a 50-year female trek fan talks afout her time in the fandom

[archersangel]

via twistedchick

In 1966, my friend, who I’ll call “Dee,” was 26 years old, living in Oregon with two other young women, both in their early twenties. Dee’s family considered her a “spinster,” as she should have been married with kids by then, but Dee had no interest in finding a husband. She wanted a career in the medical field, to attend grad school and, more than anything, to write.

She belonged to a women’s science fiction writing group. Some of them had written professionally and others were hoping to get published (Dee among them), but as she said: “Science fiction in the 1960s was not considered the purview of women. So we would go to science fiction conventions and so on — it’s not fair to say we weren’t welcome — but there was very much a division, and the social attitudes at the time played a large role in just how participatory we thought we could be.”

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