Book Chapter

The Female Fiction Factory

Nette, Andrew

2022

Overview

Katherine Bode has argued that authorship of Australian pulp fiction was strongly gendered, with a small number of female writers concentrated in traditionally female-oriented genres such as romance, and a ‘prevalence of male authors ref lecting the high proportion of genres aimed at a male audience’. This assertion is echoed by one of the few scholars to have undertaken work on the female authorship of pulp, Erin A. Smith. Smith, whose work mainly focused on pre-war pulp magazines such as Black Mask, argues that while women – and she mentions two, Erika Zastrow and Katherine Brocklebank – wrote for the magazine and other women edited it and other pulp publications, ‘they were clearly second-class citizens of this trashy literary underworld.’ While I will argue that questions concerning the pulp genres that women wrote and who comprised pulp's readership are somewhat more complex than Bode asserts, she correctly identifies the male-dominated nature of the industry. This ref lects the wider post-war literary field in Australia, with only 20 per cent of all novels published between 1945 and 1969 written by women. Susan Sheridan puts forward several reasons for the relative marginality of women writers during this period, including difficulty finding time to write due to family responsibilities and economic insecurity, lack of publishing options, and the male-dominated institutionalisation and professionalisation of Australian literary criticism that occurred from the 1950s onwards.While several women did write for Horwitz, female pulp writers in Australia and elsewhere were doubly marginalised: not only did they have to contend with a male-dominated industry, but their work fell on the wrong side of cultural and literary value constructions. This goes someway to explaining the dearth of scholarship on the subject of female pulp writers. In addition to work by Smith, the only aspect of female pulp publishing to have received any sustained academic inquiry has been the lesbian pulp fiction published in the United States between 1950 and 1965. Starting with the publication of Tereska Torres's Women's Barracks in 1950,Roughly five hundred mass-market paperbacks with lurid covers featuring half-dressed woman and promising accounts of ‘forbidden love’ flooded news-stands and drugstore displays. They featured mostly sensationalised stories about the sexual taboos broken in a variety of all-female environments – schools, prisons, the military – or in bohemian venues like [New York’s] Greenwich Village.

• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Subject: Classical texts
• ISBN: 9781839982453, 1839982454