An Open Letter to Joanna Russ

Open Letter
Title:	An Open Letter to Joanna Russ
From:	Jeanne Gomoll
Addressed To:	Joanna Russ, but also fans in general
Date(s):	Winter 1986/87
Medium:	print
Fandom:	science fiction
Topic:
External Links:	Aurora #25, Winter 1986/87 available for read at SF3
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

An Open Letter to Joanna Russ is an essay by Jeanne Gomoll.

It was printed in "Aurora" (issue #25, volume #10, number #1) in Winter 1986/87.

"Aurora" is a speculative science fiction and feminism zine. It was originally called Janus and was the second feminist science fiction magazine published. (The first was The Witch and the Chameleon.)

The open letter's topic is the introduction to a science fiction book of short stories called "Burning Chrome," and the erasure of the female presence in the history of the genre.

Some Topics Discussed

• women's fannish history
• many men's myopic view of fan history
• preserving women's voices, fanworks, and activities
• Joanna Russ' book, How to Suppress Women's Writing
• Susan Wood and the first "women and science fiction" panel at Big Mac in 1974
• founding and description of A Women's APA and Janus, and a mention of Women's Periodical
• SunCon (1977 worldcon held in Miami, Florida), organization against Dade County's anti-gay laws, the "Happy Gays Are Here Again" buttons, the satirical masquerade entry called "Slave Boys of Gor"
• Phoenix, Arizona's 1978 bid for worldcon, the NOW boycott of non-ERA ratifying states, and Harlan Ellison
• WisCon programming
• the first WisCon was nicknamed "PervertCon" "by some fans who were upset by WisCon's encouragement of feminist, lesbian, and homosexual programming"
• the generic "Women and SF" panels at cons, often to strong opposition
• the 1970s's separate women's spaces at cons, "rooms of our own" - the first one was at WesterCon in Vancouver in 1978, and organized by Susan Wood
• the Hugos and women
• much more

Some Excerpts

I'm writing to you about it, Ms. Russ, because I think I've just discovered another strategy to suppress women's writing. You wrote the book, How to Suppress Women's Writing (University of Texas Press, 1983), describing in gory detail all the different ways that have been used to disallow, prevent, discourage, disbelieve, discredit, devalue, ignore, categorize, debase, forget, malign, ridicule, redefine, reevaluate, and otherwise suppress women's writing. I'm sure that you meant to warn us with your book—to warn us that the suppressive strategies are still around, armed and dangerous—and that it's important for women to recognize them and to work against them. But still, I remember (or perhaps I imagined) an up-beat ending to your book and I'm surprised that there really is no happy ending. That the business is still going on today.

It was not one or two or a mere scattering of women, after all, who participated in women's renaissance in science fiction. It was a great BUNCH of women: too many to discourage or ignore individually, too good to pretend to be flukes. In fact, their work was so pervasive, so obvious, so influential, and they won so many of the major awards that their work demands to be considered centrally as one looks back on the 70s and early 80s. They broadened the scope of SF extrapolation from mere technology to include social and personal themes as well. Their work and their (our) concerns are of central importance to any remembered history or critique. Ah ha, I thought, how could they ever suppress THAT?!

This is how:

In the preface to "Burning Chrome," Bruce Sterling rhapsodizes about the quality and promise of the current new wave of SF writers, the so-called "cyberpunks", and then compares their work to that of the preceding period:

The sad truth of the matter is that SF has not been much fun of late. All forms of pop culture go through doldrums; they catch cold when society sneezes. If SF in the late Seventies was confused, self-involved, and stale, it was scarcely a cause for wonder.

With a touch of the keys on his word processor, Sterling dumps a decade of SF writing out of critical memory: the whole decade was boring, symptomatic of a sick culture, not worth talking about. Now, at last, he says, we're on to the right stuff again.

All the people who were made nervous or bored or threatened by the explosion of women's writing and issues now find it safe to come out and speak out loud of their dissatisfaction.

