Yaszek StoriesThatMother 2004

Stories "That Only a Mother" Could Write: Midcentury Peace Activism, Maternalist
Politics, and Judith Merril's Early Fiction

Author(s): Lisa Yaszek
Source: NWSA Journal , Summer, 2004, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 70-97
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4317053
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to NWSA Journal
This content downloaded from

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Stories "That Only a Mother" Could Write:
Midcentury Peace Activism, Maternalist Politics,
and Judith Merril's Early Fiction
LISA YASZEK
This essay explores Judith Merril's early fiction in relation t

nalist politics characteristic of midcentury women's peace activism.
Dominant Cold War discourses encouraged American women to become
"domestic patriots" by using their natural caretaking instincts to prepare
their homes against the eventuality of nuclear war. Conversely, midcen-
tury peace organizations posited that it was women's civic duty to protect
their families by protesting against the militaristic social and moral
orders attending the dawn of the atomic era. As science fiction became
increasingly central to the American imagination in the 1950s, women
writers turned to the genre as an ideal vehicle through which to express
their dissent from the Cold War status quo. Premier among them was
Judith Merril, whose passionate antiwar sensibilities led her to write sci-
ence fiction that invoked the maternalist logic of midcentury peace activ-
ism by demonstrating how militaristic practices threaten to destroy the
very families they are designed to protect. Additionally, Merril's stories
extend the logic of her activist counterparts by imagining how women
might connect with other caring workers-especially doctors and scien-
tists-and create new communities that will protect future generations
from the devastating legacy of the nuclear age.
Keywords: Judith Merril / peace activism / maternalist politics / Cold War /

nuclear war / science fiction
Conventional wisdom has it that feminism all but vanished under the
pressure of Cold War paranoia and conformity in the decades immediately
following World War II. In recent years, however, feminist scholars have
argued for a more nuanced account of women's activities at the American
midcentury. Although women generally did not identify themselves as
feminists in this period, politically progressive activists did contribute
their energies to those causes that seemed most pressing at the dawn of
the atomic age-most notably, the reconstruction of prewar peace orga-
nizations and the consolidation of new protest movements against civil
defense. These activists made sense of their demands for social change
by representing themselves in historically specific and culturally charged
ways. Rather than resisting the postwar glorification of domesticity and
motherhood, they invoked and revised these ideas to engage in a modern
form of maternalist politics, positioning themselves as private citizens
?2004 NWSA JOURNAL, VOL. 16 No. 2 (SUMMER)

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
STORIES "THAT ONLY A MOTHER" COULD WRITE 71
reluctantly moved to action in the public sphere out of concern for

the futures of their children-and, by extension, the future of America
itself.'
These new histories of midcentury women's activism provide us with
important insights into the relations between cultural representation
and political practice. However, they have engendered surprisingly little
discussion of how these relations might have informed women's literary
efforts as well. Joanne Meyerowitz suggests this silence stems from the
continued centrality of Betty Friedan's 1963 feminist classic, The Femi-
nine Mystique. Meyerowitz proposes that "while many historians [have]
questioned Friedan's homogenized account of women's actual experience,
virtually all accept her version of the dominant ideology, the conserva-
tive promotion of domesticity" in women's magazine fiction (1994, 230).
Although arguments about the conservative nature of this fiction might
have been crucial to efforts to carve out a space for feminist critique in
1963, Meyerowitz suggests that contemporary feminists must revisit
Friedan's claims. Indeed, as Meyerowitz's own survey of midcentury
women's magazines reveals, fictional paeans to marriage and mother-
hood were balanced by nonfiction essays that championed women's wage
work and public service. Meyerowitz thus concludes by encouraging other
scholars to continue the kind of revisionist project she has begun in her
own work with "studies based on different magazines or on fiction, adver-
tisements, films, television, or radio" (231).
This essay answers Meyerowitz's call by examining how midcentury
women translated their political concerns into literary practice in the
popular field of science fiction (SF).2 To frame this argument, I first briefly
review the connections among patriotism, maternal responsibility, and
scientific knowledge as they were expressed in postwar social and political
discourses. I am particularly interested in showing how peace activists
made sense of their cause through a maternalist politics carefully tailored
to meet the needs of the nuclear age. As I argue in this section of my essay,
midcentury activists typically presented themselves as mothers united
by their common concerns about life under the shadow of the mushroom
cloud. They further legitimized these private anxieties and made them
part of public debate over nuclear weapons by linking concerned mother-
hood to scientific knowledge and antiwar protest as it was articulated by
respected scientists, such as Linus Pauling and Albert Einstein.
In the second part of this paper I consider how maternalist politics were
expressed in midcentury women's science fiction, focusing specifically on
the case of Judith Merril, a foundational figure in the history of the genre
whose early stories both invoke and extend the maternalist politics of
midcentury peace activism. I demonstrate how Merril's 1948 short story,
"That Only a Mother," works to raise the consciousness of readers by
extrapolating from scientific and activist literature to depict a near future

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
72 LISA YASZEK
where nuclear weapons and the cultural logic of nuclear defense ulti-
mately destroy the nuclear family itself, pitting fathers against children
and wives against husbands in tragic but inevitable ways. I then examine
Merril's 1950 novel Shadow on the Hearth as extending the themes of
her earlier short story. Much like its predecessor, Shadow on the Hearth
depicts a nightmare world where the unnatural situations engendered by
atomic bombing thwart women's natural instincts to protect their fami-
lies. At the same time, however, Merril suggests that women can prevent
these scenarios from happening by aligning themselves with like-minded
women and scientists in antiwar and antinuclear activism. Thus her novel
ends on a cautiously optimistic note, imagining a new kind of community
defined by its concern for the well-being of future generations.
Getting out of Grandma's Pantry:

Maternalist Politics at Midcentury
The onset of the nuclear arms race soon after World War II sparked heated
debates over what it meant to be a patriotic American citizen. Broadly
speaking, the participants in these debates identified with one of two
positions. Those who saw nuclear war as inevitable advocated a military
model of civil defense in which every citizen would be a self-reliant soldier
working to maintain social and political order. Those who thought war
was not inevitable allied themselves with various peace organizations,
positioning themselves as conscientious objectors to all preparations for
World War III. Much like their counterparts, peace activists believed that
education was key to nuclear-age citizenship. However, they dismissed the
military model of citizenship as too prone to fascist interpretation and
instead replaced it with a scientific one based on free inquiry and rational
skepticism. Invoking the growing cultural fascination with technological
expertise, activists allied themselves with outspoken scientists, includ-
ing Albert Einstein, who wrote that "there is no defense against atomic
bombs, and none is to be expected. Preparedness against atomic warfare
is futile and, if attempted, will ruin the structure of the social order"
(Mechling and Mechling 1994, 140). Implicit in the logic of peace activ-
ism, then, was the assumption that if Americans educated themselves in
the scientific principles guiding nuclear technologies they would natu-
rally come to the conclusion that the only way to prepare for atomic war
was to ensure that it never happened in the first place.
Since participants on both sides of this debate assumed that there were
no civilians in the nuclear age, it is not surprising that they attempted
to recruit those newest of soldiers-women-to their causes by suggest-
ing strong connections between patriotism and domesticity. After World
War II women were asked by politicians and employers alike to give up

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
their wartime jobs for homecoming male veterans. These requests were
couched in the language of civic duty: just as women had been obliged to
exchange the private sphere for its public counterpart during the war, now
they were obliged to focus their energies on hearth and home.3 Although
women did not always take this advice to heart, rhetorical equations
between women's domestic identities as wives and mothers and their
national identities as civic-minded Americans became central to the
public imagination over the next two decades.
These equations were central to advocates of the military model of Cold
War citizenship. Elaine Tyler May argues that the expert discourses of
this period called on women to combine their natural feminine instincts
with "professionalized skills to meet the challenges of the modern era"
(1988, 102). These challenges included the creeping threat of communism
and the associated possibility of nuclear war. For instance, the atomic age
wife was encouraged to express affection for her husband through a sexual
enthusiasm that would keep her man safe at home-and thus safe from
association with un-American characters. Spurred on by their mutual
conjugal satisfaction, homeward-bound women and men would produce
more children and provide them with the kind of wholesome family envi-
ronment necessary to prevent juvenile delinquency and thus ensure the
future of America itself (103, 109).
The Cold War homemaker was supposed to cultivate her domestic
instincts in the name of civil defense as well. In its extensively publiciz
"Grandma's Pantry" campaign, the Federal Civil Defense Administra-
tion encouraged women to be "just as self-sufficient as Grandma was" (in
May 1988, 105). In addition to performing their regular household duties,
American women were encouraged to line their shelves with canned
goods and bottled water and to brush up on their nursing skills so they
would be prepared for all eventualities in the event of an atomic attack.
Thus women's natural impulse to nurture and nurse others was imagined
to be-in combination with modern goods and techniques-the family's
first and last line of defense in the event of a nuclear emergency.4
Midcentury peace organizations also invoked specific equations
between patriotism and domesticity. Echoing the maternalist politics o
their 18th- and 19th-century predecessors, 20th-century social activists
urged women to join the antiwar effort because their domestic manage-
ment skills and moral integrity made them ideal candidates for "munici-
pal housekeeping" (Lynn 1994, 106). For example, in the early 1950s the
Women's International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF) recruited
new members with radio commercials featuring earnest housewives
urging their peers to join the peace movement so that "you and I-and
all the mothers in the world-can go to sleep without thinking about
the terrors of the Atomic Bomb or the H-Bomb" (in Alonso 1994, 131).
Meanwhile, in 1951 the Los Angeles branch of American Women for

