Reading Arlene Heyman’s Silences in Artifact : Publishing in Women’s Writing during the Postwar Feminist Movement

Abstract Arlene Heyman’s debut novel Artifact (2020), which follows the career of an ambitious woman scientist, also allegorizes its author’s slow journey toward success and dramatizes the development, heyday, and aftermath of the women’s movement. This essay reads Heyman’s novel alongside its publication history to show how it reflects upon developments in postwar feminist thinking as well as the processes of its own protracted construction. The essay’s first section reads Artifact’s engagement with feminist history, particularly in scientific fields; I then consider Heyman’s own publication history, informed by contemporaneous feminist accounts of structural barriers to achievement. The final section analyses the novel’s ambiguous portrayal of meritocratic success, reading its silences as responses to the conditions and constraints of the historical era it tracks.