Why no women captains?

[johnnybear]

The explanation is a simple one! ENT is an altered temporal reality and DSC is another universe! But I do like this one and it makes sense!

It's always seemed far simpler to me just to interpret Lester's line "your world of starship captains doesn't admit women" to mean that it left Kirk no room for relationships with women.

That really does tick all the boxes!
JB

 

[Christopher]

To me the scenario that Starfleet agreed to oppress some of its citizens to placate an ally is as offensive as saying that Lester was right.
Its like a big corporation saying they won't have any women in management positions as some Fundamentalist Christians and Muslims men are not allowed to be told what to do by a woman according to the Bible. My opinion is that the Federation wouldn't make such an agreement especially as you never see any Tellerites in Starfleet.
I like to think the Federation is a nobler organisation than that.

That's a good point. We've seen that one of the standards for admission into the Federation is universal civil rights. A society that had that kind of institutionalized gender discrimination wouldn't be let in to begin with.

But then, as I said days ago, it's impossible to reconcile the "no women captains" idea with the rest of the franchise as it actually exists onscreen, even as far back as "The Cage" with Number One, let alone today when we have Captain Georgiou and Admiral Cornwell in the period in question. The only hypotheticals where it can work are alternate versions of the universe.

There is some precedent for this in older science fiction. I've seen stories where the writers didn't just take the lack of women on spaceships for granted but came up with specific reasons why they had to be excluded, like maybe because the radiation in space would make it impossible for them to have babies (which is a valid concern, though there are other SF stories where spacefarers of both sexes have their gametes extracted and frozen ahead of time and are then sterilized). Although I'm sure other writers have come up with more sexist excuses. I gather that E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series postulated that women were somehow psychologically unsuited to wield the powers of the Lens, even though aliens of countless different species with wildly different psychologies could make the cut, and there was a female Lensman (or whatever) added to the series eventually.

I tried looking for other old-SF examples on TV Tropes, but I haven't found anything. Maybe I'm not using the right search terms.

 

[uniderth]

OK, just some shower thoughts. I think all of us would agree that there should not be any institutional sexism in Starfleet. But at the same times I don't think we can completely dismiss Janice Lester's statements as insane ramblings. Yes, she is crazy, but her obsession is the result of something that has some basis in reality. In fact, Kirk agrees with her that that it isn't fair that his world of Starship captains doesn't admit women.

Janice has two issues going on. She is completely codependent. In her own words she states that it is better to be dead than be alone as a woman. But not only that, she also wants to command a Starship.

There are various ways to interpret her statement that "Your world of Starship captains doesn't admit women."

But I think that the most obvious interpretation is that in her view the realm of Starship captains is a boys club. There are many specific words that push this interpretation rather than "there's no room for women in a captains life."

Besides, in Janice's dream scenario SHE would be the captain and Kirk would be her subordinate. So her problem isn't that there is no room fer her Kirk's life. It's that she can't be captain because she's a woman.

But as I mentioned earlier I don't think there are any institutional rules explicitly prohibiting women from becoming Starship captains. Add to that that I think "Starship" refers to a specific class of vessel. Remember the Enterprise is a Starship class ship. Let's just assume that there are twelve Starship class ships(we don't know that for certain, but it doesn't really matter). That means that this is an extremely elite group.

Maybe there are some extreme physical fitness requirements that, generally speaking, most women (and most men for that matter) can't pass. If we assume there's no affirmative action, then there wouldn't be lower standards for women. Therefore, even though there is not an explicit rule barring women, the GENERAL physical differences in men and women would already skew the metric in favor of men.

We could also postulate, as Christopher has, that due to colonization efforts there may be a strong social pressure for women to have children at some point in their lives. Further skewing the number of candidates to males.

However, I think a big factor, maybe the biggest, is that perhaps becoming a Starship captain requires the approval of other existing Starship captains. It could be that one blackball is enough to bar someone entrance into the elite world of Starship captains.