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
74 LISA YASZEK
Peace began o
of nuclear arms (Alonso 1994, 147). Much like their civil defense coun-
terparts, peace activists explicitly equated motherhood with civic duty.
According to the logic of the latter, however, it was women's civic duty
to protest against-rather than acquiesce to-the Cold War social and
moral order.5
Women who saw themselves as political centrists distinct from the
left-leaning "old pros" of peace activism were especially attracted to the
techniques of maternalist politics. Dee Garrison chronicles the story of
Janice Smith and Mary Sharmat, two New York housewives who assumed
leadership of the New York City civil defense protest movement in the
early 1960s. Intent on mobilizing "nonradical persons" as well as "old
pros," Smith and Sharat combined their considerable personal energies
with the political resources of the Catholic Workers and War Resistors
League (WRL) to stage what were estimated to be the two largest nonvio
lent civil defense protests of the era. As Garrison argues, the success of
these protests derived largely from the women's decision to appeal to the
public with carefully managed images of protective motherhood:
They made detailed plans to surround themselves with children and toys
during the Operation Alert protest, arranging for trucks to bring the heaviest
items to the park before the drill began. Plans were made to pass out extra
babies and toys to single male activists who would practice civil disobedience
alongside the young mothers. All guessed correctly that police would not want
to take parents, complete with children, playpens, trikes, and assorted child-
hood paraphernalia, into custody. (Garrison 1994, 215)
By bringing children and other accoutrements of domesticity into City

Hall Park, Smith and Sharat created a public space where private citizens
could express dissent from the status quo of civil defense.6
Midcentury women's peace organizations often legitimized such dis-
sent by aligning maternal instinct with scientific knowledge. As early as
1952 WRL distributed pamphlets quoting Albert Einstein about the futil-
ity of preparing for a postholocaust future; later, WRL associates Smith
and Sharat reiterated this sentiment when they proposed that civil defense
drills were pointless because "in the event of a nuclear war most of New
York City would be incinerated" (Alonso 1994, 210). Women Strike for
Peace (WSP) made even more direct connections between mothers and
scientists. As Amy Swerdlow notes, WSP leaders "refused to speak in
terms of 'capitalism,' 'imperialism,' 'containment,' 'deterrence,' or even
of 'truth to power' because they believed that ideological language oblit-
erated the felt experience of all mothers." They were, however, "given to
paraphrasing Albert Einstein's statement that the atom bomb had changed
everything but the way we think" (1993, 236-7). By framing their con-
cerns in relation to scientific discourse, activists positioned themselves as

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
something other than overwrought women o

they emerged as rational beings reluctantly
understanding of nuclear weapons similar to that of scientific experts
themselves.
Peace activists also wove together the languages of maternal concern
and scientific expertise in their specific political activities. In early 1962
WSP launched a campaign to enlighten Americans about how dairy prod-
ucts like milk could be contaminated by radioactive fallout from nuclear
testing. One prong of the campaign involved the circulation of a "Dear
Neighbor" letter encouraging women to boycott dairy delivery services in
times of nuclear testing because uncontaminated milk "is of vital health
to our children" (Swerdlow 1993, 84). The letter assured women that this
call to boycott was based on specific information that WSP had gathered
from the Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S. Public Health Service,
and the Federal Radiation Council. Thus WSP activists allied themselves
not just with independent scientists like Einstein, but, perhaps even
more powerfully, with institutions established and sanctioned by the U.S.
government itself.
The Golden Age of Science Fiction

and the Housewife Heroine Story
City streets and suburban neighborhoods were not the only places where
midcentury women linked scientific knowledge to maternalist politics.
With its emphasis on logical extrapolation from current scientific, tech-
nological, and social trends, science fiction provided authors with an ideal
literary medium for voicing the twinned concerns of science and mother-
hood. Although SF was immensely popular with pulp fiction fans for at
least two decades before World War II, two sets of wartime events paved
the way for a much wider readership and what literary historians would
later call the "Golden Age" of the genre.7 First, wartime innovations in
mass media production and distribution led to a significant increase in
SF magazine publication. In 1940 there were just a few SF magazines, the
most prominent of which was John Campbell's Astounding. Over the
course of the next two decades at least 40 other SF magazines appeared
on news-rack stands. Most of these publications folded after a few issues,
but at least six survived into the 1960s and beyond. (Indeed, Campbell's
Astounding, later rechristened as Analogue, as well as The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction are both still published today.)
Concurrently, the shift from a pulp magazine economy to a paperback
one led mainstream publishing houses, including Ace and Ballantine
Books, to establish their own SF imprints and commission original works
by authors, including Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton. Even more

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
76 LISA YASZEK
Americans were exposed to SF by similar trends in film and television

production. Although most of these productions were relatively unsophis-
ticated (film and television SF tended to emphasize only the dangers of
science and the benevolence of the social status quo, while written fiction
explored the promises and perils of both), their popularity indicated the
very real extent to which SF had colonized the American imagination
(James 1994, 81-6).
SF also became an increasingly legitimate aesthetic genre at this time.
This newfound legitimacy derived largely from a second set of wartime
events: the development of viable atomic weapons. SF authors had been
writing about nuclear sciences and technologies long before the advent of
WWII; afterward, they seemed to be "prophets proven right by the course
of events" (Berger 1976, 143). In 1944 John Campbell was debriefed by U.S.
security agents for publishing a story featuring descriptions of a nuclear
bomb eerily similar to the one that was under construction at Los Alamos;
over the next few years several of Campbell's other writers began second
careers as popular science writers and industrial consultants. Main-
stream magazines including Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post
also embraced the genre, inviting SF authors including Robert Heinlein
and Ray Bradbury to write for them. In 1951 Collier's went a step further
with a special issue called "Preview of the War We Do Not Want: Russia's
Defeat and Occupation, 1952-1960." Although none of the special issue
authors (who included Edward R. Murrow, Robert E. Sherwood, and Sena-
tor Margaret Chase Smith) had any formal affiliations with SF, the title
itself suggests how indebted the Collier's editors were to future-oriented,
speculative thinking. Indeed, the opening editorial column insisted that
this special issue was "no careless fantasy or easy invention," but rather a
carefully constructed "hypothetical case" built by knowledgeable authors
who "proceeded from the factual basis of the world situation today to a
logical analysis of what may come" (1951, 17). Thus the science fictional
spirit of logical extrapolation seemed to be one with the social and politi-
cal climate of the times.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that increasing numbers of women
authors were attracted to the field in the postwar years. As SF historian
Brian Aldiss notes, prewar pulp SF had long been home to a handful of
women writers such as Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore. However, the
glossy magazines of the postwar era attracted a whole new generation of
authors including Margaret St. Clair, Shirley Jackson, and Judith Merril
(1988, 259). This new generation wrote about the same diverse range of
topics as their male counterparts, extrapolating from the forces shaping
their own time to build new worlds and test the limits of the social and
moral orders that might attend these possible worlds. At the same time,
they went beyond their male counterparts by examining how these
hypothetical new world orders might specifically impact women's lives,

