Feminism, Technology, And Art in C. L. Moore's "No Woman Born" (Critical Essay‪)‬

"No Woman Born," first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1944, is certainly one of the best sf stories of the 1940s and just as certainly the best feminist sf story of that decade and perhaps for nearly the next two decades as well--its first rivals are stories that begin to emerge in the late '60s and early '70s by writers like Pamela Zoline, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm, James Tiptree (Alice B. Sheldon), and others. Its excellence lies not simply in its strong feminist theme, but in the skill with which characterization is used to develop that theme, the remarkable concentration of relevant yet mostly unobtrusive allusions to a wide variety of historical, literary, musical, and artistic forebears and contemporaries, and the sophistication with which the cyborg image is used to explore the image of woman. These are features that anticipate both the New Wave of the mid-to-late 1960s and innovations in feminist and postmodern theory that would not appear until the 1980s, features that also create a sense of lasting quality; it is a consummately well-made story that inevitably responds to its own time, but one that will long continue to reward rereading. Nevertheless, it has fallen short of the recognition it deserves. While it has a respectable history of reprints in some anthologies, (1) it appears in only one of the major sf anthologies used as college texts since the early 1970s, and that one, Science Fiction: The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology, did not appear until 1988, forty-four years after the story's publication. And even there Mary S. Weinkauf's brief afterword, while recognizing some of the allusions and noting the problem raised in the story of the humanity of the cyborg, fails to acknowledge the feminist theme. Even in early feminist sf collections like Pamela Sargent's Women of Wonder (1974) and More Women of Wonder (1976) the only Moore story reprinted is "Jirel Meets Magic" (1935, in the second of these two), a story whose major distinction is its early depiction of a sword-wielding heroine, a warrior princess figure not likely to surprise readers in the late 20th or early 21st century. Sargent in her recent reissue, Women of Wonder: The Classic Years (1995), appropriately replaces the Jirel story with "No Woman Born," acknowledging that the latter is "among [Moore's] finest works" and that Moore herself, "in spite of her relatively small body of science fiction,... remains one of the most important writers in the genre" (4). But in her brief comment on the story in her introduction to the volume, Sargent, like Weinkauf, mentions only the problem of the humanity of the cyborg and seems to be unaware of the feminist implications of the cyborg image.