Elsewhere, Nancy Lebovitz wrote:
I’ve been into Ayn Rand (details if you like about what I do and don’t agree with from her)[1], and how I still don’t see the emotional stench that’s obvious to a lot of people from her writing… [1]She’s the only writer I can think of who put a woman character in charge of a huge piece of infrastructure– one that was part of the larger society. Signy Mallory (captain of a big spaceship) doesn’t have the same emotional effect, I’d say.
I replied:
…the only writer? can you qualify that in some way (timespan, political writings only, etc) because, er, if you’re somehow suggesting no other writer has ever done this, that’s a very strange claim.
Suggestions of other depictions welcome here.
‘She’s the only writer I can think of who put a woman character in charge of a huge piece of infrastructure”
…the only writer? can you qualify that in some way (timespan, political writings only, etc) because, er, if you’re somehow suggesting no other writer has ever done this, that’s a very strange claim.
Mandolin, I’m talking about what I’ve read– mostly genre science fiction. I asked about this once, and the only other example I was given was Cherryh’s Signy Mallory.
I can’t say that no other writer has done this– I don’t know enough. If you have other examples, I’m interested in them.
I’m mostly interested in fiction for this, but I don’t know what you mean by political writing.
Even if Rand wasn’t unique in that regard, I think she did something very unusual and pretty feminist. There was somewhat in the book about the difficulties of being a woman in that sort of job, too.
if you were putting rand in a category with, say, candide — fiction that’s written as a specific philosophical argument and usually understood in that context — then i’d call that political writing, and it’s a limited enough body of work that your claim seems likely.
as far as all of science fiction…? well, i guess something rests on your definition of “major piece of infrastructure,” but unless that’s super-exclusive, then yeah, i’d say you’re not picking up the right books.
Mandolin, I’m talking about what I’ve read– mostly genre science fiction. I asked about this once, and the only other example I was given was Cherryh’s Signy Mallory.
I find this very strange. Quite a few publishers of science fiction, and especially those of military science fiction and damn right absolutely every single one of those peddling franchised universes have requirement about showing women in positions of power. Take Honor Harrington’s cycles(David Weber), the Hammer Slammers’ universe (David Darke), Insurrection series (Steve White), and even that right wing nut’s John Ringo’s dreck. They all have 50% of the civil infrastructure headed by women (or else!) And that’s without mentioning female writers like Lois McMaster Bujold, Elizabeth Moon, and Sandra McDonald… but why go on? I am hard pressed to think of any military science fiction where women cannot be seen in positions of power in normal societies. Sure, some of the societies will be patriarchal and every single gendered, but they are usually there for their weaknesses to be explored
For me, there’s a difference between “in charge of a major piece of infrastructure” (Dagny Taggart is Operating Vice President of the biggest railroad in the country in a period when airplanes) vs. having political or military power. This may be too fine-grained a distinction, but when I see women’s paid work in fiction, it’s a lot more likely to be running a catering company or being a lawyer.
In a way, that’s reasonable– there are a lot more lawyers, catering companies, and yarn shops than there are railroads. I also realize that there’s a whole underlying topic about what sort of work is respected and what isn’t.
Still, I notice no one’s naming women characters in charge of infrastructure, and I’d be especially interested in main characters, not background characters.
Possibly of interest: Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand.
And I’m quite sorry if I’ve made a discussion of Daly’s transphobia and its effects more difficult. I held off on posting about Rand and such until it seemed as though not much was happening in the thread.
Still, another possibly hard topic– if Daly was ill towards the end of her life, I can see why she might not have wanted to clean up her own mess. I was very struck by Joanna Russ saying that she wasn’t going to write any more books because she no longer had the physical endurance, and dealing with the fallout of changing an emphatic political view that many people still agree with would be a lot more emotionally and intellectually challenging than just writing a book.
Still, if she recanted a lot of what she’d done, I hope it at least gets published posthumously.
Well, Joanna Russ has chronic fatigue syndrome and, if I understand correctly, uses the productive time she has to maintain her university position. I believe she has retracted some of her earlier positions on transsexuality.
Did Daly have CFS?
Some suggestions:
McCaffrey – Ship Who Sings series – Hypatia is in charge of the ship, and in fact IS the ship. (McCaffrey does not read feminist anymore, but I think she did at the time the books were written.)
from Ann Leckie: Cyteen by Cherryh features a female character who controls a major critical industry producing, essentially, brainwashed slaves
In Patternmaster from Butler’s wild seed series, we see all social infrastructure taken over by a small family of telepaths, some men and some women. A particular scene features the woman who has taken over the schools.
I’d keep going, but I don’t really have time now. If other people have suggestions, drop ’em, and I’ll do the same. We should probably split this off; I’ll ask Barry to do so.