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
especially as they were connected (at least in the public imagination) to

the private sphere of hearth and home.
So-called "housewife heroine stories" provoked mixed reactions from
the SF community.8 Conservative elements of this community dismissed
them as "diaper stories" written by a "gaggle of housewives" who were
out to spoil the fun of SF for everyone (in Larbalestier 2002, 172-3).
At the same time, an equally vocal and considerably more powerful
consortium of editors valued housewife heroine SF for its high literary
quality and expansion of conventional areas of SF inquiry. In 1956 editor
Anthony Boucher praised the women of his generation as the first group
of authors in SF history to produce significant numbers of "sensitive"
stories depicting "the future from a woman's point of view" (125). As
the tenor of Boucher's comment suggests, housewife heroine SF was not
exactly feminist in nature-indeed, in just a decade and half it would be
eclipsed by a revolutionary mode of women's SF that explicitly addressed
issues of gender equity in a high-tech world. Nonetheless, throughout the
1950s housewife heroine SF provided politically inclined women with a
key way to express their opinions about the state of the union, and the
prefeminist figure of the housewife heroine had the power to engage many
of the values and social arrangements trumpeted by the keepers of Cold
War culture.
"The Little Mother of Science Fiction":

Judith Merril's Literary and Political Praxis
In the SF community, the single author most closely associated with mid-
century women's SF is Judith Merril. During World War II Merril moved
to New York to support herself and her daughter through writing. There
she joined the Futurians, a group of writers and fans (including such rising
stars as Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, and Virginia Kidd) who are often
credited with setting the thematic and stylistic standards for modern SF.
Over the next two decades Merril edited a variety of prominent SF col-
lections, including 1951's Shot in the Dark and all 12 of the 1956-1967
Year's Best of SF anthologies. At the same time she was packaging SF for
outside audiences, Merril worked to strengthen the genre from within by
establishing some of the first professional SF writing groups, including the
Milford Writers' Workshop and the Hydra Club (Merril and Pohl-Weary
2002; 270, 273).
Today Merril is most often remembered for her innovative anthologiz-
ing activities, and with good reason. Bibliographer Elizabeth Cummins
notes that Merril was a "scout" on the midcentury literary frontier whose
critical thinking was notable in three major respects: "she provided [read-
ers] with a contemporary record of the events that affected the genre in

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
78 LISA YASZEK
the 1950s and 1960s; she argued for a broad definition of SF that reflected
the dynamic nature of science and science fiction; [and] she demonstrated
the value of the perspective of the scout for the continued development of
both writers and critics" (1994, 8). For example, Merril typically organized
her Year's Best anthologies around a surprising range of contemporary
issues, including McCarthyism and nuclear weapons as well as "cybernet-
ics, parapsychology, the use of horror in science fiction, space medicine,
the Abominable Snowman, Bob Dylan, schizophrenia, and alienation"
(Cummins 1994, 8). The authors whom she identified as providing readers
with the most engaging treatments of these issues were equally diverse.
The typical Merril anthology includes a mix of established SF luminar-
ies such as Isaac Asimov and Fritz Leiber, speculative fiction newcom-
ers such as J.G. Ballard and E.C. Tubbs, and mainstream names such as
John Updike and Donald Barthelme. They also include a good number
of women authors such as Mildred Clingerman, Zenna Henderson, and
Anne McCaffrey, all of whom-much like Merril herself-were simulta-
neously praised and reviled by the midcentury SF community for writing
about contemporary scientific, social, and sexual issues from the point of
view of the futuristic housewife heroine.9
This period also marked the pinnacle of Merril's own literary produc-
tion. In 1948 Merril published her first SF story, "That Only a Mother"; in
1950 she published her first full-length novel, Shadow on the Hearth. Both
works depict the lives of American women trying to survive World War
III, and both won Merril a great deal of recognition as a writer-to this day
"That Only a Mother" remains one of the most often-anthologized SF sto-
ries.'0 Although Shadow on the Hearth has received less critical attention
in retrospect, at the time of its publication it was remarkably well received:
the New York Times compared it to the cautionary works of H.G. Wells
and George Orwell, and Motorola TV Theatre broadcast a dramatic ver-
sion of it in 1954 under the title "Atomic Attack" (Merril and Pohl-Weary
99-100). Throughout the 1950s Merril continued to experiment with tell-
ing SF stories from women's perspectives, thus earning her the unofficial
but enduring moniker of "the little mother of science fiction."
For Merril, involvement with the SF community was the logical exten-
sion of an already intensely politicized life. Merril was born in Boston in
1923 to Samuel Grossman and Ethel Hurwitch, both outspoken Jewish
intellectuals and early advocates of the Zionist movement. Merril's
mother was deeply involved with the suffragette movement and the
founding of Hadassah as well. Merril herself was an active member of the
Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) throughout the 1930s and early
1940s. During World War II she participated in wartime efforts to estab-
lish public nursery schools for the children of working women; afterward,
she fought valiantly to keep these schools open despite the growing public
conviction that children's needs were best met in the home by full-time

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
mothers. Later Merril became an outspoke

in Vietnam, and in 1968 she emigrated to Canada where she worked with
war resistors and participated in the Free University movement (Merril
and Pohl-Weary 12-5, 62-5).
It is significant that Merril's literary career took off in those postwar
years when she was least actively involved with organized politics. Of
course, this is not to say that she abandoned activism altogether in this
period; instead, much like other midcentury women, she channeled her
political passions into less conventional outlets. As Amy Swerdlow notes,
women associated with midcentury activism often carefully distanced
themselves from older and more explicitly leftist groups (1995; 216, 229).
This, however, did not mean that these women were politically inex-
perienced. Many midcentury activists had ties to prewar socialist and
communist organizations, but severed them after the rise of Stalinism in
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and McCarthyism in the
United States. They also were disappointed by American leftism itself,
which they described as too rigidly organized (Swerdlow 1995, 230). For
such women, groups like WSP provided an ideal alternative to conven-
tional political organizations because they refused membership lists and
hierarchical chains of command, favoring instead informal, everyday
practices such as phone circles and group brainstorming sessions.
Similar personal and political issues informed Merril's decision to join
the midcentury SF community. Merril began to distance herself from
the YPSL in the early 1940s when she realized that, as "a Trotskyist's
Trotskyist," she found the group's "authoritarian organizational tactics
unbearable." At the same time she became increasingly interested in SF
because it took as its basic premise "the idea that things could be differ-
ent" (Merril and Pohl-Weary 2002, 44-5). Joining the Futurians further
confirmed Merril's belief that progressive politics could be different, too.
As mostly left-leaning individuals struggling to express themselves in
an increasingly conservative era, the Futurians ardently believed that
SF was the only place where writers could explore controversial issues
without being dismissed as crackpots or dangerous radicals. They also
provided Merril with the kind of nonhierarchical community that many
other displaced activists were searching for. The early SF community was
small but dynamic, and the lines between fan, writer, and editor were
quite indistinct. Additionally, the Futurians believed that creation was
a group effort rather than an individual one; accordingly, they gave away
ideas and promoted one another's work even at their own expense (Merril
and Pohl-Weary 2002, 46).
Although Merril chose to work with a very different kind of organiza-
tion than did her activist counterparts, the stories she produced during
this period championed many of the same causes, and in much the same
ways. In her autobiography she recalls that

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
80 LISA YASZEK
In 1946, 1947,
atomic radiati
Bulletin of At
newspapers; an
available was s
understood by many people, including ordinary families and even heads of
government. (Merril and Pohl-Weary 2002, 154-5)
For Merril, it was the job of the SF writer to convey this "staggering,
unarguable, and terrifying" information to the public as imaginatively
but accurately as possible. To do so, she used many of the same tactics
as did her counterparts in the peace movement. Indeed, as we shall see
in the following pages, Merril's nuclear war stories both anticipate and
extend the maternalist logic of midcentury peace activism by imagina-
tively depicting what might happen if women failed in their civic duty as
conscientious protestors of the nuclear age.
"It's the Fathers Who Do It":

Nuclear Holocaust as Domestic Tragedy
Merril's interest in using SF to explore the consequences of nuclear war,

combined with her desire to show how new sciences and technologies
have an impact on women's lives, informs almost every aspect of her 1948
short story, "That Only a Mother." Merril's story depicts a near-future
America waging an extended nuclear war against an unnamed enemy.
Although the country itself remains intact, the tragedy inherent in this
new state of affairs is beginning to come clear as increasing numbers of
men are exposed to radiation in the line of duty and increasing numbers
of children are born with drastic mutations. Like any good SF writer,
Merril does more than simply conjure up her future world out of thin air.
Instead, she carefully builds it in reference to then-current understand-
ings of nuclear weaponry, especially as they resonated throughout the
peace movement. Activist organizations such as WILPF recruited women
to their cause by suggesting that all women, as mothers, were bound
together by a desire to "go to sleep without thinking about the terrors of
the Atomic Bomb or the H-Bomb." Merril's nightmare world makes con-
crete the terrors implied by such claims, showing how nuclear war will
inevitably thwart women's ability to protect and nurture their children.
Significantly, Merril invites readers to think about the terrors of
nuclear war (and, implicitly, about how readers might prevent these ter-
rors through peace activism) by focusing her story on the fortunes of one
woman: Margaret, a computer operator who is anxiously awaiting the
birth of her first child.

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
Philosopher and peace activist Sara Ruddick notes that this kind of
identification is central to the creation of an effective maternalist peace
politics. Although individual women may fight fiercely to protect their
children in the private sphere of the home, devotion to one's own family
does not necessarily or inherently lead to public peacemaking. Instead,
women are more likely to join communal antiwar efforts "by finding in
other particular mothers, children, and families passions and responsi-
bilities akin to their own" (1989/1995, 177). And indeed, the first half of
Merril's short story seems to encourage just this kind of identification
by depicting Margaret's experience of World War III in a manner that
must have resonated deeply with many of the women who had witnessed
the end of World War II just three years earlier. Told primarily through
letters to her husband Hank, a weapons designer away on wartime busi-
ness, "That Only a Mother" details Margaret's initial concern for her
unborn child, relief when baby Henrietta proves to be a "beautiful flower-
faced" child, and joy when she turns out to be an intellectual prodigy as
well (349).
This seemingly triumphant narrative trajectory reverses itself in the
second half of the story, however, when Hank comes home to see his
daughter. Here, Merril switches to the third-person voice and Hank's per-
spective, and we learn that Henrietta is actually a wormlike creature with
neither arms nor legs and that Margaret appears to be quite insane, blinded
by a motherlove that prevents her from comprehending the tragedy of her
child's deformities. The story ends in a grim parody of fatherlove, as Hank
picks up his daughter for closer scrutiny while his fingers slowly tighten
around her throat. To a certain extent Merril's story appears to take a
rather horrifyingly fantastic turn in these final scenes-a turn that might
have seemed even more fantastic in 1948, when public awareness about
radioactivity was still relatively limited. However, for readers already
prepared to sympathize with Margaret as a wartime Everywoman, such
scenes become more than mere speculation about the potential relations
of nuclear weapons and physical mutation. Additionally and perhaps even
more immediately, they provide sympathetic readers with a frightening
demonstration of how nuclear war threatens to mutate familiar relations
into almost unrecognizable forms as well.
It is this second order of mutation that Merril explores most thoroughly.
"That Only a Mother" is not just the story of a generalized Everywoman;
it is more specifically a story about what Ruddick calls the mater dolo-
rosa or "mother of sorrows," a character type who figures prominently in
modern women's war narratives. Typically, the mater dolorosa survives
war only to find herself faced with a series of dreadful tasks that include
burying the dead, rebuilding destroyed homes, and otherwise "reweaving
the connections that war has destroyed" (1989/1995, 142). Of even more

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
82 LISA YASZEK
importance, t
war. Motheri
tifies organized, deliberate deaths.... Mothers protect children who are
at risk; the military risks the children mothers protect" (1989/1995, 148).
In essence, then, the mater dolorosa provides authors with an ideal way
to explore the contradictory social and moral orders attending warfare
itself.
An important part of women's writing about World Wars I and II, the
mater dolorosa also lends herself quite handily to speculative fictions
about World War III. Specifically, Merril uses her story about sorrowful
motherhood to demonstrate how nuclear war will inevitably spawn new
social and moral orders that contradict the best interests of women and
their children. "That Only A Mother" begins with an anxious Margaret
trying to reassure herself about the health of her unborn child with news-
paper profiles of doctors who promise to "predict and prevent" the most
severe cases of mutation. Unfortunately these same papers only exacer-
bate her growing dread with reports that there are "more infanticides all
the time, and they can't seem to get a jury to convict any of them. It's the
fathers who do it" (345, 346-7). Thus Merril maps out a deadly interac-
tion between technology and biology and, subsequently, the personal and
the political: atomic radiation produces physically mutated children. It
also produces a mutated new social order where doctors tacitly encourage
infanticide with the rhetoric of prediction and prevention, lawyers and
juries redefine murder to exclude the death of certain individuals, and the
press reports it all as the necessary cost of war. Finally, this new social
order spawns a new moral code in which men are implicitly encouraged to
kill their deformed children to protect the workings of the war machine
responsible for those deformities in the first place.
Merril invokes and extends the maternalist logic of midcentury peace
activism by using her mater dolorosa to imagine how motherhood itself
might be de- and re-formed by the exigencies of nuclear war. Initially
Merril's readers might well assume that the tragedy of the story is linked
to Margaret's insanity. Early in the story Margaret tries to alleviate her
worries about her unborn child by visiting a psychologist who tells her
that she is "probably the unstable type"; later, she dismisses news reports
about genetic mutantcy by telling herself over and over that "my baby's
fine. Precocious, but normal" (345, 351). When the story shifts to Hank's
perspective in the final passages, it seems that Margaret has indeed been
deluding herself about Henrietta all along and that the baby is-as the
title of the story suggests-a child "that only a mother" could love.
Of course, if Margaret is insane, Merril makes clear that she has been
driven to this state by the madness of her entire society. Throughout
her story Merril links descriptions of Margaret's mental condition with

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
newspaper reports of wartime atrocity. Margaret's initial depiction of

herself as "the unstable type" is juxtaposed with the tales of American
juries who refuse to prosecute fathers for infanticide; later, her frantic
refrain concerning Henrietta's normalcy is interspersed with increasingly
grim facts concerning the rate of genetic mutantcy in newborns from
Hiroshima and Nagasaki-a litany that ends with the observation that
"only two or three percent of those guilty of infanticide are being captured
and punished in Japan today" (351). Thus the chain reaction of the atom
bomb extends even further than we might already think: the insanity of
nuclear war leads to an insane mode of fatherhood based on militaristic
thinking about "organized, deliberate death" rather than love and protec-
tion. This, in turn, leads to a literal insanity "that only a mother" can
fully experience or understand.
Finally, the story of Merril's mater dolorosa illustrates how the inevi-
table conflict between mothering and militarism provokes a final kind of
mutancy, tragically altering the previously affectionate relations among
married couples themselves. In theory (and, as Merril's readers would
have known from recent experience, in practice), modern war is waged
between national and ideological enemies. In Merril's story, however, war
is ultimately waged between men and women. Fathers from all nations
"do it" to their mutant children; little wonder, then, that when Hank
first comes home Margaret can only perceive him as "a khaki uniform"
topped off by "a stranger's pale face." Although Margaret tries to reassert
normal relations with Hank by grasping his hand and telling herself that
"for the moment that was enough," her subsequent actions suggest oth-
erwise (351). Instead, her passive attempt to hide Henrietta from Hank,
combined with her more aggressive attempt to distract Hank from the
unsettling reality of Henrietta's body, suggests that, for Margaret at least,
the war has just begun.
Framed as this homecoming scene is by descriptions of khaki uni-
forms and strangers' faces, one cannot help but read it as a narrative of
invasion and occupation. In this case, Merril's heroine emerges as a des-
perate woman protecting her child against the real enemy: her husband.
Thus Merril rewrites common-sense assumptions about the relationship
between nuclear weapons and the nuclear family. Rather than preserving
the domestic relations that are supposedly at the heart of the American way
of life, nuclear weapons engender a new social and moral order that threat-
ens to completely destroy those same relations, turning parent against
child and husband against wife.

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
84 LISA YASZEK
"Isn't Anything Safe?": Civil Defense,

Scientific Rationalism, and Maternal Morality
In her 1950 novel Shadow on the Hearth, Merril continues to appeal to the
antiwar sensibilities of women readers based on their common situation
as mothers haunted by "the terrors of the Atomic Bomb." Furthermore,
she does so once again by inviting readers to identify with one particular
character. The novel follows the story of Gladys Mitchell, a Westchester
housewife and mother of three. Gladys is the epitome of midcentury
domesticity, dispensing nuggets of wisdom about the effects of French
toast on ill-tempered children while struggling with her conscience about
whether or not she should abandon the laundry to attend a neighborhood
luncheon (87). With the advent of World War II, Gladys's life turns upside
down: her husband Jon is presumed dead in New York City, her daugh-
ters Barbara and Ginny are exposed to radioactive rain at school, and her
son Tom, a freshman at Texas Tech, seems to have vanished off the face
of the planet. In this brave new world, even the most familiar aspects of
suburban life become terrifyingly strange: basic utilities fail, and men
become monsters who abuse their power as civil defense officers to harass
the women and children they are meant to protect.
In Merril's book, nuclear war shatters our certainty about what it might
mean to be a wife and mother in the atomic era. At first Gladys tries to
cope with her terrifying new world by imagining what her husband would
do in her situation. However, she soon gives this up because
Jon wasn't there. For more than two days Jon hadn't been there. The other time,
the other war, it was different. Then she wrote him cheerful, encouraging let-
ters, telling him all the little troubles that came up each day, the little things
he customarily solved, that she had learned to cope with. But these were not
little problems now, nor were they the kind that anyone customarily solved.
What would Jon do?
That was the old formula, the way it had worked in the last war. She'd ask
herself and get the answer. Now there was no answer. (188)
As Merril's heroine realizes, the formula for gender relations that made
sense in World War II has little or no bearing on the radically different
situation of World War III. This insight challenges the rhetoric of civil
defense as it was expressed in official government documents such as the
"Grandma's Pantry" pamphlet. Rather than looking to the past for models
of appropriate feminine behavior that will make sense of a frightening
new present, Merril's readers must acknowledge that shifting modes of
technology create new social realities that demand new modes of relations
for men and women as well.

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
In contrast to her earlier short story, then, Merril's novel is more than
just a warning about the tragedy of domestic life in the nuclear age.
Instead, it is an appeal to readers to help prevent that tragedy. Accordingly,
Merril devotes the majority of her novel to Gladys's transformation from
helpless housewife and mater dolorosa to educated mother and activist
citizen. The course of Gladys's transformation is marked by her engage-
ment with three distinctive ways of knowing the world -what feminist
psychologists Mary Field Belenky et al. call "received knowledge," "sub-
jective knowledge," and "constructed knowledge." In essence, received
knowers rely on external (and usually male) authorities "for direction
as well as information" about how to act appropriately (1986, 40). Con-
versely, subjective knowers-who often describe themselves as having
been deeply disappointed by the male authorities around them-depend
on their personal experiences and innermost feelings both to intuit the
truth of any given situation and to derive a course of action based on that
subjective truth (1986, 54). Finally, women who operate from the position
of constructed knowledge create new and stronger personal identities "by
attempting to integrate knowledge that they [feel] intuitively . .. with the
knowledge that they [have] learned from others" (134). Although these
three kinds of knowing are not entirely distinct from one another, they
do indicate the kind of broad developmental trajectory that characterizes
women's development as socially and politically engaged subjects.1"
In Shadow on the Hearth, Gladys's engagement with different ways of
knowing lead her (and, by extension, Merril's readers) toward an increas-
ingly critical conception of masculine authority as it informs the rhetoric
and practice of civil defense. At first Gladys is a received knower who
uncritically accepts official government statements claiming that nobody
in her neighborhood has been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. She
thus dismisses her youngest daughter Ginny's increasing crankiness as a
simple, childish reaction to the frightening events unfolding around them.
However, when Ginny's hair begins to fall out, Gladys finally convinces
the local doctors to examine her for radiation poisoning. At this point the
doctors admit that Gladys's growing suspicions are indeed correct and that
Ginny has fallen ill from playing with her favorite stuffed animal, which
was left out in the rain when the bombs first fell. Although they assure
Gladys that Ginny will live through the initial bout of radiation sickness,
the doctors cannot predict her long-term health. Shocked by the extent to
which official knowledge has undermined her parenting abilities, Gladys
wonders: "Isn't anything safe? Not the rain or the house? Not even a little
blue horse? ... Would anything ever be safe again? " (275) The answer to
these questions seems to be a resounding "no": after World War III women
might well retain the natural instinct to protect their children, but this
instinct itself might be tragically compromised by socially constructed
dictates to subsume that maternal instinct to masculine authority.

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
86 LISA YASZEK
Perhaps not surprisingly, Gladys reacts to her disappointment with

male authority by embracing a mode of subjective knowledge that enables
her to defy that authority to make connections with other women.
When local civil defense officials attempt to arrest her housekeeper Veda
Klopac as a communist spy, Gladys refuses to cooperate, dismissing the
whole idea as ludicrous because, as she knows from personal experience,
Veda "couldn't possibly be an enemy agent. She just works too hard
[and] wouldn't have the time" (93). Later Merril's heroine also opens her
home to Edie Crowell, an aristocratic neighbor who has been exposed to
radiation and is in need of medical treatment. Indeed, Gladys decides to
care for Edie herself because both women have been betrayed by mascu-
line authority: as Edie rather dramatically (but nonetheless accurately)
announces to everyone who will listen, "I told you I was [sick]. I told you
... and I told them, and nobody would believe me" (114)! In turn, both
Veda and Edie draw upon their respective skills to help Gladys preserve
her family: Veda quickly adapts the Mitchell household to the rhythms
of its new circumstances (a good thing, since Gladys is a lackadaisical
housekeeper at best), while Edie uses her sharp tongue to fend off the civil
defense officers who hope to break up the household and regain control
over the women.'2 Thus Gladys, Veda, and Edie create a quasi-utopian
community of women who work together-however temporarily-to
protect themselves and their children from the dangerous new social and
moral orders that threaten them.'3
Eventually Gladys learns how to become an even more critically
engaged subject in her brave new world by combining received knowledge
with personal experience. First she learns how to read between the lines
of official government radio broadcasts by cross-checking them against
the information she gleans from both her son Tom's physics books and
her own experience in the home:
The news all sounded so good, [Gladys] reflected, things seemed to be improv-
ing every hour. Then it occurred to her that nothing had been said about the
imminent failure of the gas supply or about the possible discontinuance of
telephone service.... It wasn't all quite as good as it sounded after all; maybe
the other part, the big news about the whole country [surviving the war with-
out any major damage], was weeded out in the same way. (162)
Later Gladys learns how to successfully challenge blind authority as well.

When civil defense officials order her to leave her home because of a gas
leak, Gladys refuses to comply. Instead, she exchanges her housedress for
her husband's pants and then marches into the basement to fix the prob-
lem by herself (122). Thus Merril suggests that modern women can and
must prepare themselves for the exigencies of the atomic age by develop-
ing contextualized ways of knowing the world that combine subjective,
domestic instincts with the more objective skills of rational inquiry and
technological know-how.

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
Of course, it is not enough that Gladys simply establishes herself as

a capable mother. Instead, Merril insists that she also must ally herself
with one of two distinct models for atomic-age social order: the military
model of uncritical compliance or the scientific model of rational skepti-
cism. Gladys's relationship to these contrasting models of social order
is expressed in terms of her relationship to the two men who personify
them: Jim Turner, her neighbor-turned-civil defense official, and Garson
Levy, a nuclear physicist-turned-math teacher under surveillance by the
U.S. government for his highly publicized peace activism. Merril asks her
readers to evaluate the merit of these men and the competing models of
social order they embody based on whether or not they foster constructed
ways of knowing the world, especially as they enable what Belenky et al.
(1986) call "connected and caring" relations to others (142).
In Shadow on the Hearth, the military model of social relations fails
spectacularly on all counts. Jim Turner initially seems to be an avatar of
efficiency and organization, a confident man with "a big sounding mas-
culine laugh that made [Gladys's] worries seem silly" (51). Unfortunately,
Turner is also a petty tyrant who delights in playing soldier, bullying the
men assigned to his work detail while bragging to their wives about his
importance in the new scheme of things. More to the point, Turner's rage
for order makes him intolerant of anyone who questions that order. When
Gladys asks a series of eminently sensible questions about how to ensure
the safety of her house and children, Turner impatiently warns her that
"you don't have to go looking for extra work, Miz Mitchell. You'll have
plenty to do, just following instructions" (55). As this exchange suggests,
civil defense practices may ensure a certain kind of social order, but only
if they successfully convince private citizens to acquiesce to a largely
untested public authority that embodies the rigid, hierarchical relations
of received knowledge.
Later developments in the novel demonstrate the danger of this author-
ity when Turner tries to extract sexual favors from Gladys. Preying on her
desire for information, Turner takes up the habit of stopping by Gladys's
house to tell her what he knows about the latest developments in local
government war planning-and to make passes at her whenever she least
expects it. When plans to evacuate Westchester County are announced,
Turner becomes even more overtly aggressive, telling Gladys that he could
secure priority transportation and shelter for her family "if we got to know
each other a little" (185). When Gladys resists his advances on the grounds
that her husband might still be alive, Turner dismisses her as a "damn
fool" (269). More than mere melodrama, Merril here uses the trope of the
sexually persecuted woman to underscore how all citizens might be objec-
tified by the practices of civil defense. By emphasizing Gladys's devotion
to her husband and revulsion for Turner, Merril insists that the new social
order implied by civil defense must be resisted because it undermines all
normative understandings of moral order as well.

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
88 LISA YASZEK
Even more to the point, Merril indicates that the military model of
social order is directly at odds with women's maternal instincts to make
connections with and care for others. When Gladys offers to take in several
war orphans, Turner throws out her application and tells her that "I don't
think that's such a good idea, Gladys. They sent me a form to check off
whether your house was okay. Of course I know it would be nice for the
kids here, but you got to remember what I told you before. It wouldn't make
things any easier to have a couple of extra kids here" (186). Turner's words
here certainly sound sympathetic, but by this point in the novel discerning
readers can hardly help but wonder: isn't the real problem here that a few
extra children "wouldn't make things any easier" for Turner in either his
rage for unquestioned order or his pursuit of Gladys's affections?
Turner's monstrous selfishness-and, by extension, the monstrosity
of the entire system he represents-is more than confirmed by his final
exchange with Gladys. After Ginny becomes sick with radiation poison-
ing, Turner orders Gladys to take the child to the hospital. Gladys refuses,
pointing out that she has already been to the hospital with Ginny once
and that she will not return to what has become a charnel house overflow-
ing with the victims of the New York City bombing. In a horrifyingly mis-
guided attempt to placate her, Turner insists that Gladys must be wrong.
Although he has never actually visited the hospital, the civil defense offi-
cial knows it must be fine because "I had to send my own wife and baby
there, on account of not having anybody to take care of them at home.
They didn't even get exposed, but.... [They're] better off at the hospital"
(268). Not surprisingly, this scene marks the pinnacle of Gladys's disgust
with Turner, who is more than willing to eradicate his connections with
his own family so he can play soldier with impunity. Thus Merril suggests
that the cultural logic of the nuclear age, especially as expressed through
the quasi-military procedures of civil defense, transforms all women and
children into structural if not literal victims of the bomb.
By way of contrast, physicist and peace activist Garson Levy embodies a
model of scientific knowledge and political practice that is highly compat-
ible with the contextual, connected ways of knowing that Gladys herself
increasingly values. Unlike Turner, the first impression that Levy gives is
one of astounding ordinariness: "he didn't look like a madman, or a hero
either. He looked like a scholarly middle-aged man who never remem-
bered to have his suit pressed" (143). Nonetheless, Merril's scientist turns
out to be anything but ordinary, escaping from his government-imposed
house arrest to make sure that his students' families are warned about
the radiation that they were exposed to during the first wave of bombings
and taking time to explain radiation test results when civil authorities
like Jim Turner refuse to do so. Impressed with both Levy's concern for
his students and his cheerful willingness to explain scientific and medi-
cal concepts to laypeople such as herself, Gladys invites the scientist to

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
stay with them for the duration of the war, even if it means harboring a
public enemy.
Merril further encourages readers to sympathize with Levy's way of
knowing the world by demonstrating its compatibility with maternal
modes of perception and action. As a physicist and teacher Levy provides
Gladys with a wealth of knowledge about nuclear war; as an antiwar
protestor he encourages her to use this knowledge to make informed
decisions about her family and home. When the civil defense authorities
try to convince our heroine that her family is not in danger because there
have been no explosions near Westchester County, Gladys "remembers
that Dr. Levy had said something about bombs directly overhead" and
demands that her children be tested for the kinds of radiation poisoning
that most closely match the symptoms she has already observed in them
(151). Reluctantly impressed by Gladys's carefully detailed argument, the
civil defense workers agree to run the tests. Unlike the military model
of social relations that sacrifices women's concerns for the sake of public
order, the scientific model enables women to connect their concerns with
larger events occurring beyond the home. This, in turn, enables them to
protect their families as effectively as possible.
The scientific model of social order does more than simply enable
maternal authority; rather, for Merril it also acknowledges this author-
ity as a valid mode of perception in and of itself. For example, although
she successfully stops the gas leak in her basement, it is only when Levy
arrives that Gladys is able to fully diagnose the problem and safely turn
the gas back on. Levy is more than willing to give credit where credit is
due, telling Gladys that he could not have solved the problem by himself
either, but that he depended upon "the way you described your trouble
with the stove" (157). Thus Merril once again insists on the compatibility
of domestic experience in relation to scientific authority. Of course, the
relationship between physicist and housewife is not an entirely equal
one: after all, Levy possesses more formal knowledge than Gladys. None-
theless, he recognizes the importance of close observation and detailed
description as skills that are essential to scientists and mothers alike.
Finally, Merril invites readers to sympathize with Levy's antiwar
agenda by linking the scientist's peace activism to the creation of family
and preservation of moral order. Although Levy is nominally a bachelor,
his years of political activism have earned him an extensive network of
devoted friends and followers. This network includes Peter Spinelli, the
young Westchester doctor who becomes part of Jim Turner's civil defense
team. Spinelli is the only civil defense worker to defy Turner's bullying
and rage for procedural order, taking extra time after his official rounds to
help neighborhood women prepare for life after the bomb. The similarities
between Spinelli and Levy are no coincidence; as the young doctor tells
Gladys upon discovering Levy's presence in her home:

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
90 LISA YASZEK
I was a high sc
I heard [Garson
... The money
making me a d
him in. He's im
In addition to inspiring a filial kind of devotion amongst his followers,

then, Levy reproduces himself (or at least the political and moral agen-
das he embodies) by virtue of the example he sets for them. As such, he
becomes the nexus for a model community of scientists, doctors, and
mothers, all of whom are bound together by a shared concern for the ter-
rors of the atom bomb and a mutual desire to protect future generations
from its devastating legacy.14
Of course, it is important to note that for Merril, the scientific model
of social order is at best an only partial solution to the problem of nuclear
war. At the end of the novel Gladys, Levy, and Spinelli do preserve the
family unit, but its survival is far from guaranteed: Ginny's health is still
in jeopardy; Gladys's son Tom is located but much to her horror has been
drafted into the army; her husband Jon returns from New York City but
is wracked with radiation burns and gunshot wounds that prevent him
from asserting his place as the head of the family; and Levy himself is
diagnosed with a potentially fatal strain of radiation poisoning.15
This ambivalence is key to Merril's project: if she depicts a postholo-
caust future where scientists can solve all the problems associated with
nuclear war, then there would be no reason to protest that kind of war in
the first place. Of course, that is not her project. The goal of Shadow on the
Hearth is twofold: to alert readers to the devastating effects of nuclear war,
and to investigate what models of social order are most likely to address
women's concerns about the nuclear age. By demonstrating the moral
similarities between mothers and scientists, Merril makes a strong case
for models of social order that treat individuals as rational subjects of a
high-tech era rather than irrational objects of modern military strategy.
And by demonstrating how even the natural sympathies of women and
scientists might not be enough to guarantee survival in a postnuclear
future, she also makes a strong case for peace activism in the present.
Midcentury Women's Science Fiction

and the Feminist Future
Looking back on the American midcentury, Judith Merril once noted that
SF was "virtually the only vehicle of political dissent" available to Cold
War writers like her (1971, 74). At first this might seem like a surprising
thing for a woman to say, since SF has commonly been considered a genre
that best expresses the interests of men. Yet Merril turned the genre's

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
own concepts and conventions to the political advantage of women. Of

course, scholars have long recognized that SF written since the revival of
feminism in the 1960s has been a vital source of narratives for women
interested in exploring the relations of gender, science, and culture. But
as I have argued in the preceding pages, women like Merril were active
and politically engaged writers within the genre throughout the long
domestic decade that preceded the modern women's movement as well.
By examining how midcentury women used stories about the future
to articulate-in however allegorical a manner-their hopes and fears
about the American present, we further one of most fundamental goals
of feminist studies: to remember women's contributions to culture in all
their diverse forms.
More specifically, when we examine Judith Merril's early fiction, we
learn more about the diverse strategies that feminists have used histori-
cally to convey their ideas to nonfeminist audiences. Women were key
political actors in the peace movements of the postwar era, and Merril was
at the forefront of that activity. Rather than taking to the streets, however,
she chose to work in what might seem to be the last place anyone would
have expected: the field of SF. Thus Merril's own antiwar, pro-peace mes-
sage reached a number of audiences well beyond those who were already
converted to the cause. The most immediate audience-the predomi-
nantly male SF community-may not have been passionately interested in
maternalist politics, but they were, by definition, passionately interested
in strange and estranging stories about science and technology. Merril's
nuclear holocaust stories play to this interest by showing SF readers how
they might think about war and peace-traditionally the province of male
politicians, scientists, and soldiers-from the seemingly alien perspective
of the suburban wife and mother. Furthermore, as SF became an increas-
ingly fashionable part of American culture, innovative stories such as
Merril's began to reach whole other audiences through college seminars,
newspaper reviews, and television dramatizations. Far from limiting the
efficacy of Merril's social and political analyses, then, SF served as a kind
of literary gateway for the dissemination of those same analyses.
Finally, I want to suggest a third reason to revisit the antiwar stories
of midcentury women writers such as Judith Merril. Such stories are
relevant not just to feminist scholars, but to all people interested in the
fate of the Earth as we move into the second nuclear age. Simply put,
nuclear weapons have not gone away, nor has the need for a peace politics
that offers the possibility of alternative social and moral orders rooted in
something other than technostrategic militarism. Stories such as "That
Only a Mother" and Shadow on the Hearth remind us in powerful ways
that these are not new problems, but ones that socially conscious women
have grappled with since the dawn of the first nuclear age. More than
trivial tales about the hopes and fears "that only a mother" living in the

