Home truths: women writing Keywords domestic Cold War science in the nuclear dawn history 1 natural science Diana Newell feminist literature science-fiction Abstract literature This paper develops a political reading of women writers’/writer-editors’ Rachel Carson involvement in the American atomic age, Cold War-era fields of science fiction atomic age and popular science writing. Judith Merril (1928-97) in her post-war 1 My thanks to Linda science-fiction writing and Rachel Carson (1907-64) in her international Lear, Leslie Paris, best-selling anti-pesticide polemic, Silent Spring (1962), capitalized on Arthur Ray, Jim Rupert, and Allan popular, mass-market literary genres as vehicles for social criticism in what Weiss for thoughtful Jessica Wang calls an ‘Age of Anxiety’ in which open criticism of American comments on this research. Versions of science, government, and the industrial-military complex carried high personal this paper were deliv- risk. Importantly, both explicitly politicized images of domesticity, thus ered at the 10th Biannual Swiss joining women’s history to some of the most sweeping changes of the twenti- Congress on eth century. Women’s History, ‘Gender and Knowledge’, The US atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 engendered in members University of of the Anglo-American science fiction communities a certain glow of Misericorde, Fribourg, Switzerland, 18-19 self-congratulation for having brilliantly predicted a world-changing sci- February 2000; and entific development.2 The general mixed sense of elation among writers the International Conference on the and fans of science fiction is captured in British writer Brian Aldiss’s per- Nature of Gender and sonal reflection in the 1970s: ‘Whatever else the A-bomb meant to ... the Gender of Nature, Kiel University, Kiel, the rest of mankind, to a small handful of us it meant vindication. We Germany, 11-12 who had been regarded as mad were proved dangerously sane. The November 2000. 3 Future had happened, and blown the lid off the Old Order.’ In the Cold 2 Paul Brians, ‘The War wake of Hiroshima, American science fiction writers would, like Revival of Learning: 4 Science After the American scientists, both challenge and perpetuate the development of Nuclear Holocaust in the domestic Cold War order. Yet, rarely have studies of early atomic- ’, in Carl B. Yoke (ed.), era science or science fiction examined the value of women’s leadership Phoenix From the in these critical debates. In this explosive post-war political era, in the Ashes: The Literature long gap between first- and second-wave feminism, how would women of the Remade World (New York: construct their political interventions in Cold War debates concerning Greenwood Press, science, society, and the future? 1987), p. 45, citing in part the early This paper considers and compares the radical, intellectual contribu- studies by Albert I. tions of two leading post-war American women writers - Judith Merril Berger, ‘Nuclear Energy, Science (1928-97), who in the 1950s became the pre-eminent New York-based Fiction’s Metaphor of science fiction writer/editor and critic in science fiction, and Rachel Power’, , 6 Carson (1907-64), the celebrated Washington DC area literary natural (1979), pp. 125-26, science writer/editor and author of Silent Spring (1962). Although much and Michael J. has been written about Rachel Carson and on this, her most famous Yavenditti, ‘The American People and (and last) text, the domestic Cold War context of her nature writing the Use of Atomic deserves fuller consideration. Viewed within the early Cold War, atomic Bombs on Japan: The 1940s’, The Historian: anxiety context, the literary contributions of Merril and Carson have A Journal of History,

EJAC 22 (3) 193–203 © Intellect Ltd 2003 193 36 (1974), pp. 224- 47. much more in common than the quite different careers of their authors might suggest. 3 Brian Aldiss, ‘Introduction’, in Brian Aldiss and Atomic concern (eds.), Hell’s Cartographers: Paul Boyer suggests in The Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Some Personal Culture at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age that in broad cultural terms it Histories of Science Fiction Writers might be helpful to think of the public’s critical engagement with the (London: Weidenfeld bomb as cyclical, with alternating periods of awareness and apathy.5 and Nicholson, 1975), p. 2. The political atmosphere in the ‘bomb’s early light’, suggests Boyer, was one of ‘fear and animosity that had increasingly surfaced as an impor- 4 Jessica Wang, American Science in tant component of post-Hiroshima American attitudes toward modern the Age of Anxiety: science and its ambiguous gifts’.6 The great source of anxiety in this first Scientists, Anticommunism, and cycle was fear of atomic attack. Boyer identifies a second cycle of atomic the Cold War (Chapel concern that runs from 1957 to 1962, when nuclear weapons for the Hill: University of 7 North Carolina Press, second time emerged as a central cultural theme. Marking this second 1998). wave was the widespread and profound public anxiety about radioactive 5 Paul Boyer, By the fallout from US nuclear tests in the Pacific, which began in the mid- Bomb’s Early Light: 1950s, and the Soviet-US space race. Public anxiety peaked with US American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of President John Kennedy’s massive fallout shelter programme and the the Nuclear Age. (New Cuban Missile Crisis in the opening years of the 1960s, and abated with York: Pantheon, 1985), epilogue. the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Updated in the new In the domestic realm, atomic bombs were revolutionary for their ‘Preface’ to the 1994 printing (see pp. x- impact on civilian life and the role of the family, as recent research xi). demonstrates.8 Elaine Tyler May and other scholars who have located 6See Boyer, By the the family within the larger political culture identify a general expecta- Bomb’s Early Light, tion in 1950s