Heinlein's Female Troubles
: "Given Heinlein's apparently feminist ideas, you'd think he would be enshrined as a champion of women's rights. And had he stopped writing with his young-adult novels, he most likely would have been. But the sexual revolution took a toll on him, tainting some of his post-1970 novels with a dated lasciviousness and impairing his ability to create three-dimensional women. In Heinlein's earliest stories - the ones in which lady scientists used their initials - Heinlein eroticized his women. But the prim conventions of 1950's fiction precluded doing this explicitly. By the 1980's, however, he felt licensed to reveal more - or, in the case of Friday, to describe sexual experiences from a woman's point of view. Friday is an 'Artificial Person'; she was conceived in vitro and brought to term in an incubator, which in the book's fictive world is a terrible stigma. To today's AIDS-conscious reader, however, Friday bears a worse stigma: she is a brazen disease vector, recklessly promiscuous, with a bizarre weakness for male engineers. (Heinlein trained as an engineer.) This gives unintended meaning to the idea of Artificial Person; Friday exists only as a mouthpiece. Heinlein has so thoroughly objectified her that her subjectivity falls flat.

Sometimes I wish Heinlein were a less complex writer, that I could cheerlead for his early novels"

As a result of this paragraph I am rereading Friday. So far MG's criticisms seem a little dated and shrill. I find his later novels, while sexually explicit in conformance with the popular fiction of the time, Heinlein was above all a popular fiction writer, still had that unusual emphasis on females as competent fully participatory humans, who just happened to be the half that got pregnant. I think some of the problems feminists have is that Heinlein's women are interested in having babies. Many of his explorations of family structures are setting up child care situations for women who are not dedicated child care providers. In all his families in the later novels, the men are expected to be involved in child rearing coequally with the women. Radical for the time.

Friday was far from the first time Heinlein described sex from the female viewpoint. He did it in I Will Fear No Evil.

Friday reread from a perspective of gender philosophy causes cognitive dissonance until you realize that Friday is simply a James Bond type larger than life heroine with all the human foibles that larger than life characters normally display including a tendency to use sex as recreation and manipulation. Put the artificial person Friday in a male case and change the gender of all the other characters and you have a fairly conventional spy thriller, with the hero bedding all the interesting characters of the opposite sex.

Heinlein at least gave a nod to STDs by having Friday immunized and sterilized so that promiscuity which was a designed in characteristic of her artificial personality would not have unwanted results. Heinlein is turning the design aim of female artificial persons as doxies, upside down in Friday's case as she uses her sexuality and sexual favors for manipulation as well as her own gratification. But like a conventional male hero her own sexual gratification is accepted as a integral part of the story line.

FWIW I found Friday one of the most believable of the Heinlein heroines - she actually had a few flaws. (Though forgiving the rapist will NEVER feel believable to me).

A common theme is a male character assuming incapability in a female only to have the capability shoved down his throat in the next paragraph.

Zeb said, "Huh? Sharpie, there's no time for that; there's something dangerous around! You girls get inside before I--"...
"Chief Pilot, there are no 'girls' here; there are four adult humans." The Number of the Beast, 1980. (NOB) 219.

She goes on with a chain of command explanation, she being on top by being the most competent for command by consensus.

The first two thirds of NOB is an exercise in sorting out competence without regard to gender assumptions, and not incidentally how this sorts out in the context of conventional marital expectations. Both wives get pregnant early in the story which adds the spice of continuation of the species of super competent humans to the mix. It is also an extended lesson on how even pregnant competent females can believably achieve their designated roles in an adventure story.

Don't really have anything to add, just want to say I like this thread and look forward to seeing it develop.

RAH's depiction of women in the juveniles STILL included a large sprinkling of invisible/worthless females - mothers, generally.

He also included Hugh Farnham's wife, who was a caricature, I felt, even if she was modeled after Leslyn.

But by far his most glaring issue with his females was that they were not believable because they were so hyper competent - they did not typically even rise up from a more normal stage to get there, they were always that way.

A typical Heinlein Heroine would build a star ship out of three sticks and a coconut in the back yard while simultaneously raising infant twins and some genius 6 year old errant nephew, all the while maintaining runway model looks, acquire a PhD in a hard science and master 4 or 5 languages before they turn 25....

Come to think of it I can't think of ANY heroine older than about 30 - there were no female Jubal equivalents.

And he had whole flocks of these creatures running around ready to drop everything to pine after some guy.

Not the usual definition of sexism - but he did seem to paint women as all alike for the most part.

If you make it "no heroines over 40" the contention holds. Thirty-somethings are the far edge if you count Wyoh and a few other not-certains. (Girdie in Podkayne comes to mind.)

Clearly, Heinlein women were meant to age into mothers and/or Mrs. Keithleys. No future for them as ruggedly mature universe-changers.

<nod> I can think of quite a few older women in Heinlein's books, but they're usually Howard Family or rejuvs or somesuch -- not obviously older to those around them. So I think the comments are on target. One of my best friends thinks that Heinlein was horrendously sexist: she can't read his stuff at all. I never did; he struck me as having 1920s/30s era ideas, a mishmash of "women can do anything" and "but I sure like them when they do what they do best", which *always* involved sex and or kids. <wry grin> I'm a woman of 50 who never had kids, and I have no interest in becoming another Mrs. Keithley nor skill in that. The world is just a bit bigger in some ways than Heinlein ever managed to grasp.

Since that's true of most people, though, I don't think badly of him for it. I suspect I'd have liked him if I'd ever met him, in spite of his Lazarus Long attitudes about some things.

I was gonna mention Hazel Stone, but Bill beat me to it. Am I remembering incorrectly - isn't there a reverse continuum between Hazel and someone in Moon (and maybe Cat)? Memory is fuzzy on the details and I'm too lazy to look it up.

There is. In MIAHM, Hazel Stone is a preadolescent girl who gets mixed up in a violent protest, acquits herself extremely well, and ends up being adopted by the hero's family. In TCWWTW, Hazel Stone under another name marries the hero and recruits him into the Long family.

I think one conclusion to draw is that Heinlein knew who his customers were - teenage boys, originally, who grew into lecherous old men who liked spaceships and purty gurls - kinda like himself. I don't think it says anything one way or another about his alleged sexism - certainly not in the context of his era - but I tend to see him as somewhat less sexist than the average male contemporary. He clearly was not intimidated or threatened by strong, intelligent women in real life.

I can wait to get the "why" - but I think you're on the right track.

It's one thing to identify and isolate an issue with Heinlein's work and then seek to explain and understand it... it's quite another to perform entire ballets in an attempt to claim the issue doesn't exist.

This topic has been split and moved to the Speakeasy

I'm glad that the part which might be considered offensive to some is over. However, I felt that what had already been said needed to be moved.

I don't consider it any form of censorship since that material is still available to all in the 'Speakeasy' and can be continued without any restriction, (that's its purpose), if anyone so desires.

David

Um, it's my impression that these days professional women get pregnant in their mid to late thirties. I'm aware of quite a few personally.

Heinlein admired E.E. 'Doc' Smith; he wrote once about the Doc helping him pick out a used car to buy.

In one of Smith's 'Lensman' books he makes a statement that a species has not reached 'civilization' until there is gender equality. (My rephrasing from memory). Of course, then he goes on to describe how all Lensmen are male. Clarissa is the odd 'Red' Lensman, and the only Lens holder until her daughters are born; then, they never attend the school for human lensmen.

Still, I really like the idea of gender equality as a civilization 'marker'.

I wonder what people thirty years from now will consider markers of civilization. I like to think that respect for animals-more than we have now-will be one of them.