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
92 LISA YASZEK
middle of the 20th century could understand, such stories thus emerge
as foundational fictions that enable us to better understand-and chal-
lenge-the supposedly cold, hard, and immutable "facts" of life in at the
beginning of the 21st century as well.
Lisa Yaszek is assistant professor in the School of Literature, Commu-

nication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she
researches and teaches classes on gender studies, science fiction, and
contemporary literature. Her first book, The Self Wired: Technology and
Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative, was published by Routledge in
2002. She is currently working on a second book, tentatively entitled
Galactic Suburbia: Midcentury Women's Science Fiction and the Feminist
Avant-Garde. Correspondence should be sent to Lisa Yaszek, School of
Literature, Communication, and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technol-
ogy, Atlanta, GA 30332-0165; lisa.yaszek@lcc.gatech.edu.
Notes
1. See, for instance, Dee Garrison, "'Our Skirts Gave Them Courage': The Civil
Defense Protest Movement in New York City, 1955-1961"; Harriet Hyman
Alonso, "Mayhem and Moderation: Women Peace Activists During the
McCarthy Era"; Eugenia Kaledin, Mothers and More: American Women in the
1 950s; Susan Lynn, Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial fustice,
Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s; and Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike
For Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s.
2. Recent scholarly explorations of midcentury women's SF have taken a variety

of forms. For discussions of how individual authors mobilized midcentury
beliefs about gender relations to critique Cold War politics, see Farah Mendle-
sohn, "Gender, Power, and Conflict Resolution: 'Subcommittee' by Zenna
Henderson" and David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War:
Literature and Film; for an exploration of how these strategies circulated
throughout a range of women's SF texts, see my essays "Media Landscapes and
Social Satire in Postwar Women's Science Fiction" and "Unhappy Housewife
Heroines, Galactic Suburbia, and Nuclear War: A New History of Midcen-
tury Women's Science Fiction." For an examination of how women revised
midcentury SF conventions to present readers with female-friendly futures,
see Brian Attebery's Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. For arguments con-
cerning the relationship between midcentury women's SF and its relation to
feminist narrative strategies, especially in the works of Judith Merril, see Jane
Donawerth's Frankenstein's Daughters. And finally, for discussion of how
midcentury women's "sweet little domestic stories" marked the emergence
of a literary sensibility that would inform the feminist SF community of the
1970s, see Justine Larbalestier, Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction.

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
3. For further discussion, see Eugenia Kaledin's preface to Mothers and More:
American Women in the 1950s; chapter three of Elaine Tyler May's Home-
ward Bound: American Families in the Cold War; chapter five of Annegret
S. Ogden's The Great American Housewife: From Helpmate to Wage Earner,
1776-1986; and chapter two of Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor's Survival in the
Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s.
4. For further discussion of how civil defense was naturalized in relation to mid-
century ideals of suburban domesticity, see Elizabeth Walker Mechling and
Jay Mechling, "The Campaign for Civil Defense and the Struggle to Natural-
ize the Bomb."
5. As Sara Ruddick points out, these strategies are still central to women's peace
activism around the world today-most notably, perhaps, in Argentinean
and Chilean women's resistance to the military regimes of their respective
countries. For further discussion, see chapter nine of Ruddick's book Maternal
Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace.
6. As Amy Swerdlow argues, these are essentially the same tactics that anti-
war groups like Women Strike for Peace (WSP) used so spectacularly in the
1960s. Indeed, Mary Sharmat went on to work closely with WSP for several
years after she and Smith staged their New York protests. For more detail, see
Swerdlow's Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical
Politics in the 1960s.
7. Here I follow literary critic Edward James' timeline for science fiction history.
James calls science fiction's formative period between 1926 and 1940 "the pulp
era" in honor of the cheap paper that most SF magazines were printed on at the
time. 1940-1960 represents science fiction's "Golden Age," when the genre
reached stylistic and thematic maturity (and when publishers began printing
SF magazines on better quality paper). For further discussion, see James's Sci-
ence Fiction in the 7wentieth Century.
8. The phrase "housewife heroine SF" was first introduced by Pamela Sargent in
her introduction to the 1975 feminist SF anthology Women of Wonder: Science
Fiction Stories by Women about Women. Sargent invokes Betty Friedan's cri-
tique of midcentury women's magazine fiction as "happy housewife heroine"
storytelling, extending it to the realm of midcentury women's SF to argue
that it, too, "reflected the attitudes of the time" by featuring "characters
[who] were usually passive or addlebrained and solved problems inadver-
tently, through ineptitude, or in the course of fulfilling their assigned roles
in society" (xxiii). Although I believe that Sargent's depiction of midcentury
women's SF is overly dismissive, I have chosen to continue using the phrase
"housewife heroine SF" because it is rich in specific historical connotations
and accurately describes a particular area of SF inquiry. For further discussion,
see my essay "Unhappy Housewife Heroines, Galactic Suburbia, and Nuclear
War: A New History of Midcentury Women's Science Fiction."

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
94 LISA YASZEK
9. For further discussion of Merril's work as an SF anthologist and editor, see

Elizabeth Cummins' "Judith Merril: Scouting SF"; "Judith Merril: A Link
with the New Wave-Then and Now"; and "American SF, 1940s-1950s:
Where's the Book? The New York Nexus."
10. "That Only a Mother" is also one of the few midcentury stories that feminist
science fiction scholars have discussed in any depth. For an exemplary reading
of this story, see Chapter 3 of Jane Donawerth's Frankenstein's Daughters:
Women Writing Science Fiction. Like Donawerth, I believe that this story is
an important part of women's science fiction history because it is one of the
first to be told, at least in part, from a woman's perspective. However, while
Donawerth discusses this story vis-a-vis the larger tradition of feminist specu-
lative writing over the past two hundred years, I put Merril's work in the more
specific context of postwar women's political and literary practice.
11. Belenky and her co-authors actually identify two more ways of knowing the
world: through silence (perhaps the simplest way of knowing the world, and
one that is experienced primarily by very young and/or very socially, economi-
cally, and educationally deprived women) and through procedural knowledge
(the kind of formal knowledge that women tend to acquire in college or during
other complex learning experiences, such as family therapy). Moreover, as
scientists working in the fuzzy domain of human development, they are quick
to point out that women rarely experience these ways of knowing the world
separately or in a strict logical sequence. Of course, Merril is writing fiction
rather than transcribing real life, and she has a particular goal in doing so: to
introduce readers to the habits of thinking associated with peace activism.
Thus it should come as no surprise that her depiction of women's psychologi-
cal development is simpler and more linear than that of Belenky et al.
12. This largely positive depiction of communal living may well have stemmed
from Merril's own experience of the same. Throughout the late 1930s and
early 1940s many of the male Futurians lived together to minimize their
expenses and maximize their creative output. When both of their husbands
were sent overseas during WWII, Merril and Virginia Kidd set up their own
communal household. As Merril recollects, "Living with Virginia was lots of
fun against the backdrop of great intellectual stimulation, caring for children,
coping with relationships, buying groceries, and all those things that are part
of everyday life as a single working mother" (Merril and Pohl-Weary 2002,
56). Given that Merril's fictional heroines are also housewives who have, in
essence, been transformed into single mothers by the exigencies of war, it is
not surprising that they successfully cope with their changed circumstances
in a similar way: by pooling their intellectual and domestic resources.
13. This household utopia is temporary, of course, because Merril refuses roman-
tic notions of rugged individualism. No suburban household can be magically
transformed into a self-sustaining fiefdom, and the women must maintain
contact with the outside world to get food and medical attention for Gladys's
daughters and Edie Crowell (all of whom have been exposed to radioactive

