This is a book with an almost exclusively male cast of characters. Some of the books that seem to be the most male-dominated actually have the best pro-female messages. I dare say that the female characters and attitudes portrayed in the Heinlein juveniles have a stronger impact on the reader for being in the background, for being presented in a “of course that’s the way it is” unquestioning sort of way.Īnd overt appearances can be deceiving. The female characters don’t have to be the main character to have an impact, and a powerful one. The women and girls in Heinlein’s books are always good in math, better than the men and boys-none are of the Barbie-math-is-hard type.īy nearly every boy main character is a female character who is stronger, smarter, and more skilled. There are women pilots, numerous engineers, researchers, doctors, soldiers, explorers, and a description Heinlein uses frequently, whizzes in math. I credit my parents for never trying to stop me from doing anything I set out to do, and I credit what I got from Heinlein’s books, particularly the juveniles with their ingrained attitudes about the roles and abilities of women.īehind those adventuresome boys in the juveniles are a wealth of women playing roles of strength. I went on to work in an area that, when I started, was almost entirely male-dominated. I took Heinlein’s views of women to heart-I took the math classes, did the farm work, roofed buildings, worked on my own car, went to college in engineering, where I was the only female in my engineering classes for two years.

I never felt that these stories couldn’t be about me, or that I could be the one having the adventures in space and on the frontier worlds. As a young girl reading the Heinlein juveniles, stories mainly about boys and young men and their adventures in space, I never felt excluded. I started reading Heinlein when I was eight or nine years old, at a time in the 1960s when it was still assumed that girls and women would play certain roles and take certain jobs-be secretaries, not engineers, study home economics, not calculus and physics. Yes, I do believe he was, but not in a bad way. The most frequent question I’m asked by women and girls reading my site is, “Was Heinlein a sexist?” I’ve been running a Heinlein website since 1997. My portion of the discussion was on the older women characters in the juvenile novels as role models This article is based on a presentation given by me at Ba圜on 2003, May 24, 2003, in a panel discussion by Heinlein Society members on Heinlein’s Women characters. Heinlein’s Women: Role Model Characters in the Heinlein Juveniles Full List of Heinlein Society Items to Shop.Donate and Receive The Ensign’s Prize Books.

Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein