This is what I meant by this tweet – and sorry to be so cryptic.
I’m working on a chapter about sf writer Robert Heinlein, his books for young adults (published 1947-1959) and his conflicts with his (female) editor at Scribner’s. The gist of the argument has to do with Heinlein’s belief that “true” science teaching, and thus modernity, faces impediments in the form of older, tradition-bound, scared female and female-coded figures—typically mothers, children’s librarians, female teachers, and what he calls “spiritually-castrate” male teachers and school administrators. He loved Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers, and some of his older female characters in his YA books—mothers or aunts who object to characters leaving school to go on space voyages, for example—are very much like Wylie’s Moms.
What I’m trying to figure out is how to contextualize Heinlein’s attitude toward the “female” as “civilized,” and thus hidebound/scared/traditionalist/detrimental to progress, within the culture of the time. If he wrote during the early 20th c I’d have no problem getting secondary sources in on the game (see Bederman, for one), and there’s Marshall Berman, but for the postwar period in particular, I’m lost. Maybe I should be looking for people who write about Wylie, and then following that line of thought?
Thanks for the help, Tweeps.
Shane Landrum
Apr 27, 2011 -
You’re right, of course, to look at Elaine Tyler May’s work. Feminist and queer scholars have written reams on Wylie; see for example Jennifer Terry, Molly Ladd-Taylor and Laurie Umansky’s edited volume on “bad” mothers in postwar America, and maybe James Penner. Kriste Lindenmeyer’s The Greatest Generation Grows Up would shed some light on the women who were mothers during the postwar period (and perhaps on some of their socialization around proper childrearing).
A slightly off-the-wall idea: in the context of postwar YA literature, William Tuttle’s Daddy’s Gone To War might give you a way to think about how Heinlein’s YA readers experienced parental gender roles during the war. That won’t get you far in terms of Heinlein’s representations, but Tuttle’s one of the few people I’ve read who do oral-history-based psychohistory well, and it’s a very… different book on the WW2 homefront.
Not at all related to this question: if you don’t know David Harley Serlin’s Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America, you might enjoy it for the blend of cultural methods, science/technology history, and gender analysis. Then again, his first chapter– on prostheses for WW2 military veterans– may touch some of what you’re trying to get at here about science, masculinity, and gender.
rebecca
Apr 27, 2011 -
Oh, thanks so much for this. Terry et al and Penner look like exactly what I’m lacking here. I’ve read Tuttle – and you’re right, there’s not anything else out there like his book. I admire its thoroughness. (I like your elliptical “different.”)
Finally, you’re not the only person who recommended Serlin – that’s exactly the kind of thing I want to read, not for this chapter, maybe, but for a methodological model. I’m going on a plane trip tomorrow – may grab this out of the library for a “pleasure”/non-work reading option.
Thanks again – this is tremendously helpful.
Natalia
Apr 30, 2011 -
I’m late to this and will be useless, seeing as how you’ve inquired about a specific historical period, but might it not also be worth seeing this as part of a longer history of the same trope? I’m thinking in particular of U.C. Knoepflmacher’s Ventures into Childland, which sees reads Victorian children’s fantasy as a masculine-gendered revolt against the civilizing didacticism of “realist” female authors like Maria Edgeworth.
Rebecca Onion
Apr 30, 2011 -
Nay, not at all useless – this is just exactly what I need – especially b/c the source is looking at children’s lit in particular. (Interesting also to think of this earlier dynamic in conjunction with Heinlein’s particular revolt against “realism,” in which he substituted not fantasy but futurism – some kind of hyper-reality? – for what he saw as the limited horizons of female-penned children’s lit…)
Bridger
Jun 1, 2011 -
If Gandhi were reincarnated as an annoying grad student, he would say: Write the secondary source you wish to see in the world! (Or at least in Worldcat.)
rebecca
Jun 1, 2011 -
I wish there were a way for me to “like” this comment. (Except, are you comparing yourself to Gandhi? Ha!)