In Why Women Can't Write, Russ states that science fiction is one of the few genres which portrays women as whole people. This may be an overstatement because although much of mainstream science fiction was written by males for other males and it often relegated females to the roles of damsels in distress or sex objects, there were always a few stories which explored new roles for women. On the other hand, the 1970s saw a number of feminist writers exploring the genre of science fiction; they often explored the role of liberated reader and writer.

Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17 (1966) presented a protagonist who was a poet and yet was capable of helping with technological solutions to problems. Walter Miller portrays a world which men have destroyed in his Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) but a world in which three women are remarkably resilient...