America that parents - mothers in particular - would chapter 22, ‘Second Thoughts about shoulder responsibility for creating normal families and stable homes to Prometheus: The foster a Cold War consensus.9 Stephanie Coontz in The Way We Never Atomic Bomb and Attitudes Toward Were argues that in Cold War America, a stable, ‘“normal” family and Science’. vigilant mother became the essential “front line” of defense to 10 7 Boyer, By the Bomb’s treason’. Focusing her study of Cold War images of women on atomic Early Light, chapter images, Kristina Zarlengo’s research demonstrates that with atomic 22. Following the second cycle was a bombs came the cultural production of several contradictory ideas of long period of femininity fitted to the atomic age.11 At one extreme was the female relative apathy, then a renewal (third ‘bombshell’ (highly sexualized women, ‘pin-up’ girls, who posed a threat wave) of atomic con- to sexual order). At the other, was the domestic female expert in civilian cern in the 1980s, defence. Regarding the latter, public information campaigns encouraged with US President Ronald Regan’s Star atomic-age women to imagine themselves as warriors in training, and Wars project. women and children were hailed as a new class of soldiers - ‘deterrence 8 In addition to soldiers’.12 The related environment of containment, Alan Nadel recalls Kristina Zarlengo, ‘Civilian Threat, the of his childhood in Containment Culture, had ‘handcuffed’ young people Suburban Citadel, like him to the nation.13 and Atomic Age American Women’, Amy Kaplan’s study, ‘Manifest Domesticity’, argues that the idea of Signs: Journal of the domestic was more unstable, dynamic, and complex than earlier Women in Culture and scholarship implies.14 Merril’s first science fiction novel, Shadow on the Society, 24: 4 (1999), see Margot A. Hearth (1950), and Carson’s final natural science monograph, Silent

194 Diana Newell Henriksen, Dr Spring (1962) can be read as persuasive post-war evidence of Kaplan’s Strangelove’s America: point. Both projects effectively engaged with the deadly forces unleashed Society and Culture in the Atomic Age in 1945; they powerfully interrogated domestic settings and, in the (Berkeley: University process, advanced somewhat new images of women, families, and of California Press, domesticity in the new post-war white, middle-class locale of suburbia. 1997), a cultural study of America’s ‘culture of dissent’. A Judith Merril, science fiction, and Shadow on the brief commentary on the contribution of Hearth (1950) science fiction Although a handful of studies consider the role of science fiction and (mostly films) forms part of chapter 2: hard-boiled pulp fiction in Cold War cultural formations, unique among ‘Vertigo: The them is David Seed’s thoughtful recent work, American Science Fiction Unhinged Moral Universe of Cold War and the Cold War: Literature and Film. Seed discusses literary Cold War America’. She settings such as the home and the role of science fiction narratives in appears to miss addressing the real anxieties of civilians - such as the viability of the Boyer’s point about the cyclical nature of home as a refuge in nuclear attack. In this context, he highlights the lit- dissent, however (see erary contributions of a number of women writers, most notably Judith pp. xv-xvii). See also Stephanie Coontz, The 15 Merril. Way We Never Were: The field of science fiction into which Judith Merril stepped in the American Families and the Nostalgia Trap 1940s had American origins and dated from the 1920s, but it did not (New York: Basic gather force with expanded readership until after the shift from pulp- Books, 1992). fiction magazines to mass-market magazines and paperback books 9 This is a serious beginning in the early 1950s. By then, Merril was prominent in New point; the period 1945 to 1960 York science fiction circles and becoming a productive, respected produced what writer/editor of the genre.16 The explosion of the science fiction field became known as the ‘baby boom’. See through mass-market publishing, and the newfound ‘respectability’ of Elaine Tyler May, science fiction collections and novels after Hiroshima, as mentioned by ‘Introduction’, Homeward Bound: Aldiss, attracted many new writers of science fiction. Many of the new American Families in practitioners were women. Merril’s own retrospective view of the post- the Cold War Era war, atomic-age history of the science fiction field, as she had experi- (New York: Basic Books, 1988). Joanne enced (and led) it in the late 1940s and the 1950s underscores the Meyerowitz (ed.), Not vitality of science fiction in the 1940s and early 1950s: June Cleaver: Woman and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 The best s-f stories of the forties had been (often brilliantly) predictive; the (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, over all tone up through the early fifties was instructive, indeed evangelist; 1994), points out science fictionalists were triumphant prophets of atomic power and space both that before the 1990s, US women’s flight, direful forewarners of atomic war and brainwashing and overpopu- histories paid little lation ... new writers had poured into the field, and new ideas as well as attention to the new techniques emerged in every issue of the proliferating magazines ... immediate post- World War II years, And by 1955, the field had achieved just enough literary respectability to and that her volume be able to serve a vital function: during the entire period covered by this was a ‘revisionist endeavor’ to address anthology [1955-60], it was the science-fiction magazines that provided the post-war domes- the only widely read medium for protest and dissent in a witch-hunted tic stereotype 17 initiated by the country. pioneering feminist text, Betty Fridan’s Feminine Mystique That is not to say that science fiction outlets were operating entirely (New York: Norton, beyond the range of Cold War political surveillance and censorship. In 1963).

