Modern feminist science fiction has its roots in utopian stores written by feminists as part of the movement for women's voting rights from the mid-19th to the early 20th century.

Feminist science fiction generally features a female hero, often an action hero. It generally explores gender roles and relationships between the sexes. It came into prominence partly as a result of more women entering the field of science fiction beginning in the 1960s and partly as a result of the women's liberation movement and the drive to pass an Equal Rights Amendment which reached its zenith in the 1970s.

In 1990 Diane Martin, an editor of the fanzine Aurora, semi-seriously proposed her own "Martin Scale" to measure the feminist content of a work of science fiction. As presented in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, this scale consists of:

Level One: Doubts about patriarchy/women escaping victimization
Level Two: Men and women as equals
Level Three: Women are better than men on some levels
Level Four: Women are uniformly better than men
Level Five: Can't live with 'em/can't live without 'em
Level Six: Men are tragically flawed and pitiable
Level Seven: Men as slaves
Level Eight: Separatism is necessary for survival
Level Nine: Postive depiction of lesbian/feminist utopias
Level Ten: Parthenogenesis and/or scenes of actual castration

Not all feminist science fiction is written by women. Not all women write feminist science fiction.

Two early utopias that presented societies without men are:

• Mizora (1890) by Mary E. Bradley Lane
• Herland (1914; rpt. 1979) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

An early male writer of feminist science fiction is Theodore Sturgeon with Venus Plus X (1960).

Key figures in feminist science fiction are Joanna Russ, author of The Female Man (1975), and James Tiptree, Jr. (a pseudonym of Alice Sheldon).

Some prominent writers of feminist science fiction include:

• Marion Zimmer Bradley (the Darkover series)
• Suzette Hayden Elgin, Native Tongue (1984)
  
• Vonda McIntyre, Dreamsnake (1978)
• Andre Norton (the Witchworld series)
• Sheri Tepper, The Gate to Women's Country (1988)

Gender issues play a prominent role in many works by Ursula K. Le Guin (especially The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969) as well as in works by Octavia Butler and Anne McCaffrey.

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