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
dust and rain). Nonetheless, Merril insists that the tenor of her characters'
dealings with the outside world does change radically once the women realize
that they can rely on themselves to take care of many of the problems they
have traditionally delegated to their men, like fixing gas leaks and defending
themselves against burglars.
14. Unlike Jim Turner, neither Levy nor Spinelli abuse their authority to extract
sexual favors from women. From almost the very beginning, Gladys and Levy
simply treat each other as old friends. Similarly, although there are some
sexual sparks between Gladys and Spinelli, Merril depicts them as mutual
and temporary. Indeed, by the end of the novel Spinelli's attraction to Gladys is
transformed into a more general admiration for her strength and intelligence,
and his romantic interests are more appropriately channeled into a budding
relationship with Gladys's oldest daughter, thus preserving the proper social
and moral order of the family.
15. The original ending of the novel-which Doubleday refused to publish-was

even more pessimistic. In Merril's final draft, Gladys's husband survives the
horrors of postholocaust New York only to be shot to death by civil defense
officials in his own backyard (Merril and Pohl-Weary 2002, 100).
References
Aldiss, Brian W. 1988. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. New
York: Avon.
Alonso, Harriet Hyman. 1994. "Mayhem and Moderation: Women Peace Activists
During the McCarthy Era." In Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Post-
war America, 1945-1960, edited by Joanne Meyerowitz, 128-50. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
Attebery, Brian. 2002. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. New York: Routledge
Press.
Belenky, Mary Field, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill
Mattuck Tarule. 1986. Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self,
Voice, and Mind. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
Berger, Albert I. 1976. "The Triumph of Prophecy: Science Fiction and Nuclear
Power in the Post-Hiroshima Period." Science Fiction Studies 3:143-50.
Boucher, Anthony, ed. 1956. Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 5th series.
New York: Doubleday.
Cummins, Elizabeth. 1999. "American SF, 1940s-1950s: 'Where's the Book?' The
New York Nexus." Extrapolation 40(4):314-9.
. 1995. Judith Merril: "A Link with the New Wave-Then and Now."
Extrapolation 36(3):198-209.
. 1994. Judith Merril: "Scouting SF." Extrapolation 35(1):5-14.
Donawerth, Jane L. 1997. Frankenstein's Daughters: Women Writing Science Fic-
tion. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
. 1994. "Science Fiction by Women in the Early Pulps, 1926-1930." In
Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, edited by Jane

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
96 LISA YASZEK
L. Donawerth an
versity Press.
Garrison, Dee. 1994. "'Our Skirts Gave Them Courage': The Civil Defense Pro-
test Movement in New York City, 1955-1961." In Not June Cleaver: Women
and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, edited by Joanne Meyerowitz,
201-26. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
James, Edward. 1994. Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Kaledin, Eugenia. 1984. Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s.
Boston: Twayne Publishers.
Kessler, Caroline Farley. 1995. Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United
States Women before 1950, 2nd edition. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press.
Kolmerton, Carol A. 1994. "Texts and Contexts: American Women Envision
Utopia, 1890-1920." In Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of
Difference, edited by Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerton, 107-25.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Larbalestier, Justine. 2002. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Middle-
town, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Lefanu, Sarah. 1989. Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press.
Lynn, Susan. 1994. "Gender and Progressive Politics: A Bridge to the Social
Activism of the 1960s." In Not fune Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar
America, 1945-1960, edited by Joanne Meyerowitz, 103-27. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press.
. 1992. Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace,
and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press.
May, Elaine Tyler. 1988. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War
Era. New York: Basic Books, Inc.
Mechling, Elizabeth Walker and Jay Mechling. 1994. "The Campaign for Civil
Defense and the Struggle to Naturalize the Bomb." In Critical Questions:
Invention, Creativity, and the Criticism of Discourse and Media, edited by
William L. Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary A. Copeland, 125-54. New York:
St. Martin's Press.
Mendlesohn, Farah. 1994. "Gender, Power, and Conflict Resolution: 'Subcommit-
tee' by Zenna Henderson." Extrapolation 35(2):120-29.
Merril, Judith. 1971. "What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction?" In SF: The Oth
Side of Realism, edited by Thomas D. Clarenson, 53-95. Bowling Green: Bowl
ing Green University Popular Press.
1950. Shadow on the Hearth. New York: Doubleday.
1948; 1970. "That Only a Mother." Reprinted in Science Fiction Hall of
Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, 344-54. New York: Avon Press.
Merril, Judith, and Emily Pohl-Weary. 2002. Better to Have Loved: the Life of
Judith Merril. Toronto, Canada: Between the Lines.
Meyerowitz, Joanne. 1994. "Beyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of
Postwar Mass Culture, 1946-1958." In Not fune Cleaver: Women and Gender
in Postwar America, 1945-1960, edited by Joanne Meyerowitz, 229-62. Phila-
delphia: Temple University Press.

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00
Ogden, Annegret S. 1986. The Great American Housewife: From Helpmate to

Wage Earner, 1776-1986. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
"Preview of a War We Do Not Want: Russia's Defeat and Occupation, 1952-1960."
October 27, 1951. Special issue of Collier's.
Roberts, Robin. 1993. A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Ruddick, Sara. 1989; 1995. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Rupp, Leila J. and Verta Taylor. 1987. Survival in the Doldrums: The American
Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1 960s. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Sargent, Pamela. 1975. "Introduction: Women in Science Fiction." In Women of
Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women About Women, edited by Pamela
Sargent, xiii-lxiv. New York: Vintage Books.
Seed, David. 1999. American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and
Film. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn.
Swerdlow, Amy. 1995. "Ladies' Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace versus
HUAC." In U.S. Women in Struggle: A Feminist Studies Anthology, edited
by Claire Goldberg Moses and Heidi Hartmann, 214-39. Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
. 1993. Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical
Politics in the 1960s. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Weinbaum, Batya. 1997. Sex-Role Reversal in the Thirties: Leslie F. Stone's "The
Conquest of Gola." Science Fiction Studies 24(3):471-82.
Westfahl, Gary. 1998. The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Sci-
ence Fiction. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press.
Yaszek, Lisa. "Forthcoming 2005. Domestic Satire as Social Commentary in
Midcentury Women's Media Landscape SF." Foundation: An International
Review of Science Fiction.
. 2003. "Unhappy Housewife Heroines, Galactic Suburbia, and Nuclear
War: A New History of Midcentury Women's Science Fiction." Extrapolation
44(1):97-111.

68.150.205.180 on Mon, 28 Aug 2023 02:33:24 +00:00

Yaszek StoriesThatMother 2004

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Yaszek StoriesThatMother 2004

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Stories "That Only a Mother" Could Write: Midcentury Peace Activism, Maternalist

Politics, and Judith Merril's Early Fiction

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4317053

This content downloaded from

This essay explores Judith Merril's early fiction in relation t

Keywords: Judith Merril / peace activism / maternalist politics / Cold War /

?2004 NWSA JOURNAL, VOL. 16 No. 2 (SUMMER)

This content downloaded from

reluctantly moved to action in the public sphere out of concern for

This content downloaded from

Getting out of Grandma's Pantry:

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

By bringing children and other accoutrements of domesticity into City

This content downloaded from

something other than overwrought women o

The Golden Age of Science Fiction

This content downloaded from

Americans were exposed to SF by similar trends in film and television

This content downloaded from

especially as they were connected (at least in the public imagination) to

"The Little Mother of Science Fiction":

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

mothers. Later Merril became an outspoke

This content downloaded from

"It's the Fathers Who Do It":

Merril's interest in using SF to explore the consequences of nuclear war,

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

newspaper reports of wartime atrocity. Margaret's initial depiction of

This content downloaded from

"Isn't Anything Safe?": Civil Defense,

What would Jon do?

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Perhaps not surprisingly, Gladys reacts to her disappointment with

Later Gladys learns how to successfully challenge blind authority as well.

This content downloaded from

Of course, it is not enough that Gladys simply establishes herself as

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

In addition to inspiring a filial kind of devotion amongst his followers,

Midcentury Women's Science Fiction

This content downloaded from

own concepts and conventions to the political advantage of women. Of

This content downloaded from

Lisa Yaszek is assistant professor in the School of Literature, Commu-

2. Recent scholarly explorations of midcentury women's SF have taken a variety

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

9. For further discussion of Merril's work as an SF anthologist and editor, see

This content downloaded from

15. The original ending of the novel-which Doubleday refused to publish-was

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Ogden, Annegret S. 1986. The Great American Housewife: From Helpmate to

This content downloaded from

You might also like