Throughout history, women’s accomplishments have been erased, overlooked and credited to men. It’s only in recent years that we’re all starting to discover how many of the things we take for granted as the domain of men originated with women. This list aims to do just a little bit in correcting this erasure and talking about how very influential women are to the pop culture we enjoy today, whether it be sci-fi, superheroes or even the written word in general. Do you know of any great contributions by women that this list didn’t cover? Talk about them in the comments!
The Written Word
The majority of the pop culture we nerds enjoy, from books to tv to video games, is fiction that has its roots in the written word. And who was probably the earliest known author and poet? A Sumerian Priestess named Enheduanna. She lived during the era of 3000 BCE and left behind an expansive body of literary work, most prominently some devotional hymns to the goddess Innana and the Sumerian Temple Hymns.
Of course it’s impossible to know who actually invented writing, but Enheduanna proves that women were instrumental in literary canon from the earliest days, as far back as we can go.
The Novel
We all have our favorite novels, and we owe the existence of the novel itself to a Japanese woman named Murasaki Shikibu, who lived roughly from 973 to 1014 CE and was the lady in waiting at the imperial court. Murasaki grew up in the Heian era, when Japanese women were forbidden to learn Chinese because it was thought to be a “masculine” language, but Murasaki picked it up anyway.
Murasaki’s novel, The Tale of Genji, is considered to be the first novel, or at least the first example of the modern novel. The novel tells the story of the many romantic adventures of Hikaru Genji, the Emporer’s son. It’s considered a classic and an essential part of the Japanese literary canon.
Fairy Tales
The book Clever Maids: The Secret History of Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Valerie Paradiz reveals that many of the fairy tales we credit to the Brothers Grimm actually came from a network of educated women who received little credit.
Among these women were Dortchen Wild, who contributed “Hansel and Gretel” and “Rumpelstiltskin”. Other female contributors were writer Bettina von Arnim, the Hassenpflug sisters (who contribute “Puss in Boots” and “The Little Red Riding Hood”) and many more. The book also goes into how the Brothers Grimm disdained some of the women they owed their fame to as too threatening and not feminine enough. There’s also speculation the Grimms may have altered the original tales to be more unkind to women.
Utopian Science Fiction
Margaret Cavendish, who lived from 1623 to 1673 was both an author and a scientist. She also was the originator of Utopian Science Fiction, a clear forerunner to the Science Fiction we’re familiar with today. Her novel Blazing World (full title The Description of a New World called The Blazing-World) depicts a utopian land that can be reached through the North Pole, existing in another dimension. The world is populated by hybrid-species of animal-men. The novel is also somewhat satirical.
In addition to being an innovative author, Cavendish was an early opponent of animal testing and was the first woman to attend the Royal Society of London (a big-deal science society).
Modern Science Fiction and Horror Literature
In the modern era, women struggle to be accepted as science fiction authors, yet it is pretty well known that science fiction was basically invented by a teenage girl. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818. The story focuses on a young scientist called Victor Frankenstien, whose horrific experimentation on corpses results in the creates a gruesome looking, monstrous man.
Many critics, like Brian Aldis, have argued that this is the first true science fiction story. Previous stories had some science fiction elements, but fell more in the category of fantasy, with many magical elements. Frankenstien shows all the happenings of its novel as firmly rooted in scientific experimentation.
It’s certainly originator of horror-based science fiction. Shelley’s work is credited as spawning and influencing the entire genre of horror fiction we see in the 19th century and beyond, predating Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and H.P. Lovecraft’s work.
Fiction/Fantasy Films
The first fantasy film ever was directed by Alice Guy-Blache in 1896. It was called The Cabbage Fairy (La Fee aux Choux). Like it sounds, the film was about fairies picking baby boys out of cabbages. While it was definitively the first fantasy film, it was also probably the first fiction film, with the only other contender being The Waterer Watered (or L’Arroseur Arrose), a silent comedy about two guys with a hose. In addition to all this, it’s the first film we know of that lasted at least one minute.
Alice Guy-Blache’s is an incredibly influential filmmaker in general, though she is often ignored by the history books. She directed over 1,000 films, including some of the earliest ones with color and sound. She innovated special effects like double exposure and running films backwards. And she did all this innovation with her male assistants trying to sabotage her and get her fired!
