Dave <-- redeacted --> writes:

> At 04:53 PM 10/9/97 -0400, Nathan Brindle wrote:
>
> >Umm...in Piper's day it was very common to refer to women as 'girls'.
>
> Yes, I know.  But Piper often seems to be suggesting that women can and
> should be more than just June Cleavers--there's a lot of women officers
> in the Uller Company Army, for instance, and in _Cosmic Computer_ Conn
> Maxwell comments that he likes whats-her-name, Sophie Jaquemmont, because
> she was (unlike his mother) handy with a soldering iron--and yet, the
> women are still 'girls'.  Its funny.

Clearly, Beam was more "enlightened" than many of his contemporaries
when it came to societal opportunities for women.  (He was a science-
fiction writer after all.)  A feminist theorist (or any post-modernist)
would explain his "girls" language as merely an example of the patterns
of domination that continue to exist in the language even when someone
has developed a certain amount of awareness of such domination in the
larger society.  Hence, he continued to use the diminutive "girls" even
as he portrayed women with greater opportunities than they enjoyed in
1950's America. . . .

And while we're on the subject of Beam's anachronisms, how much would
you bet that the most likely cause of death for his characters,
barring violent means, was lung cancer? :)

David Johnson                        Net: -- redeacted --
Arlington, Virginia, North America   Web: http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~david
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"A girl can punch any kind of a button a man can, and a lot of them know
what buttons to punch, and why."     -H. Beam Piper, *The Cosmic Computer*