Indeed, from that same Cherryh universe alone, Signy Mallory supplies the military force behind one of the three human civilizations; Elene Quen runs the dockyards that supply the economic power behind the same civilization. Ariane Emory runs the cloning industry, and through it is effectively the Prime Minister of a second of the three civilizations.
For a different SF author, in Bujold’s Cetaganda, all the genetic engineering that defines the aristocracy of a society is carried out by women. If you really want *physical* infrastructure, well, lots of SF simply glosses over the infrastructure. Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels are kind of a corner case, because all the infrastructure is run by neuter characters (which is largely why he mentions it, I think). Far be it from me to claim this as feminist fiction, but in the Ringworld books Larry Niven puts Teela Brown in charge of the Ringworld infrastructure.
But it sounds like you want something analogous to today’s “captains of industry”, and that seems to be found mostly in near-future fiction: cyberpunk and the like, in which a frequent theme is that the power imbalances in our society become exaggerated, rather than reduced.
Dan Simmons’ Hyperion cycle has Meina Gladstone as CEO of the Hegemony – essentially President of the Galaxy.
Been tooooo many years for me to remember McCaffrey well enough, but ISTR the “Crystal Singer” books eventually involve Killashandra at the top??? You could make a case about Weyrwomen too though the constant “must pair with the top bronze rider” heterosexual imperative drags the whole thing down. And does Menolly eventually run the Bards? God it’s been decades.
Women run the Seamstress’s Guild in the Discworld (and not much else, I say with the caveat that I started them in the early 90s and many of the earlier ones are hazy; I’ve also only gotten through “Thud!”)
Women have run Hogwart’s a couple of times, both McGonagall and awful Doris wossername, and of course there’s the headmistress of Beauxbattons.
Sorry, breadth of response limited by time today.
How about Cirocco Jones and Gaby Plauget in John Varley’s Titan series?
Cirocco starts out with command of a NASA mission, but she becomes the official factotum for the brain of a sentient planet. Officially, this involves travelling to all of the planet’s different regions and making sure operations proceed smoothly. We the readers are shown her key decision-making role in the the convoluted reproductive ritual of one of the planet’s sentient species, which we could read as social infrastructure.
Gaby doesn’t get an official title, but as a freelancer she handles most of the physical-plant infrastructural operations that the reader never sees Cirocco deal with. She is the only person around who cares enough about unclogging intake valves to actually assemble a crew and get it done.
SPOILERTIME
After Gaby is assassinated (she gets better), she ends up taking over Gaea’s place at the Hub, effectively taking charge of the entire planet. But maybe this is more of that political power. (It’s certainly not religious, for all that Gaea is supposed to be god.)
Mandolin, thank you for picking this up and thanks to everyone who has suggestions.
I’ve been thinking about what I meant– I do think that Dagny running a railroad makes an emotional difference to me, and at least some of the factors are important to the society, physically durable (though before I read this thread, I was wondering how I’d feel if something like Google were run by a woman), integrated in a larger society (captain of a long-trip spaceship is emotionally different for me– it doesn’t seem as though other people have the same categories) and of life and death importance. Onstage matters, too– Rand drops in a lot of details about what it means to run a railroad.
It looks as though Rand is more like possibly the first for such a character in a society pretty much like ours.
No one’s mentioned feminist utopias, nor Brin’s female dominant clone society in Glory Season, which I’d say isn’t a good deal for the men, but isn’t a dystopia, either.
Ariane sounds like the best match, though I haven’t read Cyteen. Part of what I want is that understanding how things work is essential– a politician can leave most of that to experts.
IIRC, the biotech in Cetaganda is offstage. I’m not just looking for a society where women run some infrastructure, I want visible characters doing it.
I generally avoid mil sf, but it’s interesting if it’s got a better gender mix in the hierarchies than most sf. (A useful definition came out of rasfw– mil sf is sf about characters in a chain of command.)
It doesn’t have to be a captain of industry– at this point I think I’d settle for a woman in charge of building a bridge, though building a Beanstalk would be cooler.
Tying this into larger discussions of gender roles, there are women who are more interested in how things work than in relationships. They’re apt to have a tough time in the real world because they aren’t what most people expect women to be, and they aren’t much represented in fiction.
This isn’t exactly what I was looking for– I don’t mind if the woman character running some infrastructure is also interested in relationships– but it overlaps.
Island in the Sea of Time is an anthropological sci-fi/ steam punk type/ maybe scientific fantasy story by S. M. Stirling. One of the main characters is a lesbian, black military commander who is also in charge of all of the modern world’s export and international transport. It’s about Nantucket (the island) being transported back to 1250 B.C. I had a few problems with depictions of race and sexuality, but I did like the book and plan on reading the rest of the series.
Re McCaffrey, I don’t think anyone’s yet mentioned The Rowan. She’s responsible for the cargo and passengers teleported by her and others in her Tower.