She was also the first woman to have her own studio, the Solax studio, which was also the largest pre-Hollywood studio in America. She was one of the earlier directors to do interracial casting and the originator of a single-person perspective and more naturalistic acting in films.
Monopoly
The story of Monopoly is a sad and deeply ironic one. The game was originally invented by Elizabeth Magie in 1904. It was actually meant to be a criticism of capitalism and landgrabbing. It was called The Landlord’s Game and there were two versions- the one closer to one we know where you destroy everyone else and take their stuff and one where the wealth is spread equally. In what is perhaps a pointed commentary on the human condition, people found the first one more fun.
In an even more pointed commentary, Charles Darrow heard about this game and stole and sold the idea to Parker Brothers. Upon finding out how stolen the idea was, Parker Bros. paid Magie about 500 bucks and made off like bandits. Magie lost the real life game of Monopoly due to cutthroat business practices and human cruelty, which was sort of her point all along.
Costumed Vigilantes and Superheroes
The first story about a masked vigilante, and perhaps the first superhero story, can be credited to Emma Orczy. She published The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905. The novel is set in 1792, and tells the story of Marguerite St. Just and her husband, a supposedly shallow English dandy named Sir Percey Blakeney. Blakeney is secretly the Scarlet Pimpernel, the costumed leader of a league devoted to rescuing Frenchmen from execution during the Reign of Terror.
Percey is a clear precursor to another wealthy, famous vigilante who masquerades as a shallow playboy by day to hide his real identity- Batman. He even precedes other masked heroes that are admitted to have directly inspired Batman, like Zorro and The Shadow.
The Scarlet Pimpernel was first run as a wildly successful stage play in Britian and was published as a novel later that year.
Space Westerns
Space Westerns are still beloved to this day. If you love Star Trek (Gene Rodenberry himself described it as one), Cowboy Bebop or Firefly, you should know that you owe their existence to Catherine Lucille Moore.
C.L. Moore was a prolific sci-fi writer who lived from 1911 to 1987, who is best known for her work in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. She created the first Space Western hero, Northwest Smith. Smith was characterized as a space pilot and smuggler who zipped around the human-colonized solar system rescuing people and finding treasure. Sound familiar?
The first Northwest Smith story was “Shambleau” which was published in Weird Tales in 1933.
Computer Programming
We wouldn’t have video games without computer programming and we owe much of computer programming to women. Ada Lovelace teamed up with Charles Babbage to invent (though not actually build) the precursor to the modern computer and her notes were really the origins of algorithms and computer programing. Grace Hopper was part of the team that created COBOL, the first modern computer language.
A Lot of What Made Star Wars Good
It’s not well known how much we owe the awesomeness of the original Star Wars trilogy to Marcia Lucas, George Lucas’ ex-wife. Many have credited her as being behind many of the small character moments that made the films memorable and it was her idea to have Obi-Wan die and Darth Vader be more of an actual threat. She was also behind one of the most iconic sequences in the film, the trench run. The original sequence was overlong, overcomplicated and lacking in tension before Marcia has it redone from the ground-up. Marcia’s editing was also part of what made the film great, she won an Academy Award for it in 1977.
Mark Hamill himself even credits a lot of the quality of the films to her, describing her as the heart and warmth of the films and saying “You can see the huge difference in the films that he does now and the films that he did when he was married". It’s pretty clear Hamill considers the critical failure of the less well-received prequels to be a product of Marcia’s absence.
Hypertext Fiction
Hypertext fiction refers to online fiction that incorporates links within the text, allowing the reader to interact with the fiction in a personable and non-linear way. There are many prominent hypertext fiction stories, such as GRAMMATRON by Mark Amerika, which was included in several famous art shows and Caitlin Fisher’s These Waves of Girls which won the ELO Award.
Hypertext fiction was pioneered by Judy Malloy. She self-published the first hypertext fiction story in 1986. It was called Uncle Roger and focused on a wacky computer chip salesman. She created an entire database system to tell her story with that was very advanced for its time.