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TROOPERS_AGAINST_SEXISM

                                                    June    25, 2017
                                                    December 7, 2017
One of Heinlein's many "modest proposals" for
alternate democratic systems was that if
government was restricted to women-with-children             TROOPERS
it would be automatically more far-sighted, more
concerned with the future of humanity.

   I think that illustrates something about
   Heinlein's style of thinking: he was ahead
   of his time quite often, but a few years
   later his thinking might seem quite dated--
   or at at least out of sync with current
   thinking.  But then his time was very
   early-- he was born in 1907.


Consider that in "Starship Troopers"--
published in 1959-- all of the
spaceship pilots are female--            And for Heinlein, "pilots" have
                                         always been intelligent,
However, there doesn't appear to be      technically-trained professionals.
any intentional gender-segregation
going on: the society is at least            In a typical Heinlein scenario,
depicted as entirely meritocratic--          spaceships get where they're
and yet, the best-qualified people           going because someone does a
for different roles just happen to           good job of figuring with paper
follow gender lines.                         and pencil.  He was writing long
                                             before the computer revolution.
Here, Heinlein's take would seem to
be that women deserved to be taken
more seriously than they often were
in the late-50s, but he wasn't                  (And one of the young female
presuming there was no difference               pilots we see on stage
in male and female intelligence.                was presumably Latina,
                                                just going by her name.)
   In this story, Women are
   inherently different from men,
   but not inherently inferior.                         TROOPERS_AGAINST_RACISM








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