the guy.
I don’t know that you can defend that statement. He was an Annapolis grad, but only served 6-8 years, IIRC.
Well, that was one reason Haldeman wrote The Forever War. And also one reason why Harrison wrote Bill, the Galactic Hero. To offer their own view of the military in defiance of Heinlein’s.
It seems that people are looking at Heinlein’s women with 2004 glasses. He wrote these books in the 40s and 50s.
If you look at how women were treated, and their ambitions in the 40s and 50s you will find that Heinlein was ahead of his time.
I grew up in the 50’s. The Leave it to Beaver wife was not unknown in my neighborhood. Some of these women made the Stepford Wifes look like bra burners.