During Isaac Asimov’s final illness, the editor of his namesake magazine commissioned Connie Willis to write an editorial for the magazine in order to help take some of the pressure off the Good Doctor, who up till then had written an editorial for every issue. In the event, Asimov died before her editorial could be published, and it appeared in the October 1992 issue.

Here is how it began:

The current version of women in science fiction before the 1960s (which I’ve heard several times lately) goes like this: There weren’t any. Only men wrote science fiction because the field was completely closed to women. Then, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, a group of feminist writers led by Joanna Russ and Ursula LeGuin stormed the barricades, and women began writing (and sometimes even editing) science fiction. Before that, nada.

If there were any women in the field before that (which there weren’t), they had to slink around using male pseudonyms and hoping they wouldn’t get caught. And if they did write under their own names (which they didn’t), it doesn’t count anyway because they only wrote sweet little domestic stories. Babies. They wrote mostly stories about babies.

There’s only one problem with this version of women in SF—it’s not true.

I had this brought sharply home to me when I was looking up the stories I’d loved as a teenager. I’d never paid any attention to what the names of the stories were, let alone the authors, and, as a result, I found myself constantly saying, “There’s this great story, I don’t know what it was called or who wrote it, but it was about this town where they didn’t have doctors…” 

I finally got fed up with my own ignorance and went back to my hometown public library to look all these stories up in the rebound copies of Year’s Best SF, Fifth Series, etc., that I’d read them in in the first place.

When I did, I was surprised at how many of them were classics: Sturgeon’s “And Now the News” and Damon Knight’s “The Big Pat Boom” and Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life.” And I was surprised at how many of them had been written by women: Kit Reed and Mildred Clingerman and Zenna Henderson and Shirley Jackson and Margaret St. Clair and Judith Merril (and that’s not counting C.L. Moore, who I still didn’t know was a woman, or Larry O’Donnell, which was one of the names she and Henry Kuttner used).

That’s a lot of women, considering there supposedly weren’t any, and I got to thinking maybe it was time we were reminded of them. Not because of their historical importance, but because they wrote great stories, stories I’d remembered all these years. 

I remember reading stories by most of these women writers and liking them immensely. The exceptions are Kit Reed, whose name I recall seeing but I don’t remember any of her stories, or at least none come to mind, and Zenna Henderson, whose stories I didn’t particularly care for. Hey! There are lots of writers of the male persuasion whose stories I don’t especially like. Even some of the big names. Like Ray Bradbury, for example, as I’ve mentioned previously.

One of the stories of Shirley Jackson’s that Willis goes on to single out is called “One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts”, and it was originally published in the January 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s a delightfully quirky little story, and though it’s categorized as a fantasy and I suppose that it is, it really doesn’t read like a fantasy. It just seems like a delightful story about a man who, well, read it for yourself. It isn’t very long.

I have two links. Here is a link to the archive of the magazine where it originally appeared in the January 1955 issue of F&SF. 

Note the introductory blurb: “I don’t know a better writer of unexpected and unclassifiable fiction than Shirley Jackson, who offers us this time a story as delightfully unconventional as its title.” 

And here is a link to a pdf version. The story is apparently taught in high schools these days, so there are also lots of links available to study guides for it, but I think you’ll find the story pretty self-explanatory once you get to the ending.