Are there other earlier sci-fi races with non-sentient females (or males) or was Niven the first to postulate this in some of the races that populate his stories like the Kzinti?
The MArtians in Stranger in a Strange Land have nonsentient quasi-female nymphs and sentient quasi-male adults. I believe this predates the Niven books.
Well, if you look at the typical female character in most 1930’s pulp sci-fi, they were all pretty much non-sentient…
But I don’t think it was intentional.
“Duck, Magnum, Duck!”
“I can’t spell VW, but I got a porsche!”
Didn’t any early pulp science-fiction stories have an outer-space insect “Queen” and her non-sentient male drones battling our hero? The cover paintings sure give that impression. I know that the covers rarely connected with the stories inside but I’d like to hear from someone whose read more of that stuff than I have.
I don’t know if they are canon, but some of the stories in the Man Kzin Wars collections imply that many kzinti females are sentient, but they keep that secret. They are throwbacks to before the kzin patriarchy started selectively breeding females for stupidity, and the intelligent females implant hypnotic suggestions in male kzin cubs.