Since Mary Shelley drew inspiration for "Frankenstein" from the scientific speculations to which she attended as a "nearly silent listener" at the now famous chateau in Switzerland, many other women have been similarly motivated to produce works informed by scientific theory. This study traces the history of women's science fiction writing from the turn of the century to the early 1990s, analysing how women writers have utilized the genre to critique the ideology that informs what counts as scientific knowledge.