Home truths ... 195 10 Coontz, The Way We Never Were, p. 33. reminiscing about the science fiction writer , who had had a On this point see also number of his early Cold War-era stories rejected by editors, Merril May, Homeward Bound, chapter 4, recalled that science fiction magazines in the 1950s were ‘proud’ to be ‘Explosive Issues: Sex, the last bastions of dissent and non-conformism, but, as she puts it, ‘one Women, and the was not supposed to spell it out too clearly’.18 Bomb’. From the late 1940s onward, Merril injected radical ideas about the 11 Zarlengo, ‘Civilian Threat’, pp. 925-58; science and social science content of science fiction work into published May, Homeward interviews with her and her own fiction, editorial introductions, fan Bound, chapter 4. magazines, and science fiction book reviews and anthologies.19 Merril 12 Zarlengo, ‘Civilian was not unique in challenging the political and literary status quo, but Threat’, pp. 930, 940. she was perhaps the most daring, articulate, and above all, politically 13 Alan Nadel, tenacious. Her prominent status by the 1960s as a leading critic and Containment Culture: editor who worked at the international centre of science fiction produc- American Narratives, Postmodernism, and tion - New York City - meant an automatic airing for her views. the Atomic Age It was in the ‘bomb’s early light’ that Merril published her first (Durham: Duke science fiction story and first science fiction novel; both featured anti- University Press, 1995), pp. x-xi. atomic themes, housewives and families, and domestic routines. These 14 Amy Kaplan, two works would launch Merril’s extraordinary intellectual life and long ‘Manifest Destiny’, career in science/speculative fiction. During the second cycle of atomic American Literature, 70: 3 (September concern, 1957-62, and into the late 1960s, Merril would use her posi- 1998). tion as a leading science fiction anthologist, reviewer, and critic to 15 David Seed, American attempt to revolutionize science fiction as a powerful, creative genre: Science Fiction and the speculative fiction, or ‘SF’.20 In the more liberal social environment of Cold War: Literature and Film (Chicago: the mid-1960s, she would argue that ‘science-fiction is not fiction about Fitzroy Dearborn science, but fiction which endeavors to find the meaning in science and Publishers, 1999). 21 See chapter 4, ‘Views in the scientific-technological society we are constructing.’ For the from the Hearth’. remaining thirty years of her life she would act on that conviction.22 16 See Brian Stapleford, Judith Merril grounded her early science fiction writings in the polit- ‘Marriage of Science ical events and radical concerns of the late 1940s. She would later and Fiction’, in The Encyclopedia of Science recall that her first published science fiction short story, ‘That Only a Fiction (London: Mother’ (1948), about the reactions of the mother to the birth of a baby Octopus Books, 1978), pp. 18-27. without arms and legs but with high intelligence, derived from a brief news article buried in a New York newspaper.23 The newspaper article 17 Editor’s introduction, Judith Merril (ed.), reported that the rise in infanticide in Japan had no connection to the SF: The Best of the presence of atomic ‘fallout mutations’ in that country.24 Merril aimed to Best (New York: Delacourt, 1967), p. counteract that deadly denial with her story of the differential reactions 5. of the parents to a limbless, super-intelligent baby. It was ‘an extremely 18 Judith Merril, ‘Fritz unpleasant story about the possible (probable?) effects on one small ordi- Leiber’, Magazine of nary family of life during a comparably “clean” controlled atomic war in & Science Fiction (July 1969), (what was then) the near future [a lot of us were worried] about the pp. 44-61 (p. 58). much more insidious after effects - the cancers and leukemias that 19 See Dianne Newell, might follow years later for apparently untouched survivors; the linger- ‘Women Conflating Science Fiction and ing radioactivity; the sterility and mutations which might affect plants Science Non-Fiction and animals and people in the aftermath’.25 She already recognized the in the Masculine Domain of Cold War potential of science fiction as a political outlet for dissent. ‘I was’, she America’, in recalled, ‘one of the large number of writers drawn into s-f in the United

196 Diana Newell Catherine Bosshart- States in the first intensely political phase of the genre just after the end Pluger et al., Gender of World War II.’26 She carefully researched the story, consulting with and Knowledge (Bern: 27 Chronos, forthcoming the leading atomic scientists/authors of the day. 2002). All this was a prelude to Merril’s first science fiction novel, Shadow on 20 Judith Merril, ‘The the Hearth (1950), about a suburban mother coping with atomic fallout Year’s SF: A and civil defence authorities during the three-days’ duration of World Summary’, in Merril 28 (ed.), SF: ‘59. The War III. Although her early literary output would soon be overshad- Year’s Greatest owed by her work as an anthologist and editor, and then be largely for- Science-Fiction and Fantasy (Hicksville, gotten by the late 1970s, ‘That Only A Mother’ has been much NY: The Gnome anthologized because of its strong female protagonist, and Shadow on the Press, 1959), p. 248. Hearth is favourably remembered today by some critics as one of the Merril’s passion for exploring the creative darkest stories about a nuclear holocaust.29 and critical promise Shadow on the Hearth is set within the busy domestic routine of a of the genre continued well into young upwardly mobile family living in the safety of a middle-class the 1960s, when it suburb of New York City. When New York suffers an atomic attack, the found expression her often cited polemic father (Jon Mitchell) is trapped in the city, the son is away at school, about the superiority and the wife/mother (Gladys Mitchell), at home with her two daughters. of ‘SF’ (‘experimental, daring’) over Gladys experiences the war as most women do: away from the action, mainstream science alone to cope with the state of emergency and the threats to her fiction (‘s-f’). Judith family’s health and safety. She comes to rely on her teenage daughter’s Merril, ‘What Do You Mean: Science? political awareness and on her own terrifying memories of World War Fiction?’ II, portrayed as a recent event. As in the lived reality of post-war Extrapolation: Journal of Science Fiction and America, suburbs were, as Zarlengo suggests, heralded as the citadel of Fantasy Studies civil defence; homes and their backyard bomb shelters were a last civil- (1966), reprinted in Thomas D. Clareson’s ian refuge. It eventually became clear to this suburban housewife that influential anthology the ‘safe’ suburbs were quite perilous. As Seed puts it, ‘Merril’s concept of criticism: SF: The Other Side of Realism of home has been expanded into the whole nation to represent a collec- (Bowling Green, tive state of vulnerability not security.’30 Ohio: Bowling Green Government radio broadcasts issued reassurances to householders University Press, 1971). See also that the suburbs remained uncontaminated and the emergency was Newell, ‘Women contained. This was atomic war. Winds blew ‘hot stuff’ from the Conflating Science Fiction and Science bombed city and rains showered ‘hot stuff’ from an atmosphere impreg- Non-Fiction’. nated with radiation from exploded underwater bombs, which contami- 21 Editor’s introduction, nated these places - or so Gladys Mitchell began to suspect. Radio and Merril (ed.), SF: The telephone security messages instructed suburban householders not to Best of the Best, p. 3. leave the neighbourhood, warning that they contained roving mobs of 22 For snippets of that activism, see Judith contaminated and sick outsiders who looted homes and attacked Merril and Emily women. Gladys never sees these threatening outsiders, but she recog- Pohl-Weary, Better to Have Loved: The Life of nizes this type of civil defence propaganda from the previous war - and Judith Merril it terrifies her. (: Between When rumours of the pending evacuation of the community spreads, the Lines, 2002). the civilian authorities issue the citizens calm, reasonable instructions 23 Judith Merril, ‘That Only a Mother’, about what and how much to take with them. Gladys remembers how Astounding Science in the previous war she had found it easier to focus on the task of evac- Fiction (1948), anthologized in uation in order to ignore the implications of the existing hidden dangers. Pamela Sargent (ed.), ‘You could think about your home and possessions, you could plan on Women of Wonder,

Home truths ... 197 The Classic Years: Science Fiction by hiding things ... people had done that before; that was what war meant. Women from the It was the other part you couldn’t think about: strange deadly radiation, 1940s to the 1970s 31 (New York: Harcourt silent, invisible killers.’ The world outside her door is alarmingly silent; Brace & Co., Harvest no birds sing. She discovers that death also hovers inside the home; her Classic, 1995). A little girl is quietly dying of radiation sickness. The youngster’s favourite revised version of Sargent (ed.), Women bedtime toy had been left out in the (toxic, as it turns out) rain. For all of Wonder: Science the reassurances of the civilian authorities, these seemingly innocent Fiction Stories by Women About Women places and objects in and around the home are, in fact, lethal. The (New York: Vintage health officials knew of her daughter’s actual condition all along but Books, 1974). had concealed that knowledge. Their commitment was to containment, 24 Merril, ‘Introduction’, not to protection. to Path into the Unknown: The Best of Resisting the civilian authorities, Gladys refuses to follow any gov- Soviet Science Fiction ernment order. Importantly, she refuses to evacuate her home. Home in (New York: Dell, 1968), p. 10. this context becomes a refuge, not from the roving mobs of looters men- 25 Merril’s prologue to tioned by civilian authorities, but, rather, from the roving patrols of gov- her science fiction ernment agents who shoot enemy suspects - including citizens like the collection, Survival fugitive teacher/atomic scientist whom Gladys protects, her black house- Ship and Other Stories (Toronto: Kakabeka, keeper, and even Gladys’ husband, Jon, who is making his way home 1973), p. 5. from the bombed city. Only in the final sentences of the book does hope 26 Merril, ‘Introduction’, - and the missing husband - appear. Merril claims that the editors Path Into the Unknown, p. 10. For changed her original, much darker ending because the publishers a welcome planned to market the novel through a family book club.32 recognition of the political engagement Beyond its status as a dark story, Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth of Merril’s early would have been a highly political, risky undertaking in its day. Later work, see David American feminist science fiction writers, from , in the Seed’s interview with Merril, ‘One of mid-1970s, to Lisa Tuttle, in the early 1990s, would trivialize Merril’s Postwar SF’s book as having ‘disappointingly conventional’ female characters.33 Formative Figures’, Interzone, 126 However, David Seed’s recent study