Housewife Heroines, Lady Scientists, and Midcentury Women's Science Fiction

FAIN: FT-52486-04

Lisa Yaszek
Georgia Tech (Atlanta, GA 30332-0001)

My book demonstrates the significance of women’s science fiction in the "domestic decades" following World War II. Scholars increasingly recognize that midcentury women mobilized the postwar glorification of motherhood and domesticity to participate in the most pressing political debates of the day. To date, however, there has been no discussion of the relationship between these political practices and midcentury women’s literary activities. Galactic Suburbia shows how women used one of the period’s most popular literary genres, science fiction, to articulate the radical politics of motherhood. In doing so, they produced a rich, critically-engaged body of fiction, the import of which has gone unnoticed by standard literary and cultural histories.