MAYBE you could say one of the twelve is a sexist a-hole that hates women and always black balls them, but that's not actually necessary. I think we can imagine enough plausible scenarios why the elite group of 12 or so Starship captains would already be all male without invoking institutional sexism.

Therefore, in an already limited group of candidates, heavily skewed towards males it is understandable that Janice, and maybe others, viewed this as sexist. And let's face it, with Kirk in that elite group there is now way in hell Janice is going to make it in. He would blackball her every time, and rightly so.

Anyway those are just my thoughts this morning.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

BUT, let's assume for a moment that it is in fact true that in Kirk's era there are no women captains. Let's pretend that the phrase "Your world of starship captains doesn't admit women." is accurate; and it means "women cannot be starship captains in Starfleet/UESPA."

What would be the most logical reason why this would be?

It was a single bad episode of a television show produced in the 60s. I don't think we need to bend over backwards to justify it.

The only real reason for Lester's line is Roddenberry's unenlightened views on women despite the lip service he he gave otherwise. Trying to rationalize it as some here have leads to ickier ideas than just the wacko rantings of a lunatic.

Exactly.

The fan film series Star Trek Continues did an episode all about this: "Embracing the Winds."

In it, they say that the Tellarites have a very strong cultural aversion to women in command and that, while no official regulations bar woman from command, the Tellarites have enough political sway that Starfleet doesn't want to ruffle them and so they very rarely promote a woman into that particular role.

I first heard about this here on the BBS a few weeks ago, and man, that idea is just batshit insane.

It's always seemed far simpler to me just to interpret Lester's line "your world of starship captains doesn't admit women" to mean that it left Kirk no room for relationships with women. Either that or that Lester blamed sexism because she couldn't face that she was rejected due to her mental instability. It's weird the lengths some people will go to in trying to justify a single line from a single bad episode, even if it requires extreme contortions of logic. I mean, it's one thing to explore the hypothetical "what if it were true?" in a BBS thread like this, but justifying that one stupid line hardly seems worth producing an entire fan film over.

Exactly. Kirk says, "I don't blame you" in response to Janice saying that she hoped she'd never see him again, so they obviously had a pretty bad breakup. Most of Kirk's exes seem to be pretty pleased to see him again, but not Janice Lester. Something pretty bad went down there, and it seems like Kirk still has some regrets about it.

 

[Christopher]

OK, just some shower thoughts. I think all of us would agree that there should not be any institutional sexism in Starfleet. But at the same times I don't think we can completely dismiss Janice Lester's statements as insane ramblings. Yes, she is crazy, but her obsession is the result of something that has some basis in reality. In fact, Kirk agrees with her that that it isn't fair that his world of Starship captains doesn't admit women.

The real basis is her failure to make it as a captain. That doesn't require her to be right about the reason for her failure. There are countless people who can't accept failure and blame it on outside factors, evil conspiracies, etc. I've seen wannabe writers who had no talent but who blamed their failure on the industry being an elitist clique that wouldn't give them a fair chance. Lots of people fail at sports but blame their equipment or the weather or whatever. Certain narcissistic politicians blame the media or the "Deep State" for their own incompetence.

And given the circumstances, maybe Kirk was just humoring what he thought was a dying woman, rather than rehashing an old argument.

Metatextually, we don't have to treat every single spoken line of dialogue as absolute gospel. We don't have to assume the impulse engines are fission-based just because Kelso mentioned the points decaying to lead. We don't have to assume Deanna Troi suffered a memory wipe of all the times she kissed Riker with a beard before Insurrection. Sometimes fiction contains errors, like any human construct. Sometimes it's better just to overlook an error than call attention to it.

But I think that the most obvious interpretation is that in her view the realm of Starship captains is a boys club. There are many specific words that push this interpretation rather than "there's no room for women in a captains life."