of Cold War science fiction makes (December 1997), pp. the essential point about Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth that asking 13-14, 26; and Allan Weiss, ‘Not Only a about the feminist credentials for the book is the wrong question; for Mother: An Interview the politics of the book is to ‘[unpick] the official line on security with With Judith Merril’, Sol Rising [Toronto], its requirement of acquiescence to describe a survivalism improvised 18 (April 1997), pp. from day to day’.34 What it meant to do so is indicated in the studies 6-9 (see also Merril of May, Zarlengo, and Coontz, which have demonstrated that actual clippings folder, Judith Merril ‘normal’ families and ‘normal’ mothers of the day were expected to Collection, Toronto foster the Cold War consensus. What the mother in Merril’s novel Public Library, 35 Toronto, ). fosters is the opposite: a critique of that Cold War consensus. The 27 Seed, American mother character not only eludes the state-sponsored surveillance of Science Fiction and the civilians (with the indispensable help of her eldest daughter) but also Cold War, p. 57. voices a barely-disguised critique of America’s early atomic testing 28 Judith Merril, Shadow programme, the rise of the civil defence mentality (which Zarlengo on the Hearth (Garden City: Doubleday, identifies as male in which the suburbs are seen as America’s 1950). last refuge),36 the federal loyalty-security programme, and the indus- 29 See the entry for trial-military complex. Merril’s Shadow on the Hearth is anything but Judith Merril and for conventional. nuclear themes in older editions of

198 Diana Newell science fiction Rachel Carson, natural science, and Silent Spring encyclopedias and in (1962) the latest one: and Peter If Merril published her first novel, Shadow on the Hearth, in the initial Nicholls, eds., The wave of public reaction to the atomic bomb, Carson produced her anti- Encyclopedia of Science pesticide tract, Silent Spring, in the second, at a time when fears of Fiction (London: Orbit Books, Little, Brown nuclear fallout ran high. As Linda Lear in her recent environmental and Co., 1999). biography Rachel Carson so elegantly concludes of Carson’s Silent Spring 30 See Seed, American book project, ‘Carson had attacked the integrity of the scientific estab- Science Fiction and the lishment, its moral leadership, and its direction of society. She exposed Cold War, p. 58. their self-interest as well as their poor science, and defended the public’s 31 Merril, Shadow on the Hearth, p. 72. right to know the truth.’37 As the reasonable boast on the cover of the 32 See discussion in 1991 reprint of Silent Spring suggests: ‘No single book on our environ- Seed, ‘One of Postwar ment has done more to awaken and alarm the world.’ Craig Waddell SF’s Formative persuasively argues that it was not Carson’s apocalyptic vision per se Figures’. that explains the popular support for her study. Rather, it was her 33 Lisa Tuttle, ‘Women SF Writers’, in Clute ability to capitalize on the ‘spirit of the times’, her ability to address Cold and Nicholls (eds.), War America’s ‘apocalyptic fear of nuclear holocaust’.38 The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, p. Until Silent Spring, Carson wrote prize-winning books and articles 1344. related to her field of expertise: marine biology. Carson had, like Merril, 34 Seed, American responded to the atomic threat even earlier, in her public talks. In the Science Fiction and the early 1950s, at the height of the American Cold War and the Cold War- Cold War, p. 59. related political and environmental policy upheavals in the federal gov- 35 May, Homeward Bound, pp. 108-09; ernment, where she worked, Carson took advantage of professional Coontz, The Way We occasions to champion the global social importance of nature writing. In Never Were; Zarlengo, ‘Civilian Threat’; and accepting the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1952 she stressed Woody Haut, that there could be no separate literature of science.39 When accepting introduction (‘Better in that same year a major award for excellence in nature writing Dead than Read’), Pulp Culture: (1952), Carson argued that natural science writing, as an act of public Hardboiled Fiction and education, was an urgent need if Americans were to prevent the human the Cold War (London: Serpent’s isolation in an increasingly man-made, artificial world that would lead Tail, 1995), p. 3. 40 ‘to experiments for the destruction of himself and his world’. 36 Zarlengo, ‘Civilian Carson grounded her radical analysis of the dangers of pesticides - Threat’. which was a considerable departure in subject and tone from her previ- 37 Linda Lear, introduc- ous science writing - in a vast thicket of wartime and post-war scientific tion to part 4, in Carson, Lost Woods: research and investigative journalism. Her wartime role as an informa- The Discovered tion specialist and a government writer and editor of fish and wildlife Writings of Rachel Carson, edited and publications had already exposed her to the early classified government with an introduction scientists’ studies on the environmental dangers to wildlife and human by Linda Lear health of the pesticide range DDT.41 Now, several years after leaving (Boston: Beacon, 1998), p. 187. government service in the early 1950s, Carson made crucial new con- 38 Craig Waddell, ‘The tacts with, and used the information obtained from, experts who testified Reception of Silent before a major (though unsuccessful) lawsuit in 1957-58 to prevent the Spring: An Introduction’, in state and federal governments from conducting a mass aerial spraying Craig Waddell (ed.), programme.42 Edmund Russell in ‘The Strange Career of DDT’ demon- And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of strates that American scientists were always concerned about the idea Rachel Carson’s Silent of civilian use of DDT, a concern that never faltered throughout DDT’s Spring (Carbondale

