Bonnie Gray asked: "My question to the server is, does anybody know anything
about
his wife? I have heard rumors that she was quite brilliant, which
may have had something to do with his incorporation of "strong"
(again, look at the decades) females. I haven't seen anything written
about her, though."
I used to read quite a lot of Heinlein (he was often seen as fairly radical
in some ways during the sixties, though he was always a staunch political
conservative as he defined it)--at least he had a few more female characters
(even point of view characters),and since I was pre-adolescent, I didn't see
the problems with his presentation of female characters (until _Farnham's
Freehold_ which put me off him for some time). I gather that his wife
Virginia was a model for the strong (red haired) female protagonists in a
number of his novels. I met both of them at a STAR TREK con in the late
seventies: at that time, he was promoting blood donation because his life
had been saved because of the rare blood society, and his "price" for
appearing at a con was that they have a room set aside for blood donations.
He was autographing copies of his books for the donors (or potential
donors--I had a fever so they wouldn't take me, but he smiled at me and told
me I had tried). In person, both of the Heinleins were charming. I loved
_The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ and still find it a very appealing read if I
sort of read carefully around parts of it. His wife is now managing his
estate--and from the various anecdotes shared by writers and comments made
by Heinlein himself,they seemed to have had a wonderful marriage. I came to
realize as I grew older that the major problem for me in Heinlein's women
(and he certainly is/was not alone in this) is the bedrock assumption that
all women live to reproduce (biological/evolutionary drives), that all women
are inherently different from all men (though many women are both strong and
intelligent and so forth--Manny in TMIHM SAYS that his wives are smarter and
better than him in all sorts of ways)--it's this sort of "manly" man and
"womanly" woman, totally heterosexist (except for some flirtation with
lesbian sex in _Friday_) that, just, well, depresses me especially in an
author who through Lazarus Long and other characters questions a lot of
other received social notions. I was terribly upset with _Podkayne of
Mars_, his novel with an adolescent female hero/point of view character,
when she gets breasts and basically gives up on her idea for a career in the
sciences and thinks about (eek) nursing! Fits the "dumbing down" phenomenon
identified for girls becoming young women in our culture.
Robin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:07:17 PDT