Elizabeth Moon’s always good for strong female protagonists, usually military; her Vatta’s War books, beginning with Trading in Danger, are my favorites. They star Ky, soft-hearted daughter of a trading family, Stella, empty-headed bimbo daughter of same, and a great-aunt whose name I don’t remember. The soft-hearted one slaughters space pirates, the bimbo begins to rebuild a trading empire, and the great-aunt… well, would you trust the dotty old granny? Military, corporate, and political power.
Elizabeth Bear’s good with this sort of thing too; I’d go with Carnival because I like it best.
I think mil-sf has more female characters in positions of power because it’s an easy way to win Feminist Points for what is often basically macho fiction: you just write all the characters as if they were male but you give some of them female plumbing. If you make some of them lesbians it’s even easier, plus you draw some more teenage boys. One series, David Drake’s Lt. Leary stories, even make this explicit in the author’s preface: he took the Patrick O’Brian novels, about two (male) characters in the British navy in the age of sail, transported it to space, and just changed the sex of one of the characters and a few of the sailors. No substantive change in how the characters interact (apart from being more poorly written).
I think feminist utopias, just because feminism is usually associated with other political ideas, tend to avoid the kind of hierarchy that leads to CEOs of either gender.
Part of the problem here, I think, is that what you’re asking for is rather specific: a woman in charge of some primarily technological system that affects most people in the society, and written with enough details to make her technical expertise feel real. Perhaps it would help to make clear the parameters by giving some examples of men that meet all the rest of your criteria?
If you just want a woman in a technical profession, with enough detail to make her expertise feel real, the Kathy Reichs books (on which the TV show Bones is based) feature a forensic anthropologist, with enough details (up to and including two-page descriptions of the sequence of insects that infest a decaying corpse). Or Ann in Kim Stanley Robinson’s RGB Mars books, an areologist and leader of an environmental movement. Or even Lisa Cuddy, from the TV show House – who runs a hospital, infrastructure by anyone’s standards, but maybe too people-oriented. Elizabeth Bear’s “Dust” has women in control of various infrastructure aboard a colony ship, but it’s a quasi-feudal society, so maybe not quite what you were hoping for. Didn’t Hyperion also include a female CEO of a publishing house?
“If you just want a woman in a technical profession, with enough detail to make her expertise feel real”
Asimov’s Dr Susan Calvin would fall into that category too, I think.
I’ll see if I can come up with male characters who meet the specs I have in mind, but meanwhile, has anyone read Sturgeon’s “Granny Doesn’t Knit”, and if so, what did you think of it?
Damn, Ciejay took my suggestion of Cirocco. Very good three books. “This Alien Shore’ by C.S. Friedman has several very powerful, running-things women in it (I can’t quite remember what their status is called, sorry, and they’re more of a subplot that ties into the main plot). There’s a couple of nitpicks with the book, but not along the ‘whose in control’ line wrt government. The science is a bit loose, though.
Oh, oh – for detail, Patricia Cornwell is quite good, she writes as a forensic pathologist. Very detailed, not sure if she was mentioned yet. – although, she’s not science fiction. Still recommended, though!
It’s hard to find characters similar to Rand’s, period; very few people write her style of infrastructure/capitalist porn.
I’m currently reading Nevil Shute’s Round the Bend, and I think the main character is likely to turn out to be a male infrastructure character.
Much smaller scale, but Brigg’s Mercy Thompson (a skin changer who can become a coyote) repairs cars.
Kate Shugak (in Dana Stabenow’s Breakup) has a remarkable bit near the end of the book where she gets her hands on an earth-moving machine and rearranges some land to solve a problem. It’s pure getting a machine to do what you want exuberance.
There are relatively few books featuring ANY major character “in charge of a large piece of infrastructure,” if you don’t count spaceships as infrastructure. Male and female protagonists in positions of authority are much more likely to be scientists, military leaders, detectives, politicians, doctors, or teachers. (Not to mention how much fiction focuses on characters far from positions of authority–outsiders, loners, underlings.) If the person in charge of the infrastructure isn’t anywhere near the focus of the book, the author might toss out a name in passing, but the reader is very unlikely to remember it months after reading.
Asimov’s Susan Calvin is a scientist who grows into a position of authority. I don’t think of her as being a captain of industry (though I’ve only read a few books that mentioned her, and other books might treat her differently.) Ariane Emory, of Cyteen, is also a scientist, but Cherryh seems to treat her skills as being scientific, but her power as being political, because she is in charge of such an important industry. Elizabeth Moon shows women in positions of military authority, and commanding spaceships (for war and trade.) I recommend both the series about Ky Vatta, and the one about Esmay Suiza, because of how well they deal with economic issues…though I’m not comfortable with seeing “all the men who seem to be in charge are REALLY being manipulated by bitchy old women,” as feminist.
