middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to e… - Joanna Russ

There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.

For women, there's simply no easy way of finding some kind of fulfillment. The whole idea of going from your own world to an alien world makes sense only if you're not an alien in your own world. It's very hard to feel at home here when you're not. So women either don't go into space-you're either there or here but without much traveling in between-or you came from there and now you're here, but what the hell are you doing here?

SF was born didactic! It originated as a teaching medium-which is why its potential to actually effect some changes in people's attitudes is infinitely greater. It's got representative protagonists, for example-at least it starts like this in the works of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and other proto-SF writers. If you look at, say, The War of the Worlds, the human beings there may represent certain attitudes or types, but they are obviously not "individuals" in the sense that characters in the great realistic novels are.