Home truths ... 199 and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois trajectory from hero in 1945, when first released to civilians, to 1972, University Press, when the weight of environmental concern forced the US government to 2000), p. 9 and n. 3, 43 p. 13. My thanks to sharply restrict its use. Linda Lear for draw- Carson’s book project across the years 1957 to 1962 also became ing my attention to productively entangled in a dynamic, shifting network of concerned, this new anthology. tenacious, and usually influential women who both prompted and advo- 39 Rachel Carson, ‘Remarks at the cated her work. The project became Carson’s entrée into a world of Acceptance of the women activists in the US and Europe, though she would die of breast National Book Award for Nonfiction’ [for cancer in 1964 before she had a chance to enter fully into that stimu- The Sea Around Us], lating realm.44 in Carson, Lost Carson’s counter-offensive war on pesticides tackles the seductive Woods, p. 91. appeal of pesticide use to boost post-war economic recovery, when the 40 Rachel Carson, ‘Design for Nature US Army medical experts in 1945 declared DDT ‘the War’s greatest con- Writing’, in Carson, tribution to the future health of the world’ and the civilian press and Lost Woods, p. 94. consumers followed suit.45 Her argument relies on her envisioned paral- 41 Richly documented lel between the dangers of pesticides (war on nature) and those of in Linda Lear, Rachel Carson (New York: atomic radiation (nuclear war): ‘[we] are rightly appalled by the genetic Holt, 1997). effects of radiation: how, then, can we be indifferent to the same effects 42 Lear, Rachel Carson, in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?’46 p. 313. Analogies such as these bring Carson into the orbit of the science fiction 43 Edmund P. Russell and ‘hard-boiled’ pulp fiction writers of the day (though Carson may III, ‘The Strange Career of DDT: have been horrified at this comparison), as she plays on the public’s real Experts, Federal fears and imagined anxieties about atomic warfare that Paul Boyer so Capacity, and 47 Environmentalism in powerfully argues ripped through America in the late 1950s. World War II’, Fallout, argues Ralph Lutts of Silent Spring, was Technology and Culture, 40: 4 (October 1999), pp. ‘in the air’, and it is a tribute to Carson’s perceptive skill as an author that 770-96. she was able to recognize and take advantage of the deep-seated cluster of 44 Personal communica- social concerns surrounding it in the public’s mind and that she used the tion with Linda Lear, Bethesda, Maryland, public’s existing understanding about the hazards of fallout to teach about 8 December 2000. the similar hazards of chemical poisons.48 Linda Lear’s writings name several of these women, as does Post-atomic war holocaust was after the mid-1950s becoming a Carson’s Silent Spring. 49 Carson wrote of the common theme in the popular press and in fiction writing and films. influence of the Circulating ‘in the air’, for example was the famous story, ‘Fallout: The appeals from her Silent Killer’, run by the Saturday Evening Post (1959), which presented friend, Olga Huckins, whose private bird scientific warnings of cancers and genetic damage from atomic fallout. sanctuary was News also spread of Strontium 90 from fallout being detected in cow’s poisoned by pesticides in an aerial spraying milk. Mainstream fiction writers, Helen Clarkson (McCloy) among them, campaign for wrote best-selling science fiction stories on the theme of the lone human mosquito control. 50 The early stages of survivor of a nuclear holocaust. And all the while, news of space tech- Carson’s research for nology developments generated contradictory reactions: optimism about the book drew the attention of possible new frontiers and new worlds, but pessimism about the future Washington Post of the planet. owner Agnes Meyer Out of this environment of social criticism, fear, lone survivors, and and activist Christine Stevens, president of silent killers, emerged Silent Spring. At the heart of Carson’s Silent Spring,

200 Diana Newell the Animal Welfare as in the case of Merril’s anti-atomic science fiction novel, Shadow on the Institute in New Hearth, lies a sustained counter attack on what Carson called ‘man’s York. Stevens put Carson in touch with war on nature’. Carson, like Merril, conveyed a sense of new kinds of the work of British unimaginable dangers in and for the air we breathe, the water we drink activist Ruth (and take pleasure in), the very earth we tread upon. Like Merril, Harrison, whose exposé of the Clarkson and other fiction writers of the 1950s wrote about invisible inhuman treatment killers and conjured up powerful images of a landscape in which no of livestock subsequently birds sang. The poisons Carson described were, like atomic radiation, published included a fast acting and largely unseen, had mysterious potency in unspecified preface written by Carson in 1963. combinations, and had the potential to produce slow, long-term, usually Lear, introductory permanent, cumulative effects. The open-air sprayed poisons drifted, notes to Rachel Carson, ‘Vanishing perhaps not even hitting their target but threatening other lives - our Americans’, letter on lives. She stressed, above all, that these lethal dangers were the products the