I really love Nicola Griffith’s Slow River. It deals with real infrastructure; not just chemical plants but sewage treatment! The protagonist is powerless, at the beginning of the book, and she doesn’t just use her scientific knowledge to take power. It felt important to me to see her doing a very physical job as a technician, in addition to thinking like a highly-trained civil engineer (and, of course, fighting crime.) A family is shown as owning and controlling the big pieces of infrastructure, with male and female members of the family intimately involved in running the business.
Anne mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series, which has lots of different kinds of infrastructure with different characters in charge. I thought of Ann as a scientist, who later became a political leader…she wasn’t an engineer or industrialist, to my mind. Nadia was an engineer who built a lot of what we commonly think of as infrastructure (housing, railroads, air filtration systems), but she didn’t have any desire to lead people or run a business. (The books are deeply, deeply, flawed. But I used to want to be Nadia.) Speaking of flawed…the biggest and most important thing humans built on Mars was an earth-like atmosphere, but the character in charge of that staggeringly huge project is so intensely Othered that it’s hard to recognize her as a woman building an infrastructure. She starts as a scientist, and she obviously had engineering and political skills. But her role in the book is to be Exotic Asian Woman and Primal Earth Mother. Did I mention the books were deeply flawed?
Ammonite should count as well as Slow River. And what about The Stars My Destination? Or am I remembering it wrong?
Film/Television-wise: “Commander in Chief” – female President of the US, “Starship Troopers” – Female head of military, female space captain.
Smallville – Martha Kent on the state senate
Bujold – Admiral Quinn running the mercenaries.
Carey’s Kushiel Series – female head of country, female head of religion
Rawn’s Exiles Trilogy – women run nearly everything, with men struggling against implicit sexism to get anywhere with their careers.
Women run the Seamstress’s Guild in the Discworld (and not much else, I say with the caveat that I started them in the early 90s and many of the earlier ones are hazy; I’ve also only gotten through “Thud!”)
Women head three guilds in Anhk-Morpork, the current King of the dwarves is female, and the most powerful figure in the ruins of the Evil Empire is a woman. In addition, women constitute about half of the military leadership of Borogravia. In the City Watch, the forensic department is headed by a female. The witches are very careful not to run Lancre, but they don’t quite succeed in not doing so.
This may be off-base, but you keep rejecting people’s suggestions, which comes off a bit as “women in authority don’t count unless the job is sufficiently male”. Is this what you’re looking for? A woman in what you perceive as men’s sphere? Because a lot of the women mentioned have enormous administrative power, but they don’t seem to fit your (admittedly personal) criteria.
Your mention of a skin changer who repairs cars is what got me – it’s not enough to be in charge, it has to be a traditionally non-female job? As mentioned above, military sci-fi tends to have a lot of females in traditionally male roles (though not always for very feminist reasons), but Rand’s style of plot doesn’t lend itself well to a compelling story, so isn’t going to be a very popular milieu for sci-fi writing.
Apologies if this isn’t what you’re thinking.
@Heather Freeman
Offtopic, but am I the only one who always imagined Meina Gladstone being played by Sigourney Weaver?
Anyhow, there’s also Joe Haldeman’s interminably dull Worlds trilogy, which chronicles a woman’s rise through the political ranks of space colonization.
While the leadership of an industrial organization is a different story, I would counter that such fields are a rare theme in fiction in general – if the operation of a railroad or a steel company or a shipyard is featured in fiction, usually the chief of the organization will either be a frustrating boss or an outright villain. Those roles are rarely female in fiction simply because most writers who wish to challenge social norms prefer to do it with their heroes rather than their villains.
attack_laurel, that’s exactly it– what I’m interested in is seeing women doing things which are extremely traditionally men’s work.
I had something of the sort in comment 5: “I also realize that there’s a whole underlying topic about what sort of work is respected and what isn’t.”
I also had no idea that this part of what I said would be of so much interest to other people– a lot of where I was heading was just that Rand had done something more interesting and unusual than is generally noticed.
Dana Stabenow’s Star Svensdottir. In the first book, she’s construction foreman/captain of the first L5. In the second book, she’s construction foreman/captain of the first permanent station in the asteroid belt.
TV/Comedy/Sci-Fi: Mom of “Futurama.” Runs the biggest company on Earth, and even being evil, is written differently than a man would be in the same position.
iii, thanks. I found out about Stabenow’s sf when I was checking her in Wikipedia (Breakup or Break Up?), and I’ve ordered a couple of the books.
The very same book that has Signy Mallory in charge of a spaceship (more of an interstellar battleship, actually) has Elaine Quen running not only the docks (port and construction works) at Pell Station, but ultimately running the station itself, and overseeing the planet of Pell. Kind of hard to miss, I’d have thought.