The Best of Connie Willis

Afterword for “Even the Queen”

Over the years, a lot of people (mostly guys) have asked me, “Where did you get the idea for “Even the Queen”? And I usually say something like “You’re kidding me, right?” Or “Wish fulfillment, pure wish fulfillment.”

But it was actually more complicated than that. The initial idea came from several places. The first was those “Modess, because…” ads I talk about in the story. As a kid, I loved those ads because they had full-page photos of women wearing long white gloves and gorgeous evening gowns by Schiaparelli and Yves St. Laurent.

I used to cut those pictures out and put them in a scrapbook. They seemed to me to epitomize glamour. Just like the women in the story, I had no idea what “Modess” was. I assumed it was a brand name for a perfume, or for a brand of jewelry, like Tiffany. I still remember the shock and betrayal I felt when I finally figured it out. (For you guys out there, think Ralphie and the Little Orphan Annie / Ovaltine decoder ring episode.)

The second place “Even the Queen” came from was something my grandmother had said to me. As a teenager, I had a thing for Anne of Green Gables and Little Women and the “olden days” when girls got to wear long skirts and petticoats, and one day I was waxing rhapsodic about how much fun it must have been to have lived back then, and my grandmother said, “I have two words for you: Kleenex and tampons.”

The third was a conversation I had in an elevator at Clarion West with some of my students. Everyone in the elevator was female, and somebody asked if anybody had any ibuprofen she could borrow for her cramps, and a lively discussion ensued in which we all agreed that if guys had periods, the person who’d invented ibuprofen would have been a cinch to win the Nobel Prize.

But the episode that really convinced me I needed to write about this came when I was on a panel at a certain feminist science-fiction convention that shall remain nameless. (You know who you are.) I don’t remember what the panel was about, but I do remember that one of the panel members said that women only thought of their menstrual cycle as a “curse” because the male-dominated patriarchy had taught them to, and that left on their own, women would welcome and embrace their menses.

I thought then (and think now) that this was one of the most idiotic things I had ever heard. In the first place, no one had had to say anything to me to make me despise menstruation, and in the second, nobody in my generation ever called it “the curse.” Yet when I finally encountered the term (probably in one of those olden days / long skirts books I was always reading), I thought the name was perfect.

After the panel, I did some research and found out this theory was not just the ravings of one lunatic but actually pretty common in feminist circles, and then I talked to every young woman I could find (just in case attitudes had changed), and they were all as outraged and/or gobsmacked as I had been. And horrified to learn that tampons hadn’t been around forever.

Plus, some of my fellow women science-fiction writers had been on my case because I wrote stories about time-travelers and old movies and the end of the world instead of writing stories about “women’s issues.”

So I decided to write one.