impact of of humans, not nature, and that the dangers they posed to the future of widespread use of poisons on bird popu- life were ignored, trivialized, even denied, by the government. lations, in Carson, Pesticides were applied, argued Carson from the evidence in Lost Woods, p. 189; Lear, introductory restricted scientific reports, not just to every living thing, but also to notes to Rachel every imaginable place, including places that one would normally con- Carson, ‘To Understand sider safe. On this point in the book, Carson enters interesting political Biology/Preface to territory - suburban America. She identifies the danger zones: farms, Animal Machines’, [1963], in Carson, forests, and - as Judith Merril had in Shadow on the Hearth - suburban Lost Woods, pp. 192- homes and gardens. For Carson, it was not simply a question of the 93. chemical manufacturers’ war on nature, or the state’s war on nature. It 45 Russell, ‘The Strange was also the farmer’s war, the forester’s war, the family’s war: all these Career of DDT’, pp. 770-71, 782-83. groups were willing recruits in a man-made war on nature. It is at the end of the book that Carson’s readers encounter pesticides 46 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: in the family home, which was, as she demonstrated, one of the deadliest Houghlin Mifflin, places of all. Carson warned that the chemical industry encouraged non- 1962), p. 31. expert consumers - ordinary men and women - to purchase unlimited 47 Boyer, ‘From the H- Bomb to Star Wars: quantities of pesticide poisons in self-serve supermarkets, garden shops, The Continuing and hardware stores. There, ‘homey and cheerful, and with the pickles Cycles of Activism and Apathy’, By the and olives across the aisle and the bath and laundry soaps adjoining, the Bomb’s Early Light, rows upon rows of insecticides are displayed. Within easy reach of a epilogue, p. 353. 51 child’s exploring hand are chemicals in glass containers.’ In writing of 48 Ralph H. Lutts, the commercial insecticide products and displays as the ‘hidden per- ‘Chemical Fallout: Silent Spring, suaders’, Carson (likely intentionally) echoes the title of the popular Radioactive Fallout, exposé of American consumer culture and motivational research pub- and the Environmental lished by the journalist and social critic Vance Packard in 1957, the year Movement’, in Carson began the Silent Spring project.52 With his social critique of Waddell (ed.), And No American advertising and marketing, of hidden cameras recording the Birds Sing, p. 37 and n. 3, pp. 37-38. The consumer behaviour of women shoppers, The Hidden Persuaders (1957), unrevised version of Packard would launch a series of best-selling studies exposing the this essay appeared in Environmental 53 dangers of the psychological manipulation of an unsuspecting public. Review, 9 (1985), pp. Carson writes that the terrible hazards of pesticides followed a pur- 210-25, the same year as Boyer’s By chaser of these toxic household preparations from the store to the home. the Bomb’s Early In homes, Carson wrote, Light.

Home truths ... 201 49 These are discussed in many studies but the use of poisons in the kitchen is made both attractive and easy. Kitchen Boyer, By the Bomb’s decorator shelf paper is impregnated ‘on both sides’ with deadly chemicals. Early Light, epilogue, pp. 352-53, and Attractive do-it-yourself manufacturers’ booklets instruct on how to kill notes, p. 419, offers bugs and insects with sprays in our home and insect pests on our bodies, an excellent using lotions, creams, and sprays. Pocket-sized insecticide dispensers are summary. sold ‘suitable for the purse or for beach, golf, or fishing gear’.54 50 See Seed, American Cold War Science Fiction and Helen Carson next takes her readers outside into the yard and garden (though Clarkson [pseudonym of Helen (Worrell still in view of the kitchen). Clarkson) McCloy In the story she tells, gardening had become synonymous with super (1904-93)], The Last poisons. In the family’s war - the domestic war - on nature, fathers Day, A Novel of the Day After Tomorrow fitted garden hoses and power lawn mowers with pesticide-spraying (New York: Dodd, devices, transforming these innocent garden tools into killing machines. Mead & Co., 1959). One is considered irresponsible not to use these super poisons, writes 51 Carson, Silent Spring, p. 158. Carson, because all the mass circulation magazines and newspapers take their use for granted.55 A peculiar social more of suburbia ‘dictates that 52 Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders crabgrass must go at whatever cost’, the weapons of destruction becom- (New York: David ing a neighbourhood status symbol.56 Carson in this section uses a sar- McKay Co., 1957). castic tone to deliver the hardest punches: 53 Daniel Horowitz, Vance Packard and American Social We can polish our floors with a wax guaranteed to kill any insect that Criticism (Chapel Hill walks over it. We can hang strips impregnated with the chemical lindane and London: The University of North in our closets and garment bags or place them in our bureau drawers for Carolina Press, a half-year’s freedom from worry about moth damage. All these matters 1994), chapter 6. attended to, we may round out our day with insecticides by going to sleep 54 Carson, Silent Spring, 57 p. 159. under a moth-proof blanket impregnated with dieldrin. 