The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill People (1979) situates itself as part of ‘[a] female counter-literature without letters […] literacy that denounces writing through writing’ (Klarer 1990: 328). But then, in her book The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Shulamith Firestone insists that ‘feminists have to question, not just all of Western culture, but the organisation of culture itself, and further, even the very organisation of nature’ (1979: 12). As the structures of patriarchy run deep, feminists need both to understand the existing mechanics of the world and to imagine how it could be otherwise. Firestone argues that the capitalist system is arranged in such a way as to perpetuate itself, and yoking women to childrearing is part of this. In the 1970s, science fiction offered both dystopias and utopias built around gendered structures. This chapter will examine the ways in which female authors engaged with gender, usually using those genres, with a discussion of the writings of Sue Payer, Ursula Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, Vonda N. McIntyre, C.J. Cherryh, Joanna Russ, Suzette Haden Elgin, Marge Piercy, Suzy McKee Charnas and Kit Reed, before a brief examination of the symposium on women and sf in the fanzine Khatru and the short stories of James Tiptree Jr.

The kind of feminism prominent in the 1970s had emerged in the 1960s – although feminism dates back much longer – and was crystallised in the USA by the formation of the National Organization of Women in June 1966. Books such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), Mary Ellman's Thinking About Women (1968) and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970) examine the ways in which, in the post-Second World War West, women were being encouraged to become housewives and mothers, and how culture furthered such an ideology. NOW campaigned for equal rights and pay for women through the 1970s. In some cases, there were attempts to extend access to contraception and abortion so that reproduction became a woman's choice rather than something imposed upon her by men; this remains controversial. Millett's Sexual Politics and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) marked the emergence of a feminist literary criticism, which argued that patriarchal discrimination was a political act, and that this manifested itself within literature, in the work-place and in the bedroom.