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Bending Genre and Gender:
Towards a Woman’s Pulp Revival
To view additional photos, scroll over the image above.By Livia Tenzer
Women write pulp? In today’s popular image of pulp fiction, it seems like a contradiction in terms. This image has been shaped by the noir revival of the past decade—the best-remembered pulp authors tend to be not only male, but unapologetically misogynistic as well; pulp icon Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman and A Swell-Looking Babe are not untypical of the titles found on the noir classics recently restored to print. Fans of such works would be hard pressed to name a woman pulp author, or even a female character who isn’t a dangerous femme fatale.
But women did write pulp, in large numbers and in all the genres, from hard-boiled noirs to breathless romances to edgy science fiction and taboo lesbian pulps—and a new series from The Feminist Press at CUNY was founded to celebrate these pioneers. These women writers of pulp were often ahead of their male counterparts in confronting received ideas about gender, race, and class, and exploring forbidden territories otherwise hidden from view on the typed page.
Pulp emerged as an alternative format for books in the 1930s, building on the popularity of the pulp magazines that flourished from the 1920s to the 1940s, and drawing on traditions established by the dime novel of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Printed on wood-grain, or pulp, paper, and cheaply bound, the books were markedly different from hardbound, cloth editions. These first modern paperbacks served different purposes—entertainment, thrill, or introduction to “serious culture”—and were presumably read differently. It is interesting to note, even in a broader survey of the genres, how many male-authored, and presumably male-directed, pulps were focused on women (remember Shack Baby and Reefer Girl)—a phenomenon not found in the highbrow literature of the period. Men even wrote a fair number of lesbian pulps. More often than not, the women in these books are dangerous and predatory as well as irresistible, exploiting men’s desire for their own purposes. Others are wayward women who either meet a bad end or come to their senses with the help of a man who sets them straight (in all senses of the word). Some pulp authors used pseudonyms to conceal an everyday identity behind a more saleable one, often of the opposite gender. Georgina Ann Rudolph Craig (1908-1957) wrote prolifically as Craig Rice. Some used several names, each evocative of a genre they wrote in: Velma Young (1913-1997) published lesbian pulp under the name Valerie Taylor, poetry as Nacella Young, and romances as Francine Davenport. Eventually some contemporary authors emerged as brands themselves: a Faith Baldwin romance was a predictable product.
Genres were to a large extent gendered. Crime/noir, for instance, focused on a masculine world of detectives, crooks, femmes fatales (positioned as foils to men), corruption, and violence, all described in hardboiled prose. Romance focused on women’s problems around courtship, virginity, marriage, motherhood, and careers, earnestly or coyly described. Since genres were gendered, many assume that they were exclusive domains of their respective genders—crime/noir being written and read by men and romance by women. In fact, this assumption proves largely false. Far more frequently than has been acknowledged, the authors of these stories were women, and often working-class women who put bread on the table by creating imaginary worlds, or exploring existing but risky or taboo ones, to fulfill the appetites of readers of both genders.
The fact that authorial name and persona were rarely linked to real-life identity further permitted writers to explore transgender, or transgenre, writing. In so doing, they might self-consciously accentuate the gendered elements of a given genre, sometimes approximating parody, or attempt to re-gender a genre—for instance, writing a Western that foregrounds a romance. These freedoms, combined with the willingness of pulp publishers to buy work from anyone who could write well, meant that women had the chance to write in modes typically considered antithetical to them, and to explore gender across all genres. Leigh Brackett (1915-1978), a premiere woman author of pulp, wrote hardboiled crime books, science fiction, and Westerns, in addition to scripting sharp repartee for Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep (director Howard Hawks hired her on the basis of her hardboiled novel No Good from a Corpse—assuming she was a man, as did many of her fans). Other women authors wrote whodunnit mysteries with girl heroines, science fiction battles of the sexes, and romances that start with a Reno divorce. Women wrote from male perspectives, narrating from inside the head of a serial killer, a hardnosed detective, or a small-town pharmacist who knows all the local dirt. They also wrote from places where women weren’t supposed to go.
Women writers provided the first pulps with happy endings for lesbians: Valerie Taylor’s The Girls in 3-B is a prime example of this surprisingly revolutionary phenomenon. Taylor’s book is also intriguing for its frank discussion of the different options and obstacles faced by heterosexual and homosexual women in the 1950s (with little doubt as to which looked better to the author). The femme fatale of Dorothy B. Hughes’ In A Lonely Place, the luscious Laurel Grey, has brains and integrity as well as curves—and in the end, she is not the one who turns out to be deadly. In fact, this bold twist on the noir genre can be seen as addressing the crisis in postwar masculinity, with its backlash taken to the furthest extremes. The protagonist of Faith Baldwin’s Skyscraper is typically pretty and plucky; she longs for domestic bliss and loves her man. But she also loves the bustle and buzz of the office where she works, the rows of gleaming desks and file cabinets, the sense of being part of the larger, public world of business—she epitomizes a new kind of heroine in a new kind of romance plot, a career girl with a wider set of choices to negotiate.
Relatively little scholarship has been done on pulp fiction, less still on women writers of pulp. It is not possible to know the true intentions of women pulp authors, and few would suggest that they were undercover feminists seeking to subvert patriarchal culture by embedding radical messages in cheap popular novels. Yet, from a contemporary vantage point, some of their work certainly does seem subversive, regardless of the intention behind it.
These premier books in the Feminist Press’s Femmes Fatales series were selected for their bold and sometimes transgressive uses of genre forms, as well as the richness of their social and historical settings and their lively and skillful writing. We also chose books that seemed to have some impact on public consciousness in their time, in these cases, rather inexactly measured by the fact that they crossed over into different, and even more popular, media. Both In A Lonely Place and Skyscraper were made into films—and astonishingly, The Girls in 3-B (properly sanitized of lesbian love) was the basis for a comic strip of the same name that ran in daily newspapers across the country. The Feminist Press views the Femmes Fatales series as an important new initiative in this ongoing work of cultural reclamation. As such, it is also a natural expression of the Press’s overall mission to ensure that women’s voices are fully represented in the public discourse, in the literary “canon,” and on bookstore and library shelves.
