I was appalled two years ago to find a new SF novel with the title The Hidden World by a Kristin Landon in which the protagonist is a woman from a failing colony planet in which the society on the planet is some version of old-fashioned 1950s Patriarchy with women being relegated to wifehood as vocation or otherwise despised, and the controllers of the interstellar culure are Pilot-Masters who are all male and completely patrilineal and patriarchal... and of course the protagonist turns out to be the one exception female with the ability to be a pilot.... The novel was otherwise a promising first novel, but that hackneyed "here we have this all-male-control social system and women can't... but wait, Our Protagonist is the One Woman Exception!" theme/plot, ticked me off for a book published more than 40 years after The Feminine Mystique, and decades after the upheavals of the 1960s, the integration of women into West Point and Annapolis and the Air Force Academy and the Citadel and into the US and other westen countries' militaries as pilots and navigators.
That whole trope raises my hackles, as someone female who is a military veteran and was at the end of many-to-few gender ratios in college and in ROTC decades ago. It irks me to see that despite the passing of all these years, despite both Harvard and MIT having female presidents, despite all the women who've graduated from the US federal and state schools feeding the Coast Guard and the Merchant Marine and the military, despite women being race car drivers, jockeys, CEOs, lawyers, politicians.... that ther is still the Queen Bee plot in SF/F as an acceptable trope rather than having to explained as an exception....
E.g. in Darkover Landfall, which came out around the early 1980s?, the author created a situation in which there were values changes implemented in the culture of the new colony, based on trying to make the colony survive on a planet which was not the intended destination, and upon loss of critical equipment and supplies and information access. Those conditions got set early-on in the book. No such explanations showed up in The Hidden Worlds for why the cultures treat women as second class citizens at best...
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mmmag
Re: Let me beat some tolerance into you?!
Date: 2009-08-15 02:11 pm (UTC)That whole trope raises my hackles, as someone female who is a military veteran and was at the end of many-to-few gender ratios in college and in ROTC decades ago. It irks me to see that despite the passing of all these years, despite both Harvard and MIT having female presidents, despite all the women who've graduated from the US federal and state schools feeding the Coast Guard and the Merchant Marine and the military, despite women being race car drivers, jockeys, CEOs, lawyers, politicians.... that ther is still the Queen Bee plot in SF/F as an acceptable trope rather than having to explained as an exception....
E.g. in Darkover Landfall, which came out around the early 1980s?, the author created a situation in which there were values changes implemented in the culture of the new colony, based on trying to make the colony survive on a planet which was not the intended destination, and upon loss of critical equipment and supplies and information access. Those conditions got set early-on in the book. No such explanations showed up in The Hidden Worlds for why the cultures treat women as second class citizens at best...