Fandom is supposedly cemented together by tradition and memories held in trust and passed down to future fannish generations by word of mouth and fanzine. It seems that a whole big chunk of memories has gotten entirely misplaced. For instance, here is a list of some of my memories of the late 70s. None of these events has ever been mentioned at any of the retrospective fandom-of-the-70s panels that I've attended. [see essay for these events]

Things have changed a lot in SF fandom. In a few years the percentage of women increased so dramatically that women don’t seem to be an endangered species at cons or in fanzines any more. Science fiction has changed so dramatically that I get fewer confused reactions when I use the phrase ’’feminist science fiction", whereas in the past people thought the term must be an oxymoron. These changes didn’t take place in dark closets. In fact, we still hear men who weren't even members of A Women's APA complaining about the women-only rule (invoked at least 10 years ago!). But judging from the fuzzy memories of some fans today, you'd almost think these changes must have been made secretly, behind locked doors and with muffled whispers...

Just as 1970s women's frequent presence in professional Hugo nominations now seems in the process of being camouflaged with expressions of boredom with the period as a whole, it may be that fannish history is being whisked under the rug as so many dustballs. I was interviewed by a woman from the Women's Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin recently, and was a little surprised by how few names of female SF writers were familiar to her. Are we, perhaps, working hard to preserve the art of "lost” women writers — digging through dusty archives to read, collect, and advertise our forgotten ancestors' work — only to lose track of the work done by women just a decade before us? Let's try to keep a truer perspective of our history, so future women don't have to dig it up and publish a special "Under-Appreciated Women SF Writers” issue of Aurora to spotlight it.

Today I sit in the audience at all-male "fandom of the 70s" panels (and so far, that's the way the panels I've witnessed have been filled, by men only) and don't hear anything of the politics , the changes, the roles that women played in that decade (except sometimes, a little chortling aside about how it is easier now to get a date with a female fan). The prevailing picture of that decade painted by these panels is of an over-serious, rather boring, too academic, lifeless period between better times, be tween remarkable fannish eras that (unlike the 70s) had good, reprintable fan writers.

I don't think there's a conscious conspiracy to cover up the work of women. Many of the guys up on those panels are friends of mine, and they’ll be horrified to hear me even suggest they were involved in any kind of even vaguely sexist activities. For the most part, these friends supported us, shared our excitement, and seemed to admire the work of the new women writers. These men wrote to Janus attended feminist panels, and were involved in the discussions about sexism and politics. Sometimes they even lectured us about not being feminist enough, about not being assertive enough, about not taking enough responsibility for ourselves.

Was this involvement of fleeting importance for some of these men? Is it just a coincidence that I hear male commentators in the media referring to feminism as a fad that has now passed? Maybe it's not so much wish-fulfillment working here as guilty self-criticism. Some of them have found more exciting interests (cyberpunk writing, for instance), and may have honestly begun to forget their earlier interest in feminism. Unfortunately, a lot of women seem to be catching this mood and agreeing with such frequently heard statements as, "Fannish writing was academic/ boring/too sercon in the 70s. Today’s fannish, humorous/anecdotal writing is so much better.”

There is a measure of truth to the observation that the writing done by fans in the late 70s was more academic than the quantitatively more persona 1/humorous early 80s writing.

Unfortunately, that tends to make people assume that the qualitative judgement which accompanies this observation has equal validity. But it just doesn’t follow that the different, lighter, less SF-oriented writing of the early 80s is intrinsically better than the sort of writing that was done in the late 70s. Different times encourage different sorts of writing.

Well, there’s an obvious solution to this problem I have, isn’t there? I should stand up at those retrospective panels (maybe even try to get included on them) and join in with other women in the audience and add a few of my own recollections to those of the panelists’. And we should all keep up critical pressure for balanced retrospectives , anthologies and reprints (fannish and professional). If we ourselves forget, why should we expect new generations of readers and fans to dig up the truth about what really happened?

As you suggested in How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Ms. Russ, preserving our art and our pasts is work with which most women have little experience. And inertia so much favors men's work being preserved over women’s. But this preservation needs doing if we aren’t going to be perpetually reinventing the same ideas.