Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction: Angels, Amazons, and Women

Darwinian Feminism in Early Science Fiction provides the first detailed scholarly examination of women’s science fiction in the early magazine period before the Second World War. Tracing the tradition of women’s SF back to the 1600s, Sharp shows how women such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley drew critical attention to the colonial mindset of scientific masculinity which was attached to scientific institutions that excluded women. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection provided an impetus for a number of first-wave feminists to imagine Amazonian worlds where women control their own bodies, relationships and destinies. Sharp traces how these feminist visions of scientific femininity, Amazonian power and evolutionary progress proved influential on many women publishing in the SF magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and presents a compelling picture of the emergence to prominence of feminist SF in the early twentieth century before vanishing until the 1960s.