55 Carson, Silent Spring, p. 162. It seems that it was to the domestic realm and the suburbs that Carson 56 Carson, Silent Spring, - like the pesticide planes and the packaged products in her expose - was p. 161. aiming all along. Given what we now know from the contemporary 57 Carson, Silent Spring, research of May, Zarlengo, and others about the revolutionary impact of p. 160. the atomic bomb on domestic life, the family, and the suburbs, Carson’s 58 Christine Oravec, ‘An target was surprisingly accurate. Inventional Archaeology of “A I will conclude this discussion of Silent Spring by returning to the Fable for beginning of the book, to the science fiction-like prologue that Carson Tomorrow”’, in Waddell (ed.), And No wrote as a fable, ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’. The new scholarship exploring Birds Sing, p. 43. the public response to Silent Spring is mindful of the contemporary 59 I am grateful to appeal of Carson’s apocalyptic vision and of the special role of ‘A Fable Linda Lear for for Tomorrow’ in cementing that vision. Christine Oravec writes in her suggesting that I clarify this point, and examination of Carson’s fable that it had acquired a reputation as a for her sharing her ‘rhetorical bombshell that landed in just the right place at the right expertise on the 58 important topic of time’. That said, it is unlikely that Carson introduced her study with a Carson’s reading science fiction-like prologue out of any particular knowledge of the habits (personal com- genre. Indeed, some evidence suggests that she was neither familiar munication with Lear, Bethesda, with science fiction per se nor interested in becoming so.59 Nevertheless, Maryland, 8 to live in North America during the Cold War was to know science

202 Diana Newell December 2000, and fiction metaphors and icons first-hand. Like her post-war contemporaries e-mail in science fiction, Carson and her editors would have understood the correspondence with Lear, various dates, popular appeal of what were images of the very near future. The near November 2000). See future was a popular literary device in post-war science fiction, and was M. Jimmie employed with great effect in novels of the 1950s, including Merril’s Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer, Shadow on the Hearth. The images in Carson’s prologue appealed to a ‘Silent Spring and reader’s creative imagination to end the destructive impulse that marked Science Fiction’, in Waddell (ed.), And No the post-war era, an impulse about which Carson had been issuing Birds Sing,’ p. 175 warnings since at least 1952. and n. 1, p. 201 (the authors do not, how- ever, discuss Carson’s Home truths use of the science fic- tion time setting: the Rachel Carson and Judith Merril grounded their work in the masculine near future). realm of science and technology literature. Both produced works that 60 In addition to Seed, can be read as powerful political critiques of contemporary social issues American Science in the domestic Cold War era. While both wrote in what was in effect Fiction and the Cold War, chapter 4, see the break between the first and second feminist waves of the twentieth Connie Willis, ‘The century, the period was highly politicized, nonetheless. In the case of Women SF Doesn’t See’, Asimov’s SF women who wrote science fiction in this era, recognition of the political Magazine, 16: 11 significance of this pre-feminist involvement in the contemporary genre (1992), pp. 4-8; has surfaced only recently.60 Helen Merrick, ‘“Fantastic Both writers capitalized on popular, mass-market literary genres as Dialogues”: Critical vehicles for social criticism and activism (guarded activism, in Carson’s Stories About Feminism and case) in an era in which open criticism of science, government, and the Science Fiction’, in industrial-military complex carried - as both writers were aware - high Andy Sawyer and David Seed (eds.), risks. Both advocated and practised experimental, creative writing in Speaking Science order to advance their respective fields. Both employed a literary repre- Fiction: Dialogues and Interpretations sentation of the near future, which the British science fiction writer- (Liverpool: Liverpool critic Brian Stableford reminds us was ‘an uncomfortable imaginative University Press, space for writers and readers to inhabit’.61 The atomic bomb under- 2000), pp. 52-68; Justine Larbalestier, standably would become a standard feature of Cold War science fiction’s The Battle of the Sexes images of the near future. Carson’s work of science criticism appears to in Science Fiction (Middletown, Conn.: have engaged a type of near-future, apocalyptic vision in her ‘Fable for Wesleyan University Tomorrow’. The fable was the most powerful and controversial aspect of Press, 2002); Newell, 62 ‘Women Conflating her international best-selling study. Finally, both used Cold War Science Fiction and rhetoric and paranoia about radiation and genetic mutation to expose Science Non-Fiction in the Masculine the government- and civilian-sanctioned, man-made ‘invisible killers’ Domain of Cold War (and in Silent Spring, ‘hidden persuaders’) that entered family homes and America’. suburban neighbourhoods. 61 Stableford, ‘Near In this hard-edged, masculine, and censorial era in science fiction Future’, in Clute and Nicholls (eds.), The and other forms of social criticism, neither Merril nor Carson abandoned Encyclopedia of Science or disguised settings that featured a powerful feminine world of family, Fiction, p. 858. home, and suburbs. On the contrary, they explicitly politicized images of 62 Oravec, ‘Inventional domesticity, thus joining women’s history - and the writers’ own lives - Archaeology’; and Frank Graham, Since with some of the most sweeping changes and creative, idealistic Silent Spring (Boston: moments of the twentieth century. Houghton-Mifflin, 1970).

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