Podkayne of Mars is a very sexist and unsuitable story for a modern girl. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was young, and my teacher told me that girls could only be nurses, teachers, mommies or -- if they were really stupid -- secretaries. Heinlein echoes this primitive and demeaning opinion when Podkayne debates becoming a starship captain "that nobody will hire" or confining herself to managing the nursery in a starship, a suitable job for a girl. Hard to believe that in the far future we will still run into this kind of piggery cramming us back into our biological role and that alone!
My first Heinlein books were "Tunnel in the Sky" (survival school on another world) and "Time for the Stars" (an experiment in which twin telepaths are used as communication equipment aboard a spacecraft.) The former was quite good for its time and showed girls equally good at managing daily life without amenities.
When I was younger one of the main attraction in his novels for me was thatboys were boys and girls were girls, and it was a wonderful thing to be a girl. This was lacking in most books written while I was growing up, and Heinlein reaffirmed for me that it was a good thing to be girly.
And yes, I am female ;-)
When I read it I was 10.
I didn't know anything about being sexist, I only knew girls weren't fun to play with because they whined to much.
I never thought "Podkayne" was sexist. Podkayne was my hero for years - seemed to me that her debate was really the one most girls facing a male-dominated career choice go through. I choose computer science. I have the same sort of worries Poddy did all the time - what happens when I want kids? If I take twenty years off to raise them, my training is worthless, but the other message of "Podkayne of Mars" is that if you have kids, you'd darn well better raise them.
I like Heinlein's stuff because he recognized that men and women are different but managed to have strong female characters in his stories at the same time. My favorite is Hazel, the grandmother in "The Rolling Stones" who can integrate in her head and teaches her grandkids astrogation, among many other things.
lol ...
Kate ... what did you end up doing, if you don't mind my asking?
For such a visionary, Heinlien did usually display a very provincial view of women...he especially had no trouble using them as sex objects, even when smart and capable. I write it off as the one place where he had trouble thinking outside his times.
One good representation of a girl, I think, is the short story "The Menece from Earth" though it, too, is limited by the fact that a man CAN'T altogether write in the "voice" of a girl...at least, it seldom happens.