I'm buddy reading with a couple of mutuals here and I told them that I'd post a little bit of historical context for this book as we start it together!

At the time of writing this post, Dragonflight is just shy of 50 years old. During her career McCaffrey was among the earliest female writers who were starting to enter the Science Fiction and Fantasy publishing spaces and would have absolutely been considered a feminist writer in that era of second-wave feminism. But the world has changed great deal since this was published in 1968, and our society's concept of feminism has changed too and modern audiences tend not to consider McCaffrey's books to be particularly feminist by modern standards.

When I approach books like this, one of the things I like to do is to see what the cultural norms were at the time of publication. It helps me to see how a work that feels regressive could have possibly been progressive in the era it was published. For example, here is an inexhaustive list of feminist advances that came slightly before or (mostly) after Dragonflight was published in 1968.

• No Fault Divorce (California passed the first no-fault divorce law that came into effect in that state in 1970. No Fault Divorce would not be available nationwide until 2010.) -The ability to take out a line of credit or a mortgage without a male cosigner (This was granted by the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974.)
• The ability to open their own bank account (This was also part of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974.)
• At the time of this book's publication the Equal Pay Act was only 5 years old
• Discrimination against women in education would be legal until Title IX (1972) and the Women's Educational Equity Act (1974) were passed.
• Sex discrimination based on pregnancy was legal until 1978
• The first law against marital rape were not passed in the US until 1975. It would not be considered a crime in all 50 states until 1993.

This doesn't excuse the places where McCaffrey's feminism hasn't aged well, but it hopefully gives modern readers a better idea of the context in which she was writing. The difficulties that her heroines face in these books look a lot like the problems that women in McCaffrey's era had to navigate in their daily lives, and which would have actively shaped the author's own perspective.

It's super interesting that this opens with a sci-fi grounded explanation for what is written as a very fantasy book. I'm also loving Lessa and F'lor so far