Home Truths: Women Writing Science in the Nuclear Dawn

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- Science Fiction’, 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’, Science Fiction Studies, 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 Harry Harrison (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’.

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