Gender and Civ Post-WWII?

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.