Yes, of course that was the intent, but we're allowed to reinterpret it to make it fit with the rest of the franchise. Just as we're allowed to take all the early first-season TOS episodes that talked about the Enterprise as an Earth or UESPA ship and pretend it was the Federation and Starfleet all along. Just as we pretty much have to find some way to reconcile the peacetime Starfleet portrayed in TNG's first two seasons with the fourth-season revelation that the Federation was at war with Cardassia at the time. Individual details don't always fit together. We have to do some fudging here and there to maintain the fiction of a consistent whole. It's just a question of which interpretation you choose to favor, and I hardly think "Intruder"'s stupid ideas are worth favoring over the alternative.

MAYBE you could say one of the twelve is a sexist a-hole that hates women and always black balls them, but that's not actually necessary. I think we can imagine enough plausible scenarios why the elite group of 12 or so Starship captains would already be all male without invoking institutional sexism.

We don't have any real reason to assume they are all-male, though they were probably assumed to be at the time. Here are the Constitution-class commanding officers we know of:

Constellation: Matthew Decker
Defiant: Unnamed human male (called Thomas Blair in the novels)
Enterprise: James T. Kirk
Excalibur: Harris (gender unspecified)
Exeter: Ronald Tracey
Lexington: Robert Wesley

So we can only be certain that 5 out of 12 "Starship" captains were male. That's not even a majority. For that matter, since two of those commanding officers were commodores, we can't even be sure they were the regular captains of those ships. Wesley might've been assigned to the Lexington strictly for the war games, for all we know.

 

[Maurice]

Here are the Constitution-class commanding officers we know of:

Constellation: Matthew Decker
Defiant: Unnamed human male (called Thomas Blair in the novels)
Enterprise: Christopher Pike, James T. Kirk
Excalibur: Harris (gender unspecified)
Exeter: Ronald Tracey
Lexington: Robert Wesley

Fixed that for you.

 

[Christopher]

Fixed that for you.

I was speaking of the current 12 simultaneous captains and how many of them could be confirmed to be male. I should've made that clearer.

 

[BK613]

^^So add "Starship Captains Krasnovsky and Chandra" from Court Martial.

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[Soong-type Android]

Probably for the same reason the writers got rid of a female second in command after the original pilot and made the female crew wear mini skirts and female characters generally being written poorly. It was just sexist writing under the presumption that Star Trek was aimed at a male demographic and writing it with that in mind at a time of 1960s social attitudes.

 

[uniderth]

Probably for the same reason the writers got rid of a female second in command after the original pilot and made the female crew wear mini skirts and female characters generally being written poorly. It was just sexist writing under the presumption that Star Trek was aimed at a male demographic and writing it with that in mind at a time of 1960s social attitudes.

If I understand correctly the skirts were at the behest of the female cast members as a sign of female empowerment.

 

[Maurice]

If I understand correctly the skirts were at the behest of the female cast members as a sign of female empowerment.

That depends on who you believe. Dorothy Fontana told me that Gene wanted the women's uniforms "sexier" in the series. Grace Lee Whitney told me she wanted a more "Flash Gordon" look with boots and short skirts. Could be both are true. Could be neither are quite accurate.

 

[Kor]

From what Whitney and Nichols said in interviews, I thought it had more to do with looking fashionable and cool according to the style of the time, than empowerment in particular.

Kor

 

[Guy Gardener]

Remember the Romulan Captain from the Enterprise Incident tugging at her own dress every 40 seconds because it wouldn't stop riding up?

Sitting in the Captains chair, on another ships view screen, twice actual size, we're talking about Basic Instinct.

I'm sure all the women had the option to wear trousers, although if it really was like Madmen on the Enterprise, then only the gals in the tiny little skirts got away missions and promotions.

 

[Nyotarules]

n fact, Kirk agrees with her that that it isn't fair that his world of Starship captains doesn't admit women.

Kirk's (personal) world of starship captains does not admit sons or women.

