Home truths: women writing science in the nuclear dawn

This paper develops a political reading of women writers’/writer-editors’ involvement in the American atomic age, Cold War-era fields of science fiction and popular science writing. Judith Merril (1928-97) in her post-war science-fiction writing and Rachel Carson (1907-64) in her international best-selling anti-pesticide polemic, Silent Spring (1962), capitalized on popular, mass-market literary genres as vehicles for social criticism in what Jessica Wang calls an ‘Age of Anxiety’ in which open criticism of American science, government, and the industrial-military complex carried high personal risk. Importantly, both explicitly politicized images of domesticity, thus joining women’s history to some of the most sweeping changes of the twentieth century.

(Erratum : Dianne Newell's name was presented incorrectly in the article published as Diana Newell.)