Back in April, I posted a list of women-only science fiction anthologies – see here – but since then I’ve discovered two more that should have been on my list:

Future Eves, Jean Marie Stine, ed. (2002) Subtitled “Classic sf by women about women”, this anthology is split into two sections: From the 1920s – ’30s and From the 1940s – ’50s. It contains stories by Leslie F Stone, Margaretta W Rea, Hazel Heald, Evelyn Goldstein, Marcia Kamien, Joy Leache, Betsy Curtis, Beth Elliott and Helen Clarkson. There’s a couple of names there new to me – Rea’s story is apparently the only one she ever had published (in Amazing, Jan 1933), Goldstein had eight stories published between 1954 and 1960, Kamien three in the mid-1950s, Leache three from 1959 to 1961, and Elliott only one in 1959. Clarkson is also known for a single story, which was reprinted in New Eves – see my review here.

Women Resurrected: Stories from Women Science Fiction Writers of the 50’s, Greg Fowlkes, ed. (2011) This is from a small press which seems to specialise in “resurrecting” old and forgotten genre works – not just science fiction, but also mystery and adventure. Women Resurrected contains stories by Pauline Ashwell, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Florence Verbell Brown, Barbara Constant, Betsy Curtis, Dorothy de Courcy, Miriam Allen deFord, Helen Huber, Jean M Janis, Elisabeth R Lewis, Katherine MacLean, Judith Merril, Evelyn E Smith, Lyn Venable, Ann Walker, Elaine Wilber, Therese Windser and Mari Wolf. Yet more unfamiliar names – Brown (1 story only published), Constant (2 stories), de Courcy (20 stories), Huber (1 story), Janis (2 stories), Lewis (1 story), Venable (7 stories), Walker (1 story), Wilber (1 story), Windser (1 story) and Wolf (7 stories).

None of these “unknown” writers had careers that lasted beyond the early 1960s. It’s tempting to wonder why – marriage? children? no longer welcome by editors? It also seems odd that de Courcy, with twenty stories published between 1946 and 1954, should prove so obscure, especially given that a woman sf writer – Pamela Zoline – is still known today for a single story published in 1967 (and she only published 5 in total throughout her career). Perhaps the fact de Courcy co-wrote with – husband? brother? – John de Courcy explains it. The same might also be said of Mari Wolf, who wrote alone – I mean, how can you forget a writer whose first story was titled ‘Robots of the World! Arise!’.

So that’s a pair of anthologies which focus on the early decades of science fiction and women’s contribution to it. According to Partners in Wonder by Eric Leif Davin, there were 65 women writers published in science fiction magazines between 1926 and 1949, and a further 138 who debuted between 1950 and 1960. In total, those 203 women sf writers produce 922 stories during those 34 years, averaging between 5% and 16% by title of the total contents for genre magazines throughout the period.

After 1960, of course, and the appearance of massmarket paperbacks in supermarkets, there was a huge influx of female sf readers and writers… and yet common perception still has it that women writers are a small minority – as if the situation prior to 1960 has held true for the last 50 years. Even worse, little or none of those pre-1960 women sf writers are ever collected, or appear on lists of “classic” sf… further feeding into the myth that women did not write sf during those decades. Happily, the above two anthologies prove this untrue . More like them, please.