If we take The Cage and Turnabout Intruder as the same universe then something took place between the two periods if women were no longer allowed to be starship captains.
1. The women having babies theory falls down - its the 23rd century any human female who wants to have children later in life, all they need to do is freeze their eggs, 200 years from now a woman having a baby at age 50, 60 or 70 should not raise any eye brows, human life span is twice as long as the 21st century version. A 50 year old fertile female should be the same as a present day mid30's year old fertile female.
2. Unless we want to go down the Starfleet is just for humans road, then what about long lived species like the Vulcans who can serve in Starfleet way past the age of 100, and probably have children at that age as well. Does this stupid rule of no female captains apply to them?
3. There are female admirals and captains in the ENT and DISC era, there is a female captain in The Voyage home, when did she get her promotion?

 

[Guy Gardener]

The human life span may be longer, but it seems like Youth is about as long as it is now, and it's only "old age" that has been elongated... Unless you have some Supermen in your family tree?

 

[Nyotarules]

The human life span may be longer, but it seems like Youth is about as long as it is now, and it's only "old age" that has been elongated... Unless you have some Supermen in your family tree?

They might look old on the outside but have younger bodies on the inside. You think a present day 134 year old would walk as upright as McCoy in TNG?

 

[Christopher]

If we take The Cage and Turnabout Intruder as the same universe then something took place between the two periods if women were no longer alllowed to be starship captains.

Or Janice was deluded and Kirk was humoring a "dying" woman to avoid an argument. That's much simpler. Or just take the Doylist approach and dismiss it as a bad bit of writing.

1. The women having babies theory falls down - its the 23rd century any human female who wants to children later in life , all they need to do is freeze their eggs or 200 years from now a woman having a baby at age 0 or 60 should not raise any eye brows

My hypothesis was less about individual women and more about general cultural attitudes that might emerge in colonial societies. In a small colonial population that needs to grow swiftly to survive and endure, there would be societal pressure to procreate early and often. It's not that women couldn't wait, it's that the colony as a whole couldn't afford for most of its women to wait. And that might lead to a renewal of cultural stigmas about women in the workplace -- not because it's actually justified, but because human cultures usually overreact. Rather than making the effort to consider nuance and complexity and the real reasons behind discouraging something, they just reduce it to a simplistic "X is bad, never do it," even if that's taking the stigma too far. The question is about what might cause an attitude to arise in a culture, which is not the same question as whether it's genuinely justified or correct.

If anything, the attitude arising in response to greater longevity might well be the reverse -- that women should have children first, and then once they've passed their childbearing years and done their part to ensure future generations, that's when they can pursue careers freely, with the assurance of having decades more life ahead of them. (Although of course that doesn't justify banning them from command either. It just means you'd have a lot of older female captains.)

 

[Nyotarules]

Or Janice was deluded and Kirk was humoring a "dying" woman to avoid an argument. That's much simpler. Or just take the Doylist approach and dismiss it as a bad bit of writing.

That's my normal attitude to the topic but I decided to indulge in a what if...lol

 

[Qonundrum]

Sorry, I still have to reject the premise. Either being a woman disqualifies a person from commanding a starship, or Number One was acting illegally in "The Menagerie" and the Enterprise crew were following her unlawful orders.

^^this

And I doubt that everyone was following Number One after having taken command in "The Cage".

Also, Dr Lester was insane. The script (thanks to Roddenberry's burnout with arguing against TPTB at the time) can't consistently decide whether or not to poke at a person aiming for command but failing required tests, her and Kirk having one out on dates or whatever in the past, our society via fourth wall (not unlike how Pike is the character of relation to the audience in that regard, considering 1964 society), his own show in terms of the makers that were sexist, the concept Starfleet would be sexist, perhaps teetering regressivism since "The Cage" suggests a recent change in protocol or other interpretations, or other things and not just because it's not 1969 anymore.

 

[Nyotarules]

My hypothesis was less about individual women and more about general cultural attitudes that might emerge in colonial societies.

The few colonies shown in TOS only had a handful of people, assuming most humans who joined Starfleet are from the Sol system, there is no shortage of people living on Earth to keep the population growing. I think Deneva's population was in the millions, the colony with the spores did not seem to have any children at all. And not much is known about the other Federation planets.