“Whatever it is that compels her to write so seldom”

Abstract

In the pulp magazine period (1926-1946), science fiction’s publishing practices excluded female authors from the burgeoning genre. Using a network analysis of over 2,400 authors and 14,000 stories, this article demonstrates that women’s publication numbers in science fiction went down over the pulp period. Women, unlike their male colleagues, were published in ways that made it nearly impossible to gain economic stability and prestige in the pulps. The consolidation of sf into a marketing genre thus came at the expense of a female sf community who troubled the purity of a newly exclusive field.