His women were not aggressive (unless they were the bad guys). Unless you restrict the term to sexual aggression; they were unusually sexually liberated for the time. What’s offputting about his women is that they are smart enough, strong enough, competent enough to be aggressive, but they voluntarily renounce not only aggression but even decision-making in order to serve their chosen men better. Heinlein thought that women should be more than housewives, but he didn’t think they should be leaders. They should be followers, only, you know, not just at home but in spaceships, too. (This isn’t true of the women in his juveniles, and it’s a mystery to me why, at the point when he deals with women as sexual beings, their autonomy collapses.) And he didn’t have a clue about what women in the ’50s thought about themselves.

Look, here’s an opposite example that may help you see what I mean. Take Joanna Russ’s story “When It Changed” or her novel “The Female Man.” These are two classic pieces of fiction, profoundly moving and inspiring to a couple of generations of SF readers. And you could say “wow, reading these stories shows that women in the 1970s really resented male domination.” But you could not objectively say that Russ gives you an insightful picture of the society and culture of the time outside of showing that the resentment existed. Most importantly, you can’t get a picture of the male experience at that time from reading them (unless you think that men are all killers, drones, or monkeys). I wouldn’t advise 10 year olds to read those particular works, even though I think they’re brilliant. And I wouldn’t at any age think that they were a true picture of much.

Novels marked with an asterisk * are generally considered juvenile novels, although some works defy easy categorization.

Early Heinlein novels
Rocket Ship Galileo, 1947 *
Beyond This Horizon, 1948 (initially serialized in 1942, credited to Anson MacDonald)
Space Cadet, 1948 *
Red Planet, 1949 *
Sixth Column, 1949 (initially serialized in 1941, and at that time credited to Anson MacDonald)
Farmer in the Sky, 1950 (Retro Hugo Award, 1951) *
Between Planets, 1951 *
The Puppet Masters, 1951
The Rolling Stones, 1952
Starman Jones, 1953 *
The Star Beast, 1954 *
Tunnel in the Sky, 1955 *
Double Star, 1956 (Hugo Award, 1956)
Time for the Stars, 1956 *
Citizen of the Galaxy, 1957 *
The Door into Summer, 1957
Have Space Suit—Will Travel, 1958 *
Methuselah’s Children, 1958
Starship Troopers, 1959 (Hugo Award, 1960)

Mature Heinlein novels
Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961 (Hugo Award, 1962)
Podkayne of Mars, 1963 *
Orphans of the Sky, 1963
Glory Road, 1963
Farnham’s Freehold, 1965
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, 1966 (Hugo Award, 1967)
I Will Fear No Evil, 1970
Time Enough for Love, 1973

Late Heinlein novels
The Number of the Beast, 1980
Friday, 1982
Job: A Comedy of Justice, 1984
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, 1985
To Sail Beyond the Sunset, 1987

Early Heinlein works published posthumously
For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs (written in 1939, published posthumously in 2003)

http://www.nndb.com/people/710/000023641/

From the socialism he embraced in the late 1930s to the Libertarianism and right wing Republicanism he embraced in the late 1960s and 70s was a big shift, one which offended those who agreed with the free love socialism in some of his novels. Suddenly, Heinlein was a conservative old fart: his female characters were not believable, and of course his seemingly pro-conservative works were “preachy”.

On the surface, many of these complaints seem true. Heinlein’s women differ from what we expect of women characters nowadays. Yet it is worth remembering that for roughly three or four decades they were light years ahead what anyone else had imagined for women. Heinlein’s fictious women were smart, aggressive, and not ashamed of their sexuality. True, they were generally what Robert Heinlein found appealing in a woman, as opposed to representative of what women thought about themselves. But then Heinlein was fairly disgusted with what most women in the 50s thought about themselves. He thought they should aspire to be more than domestic serfs and housewives.

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That’s my point it’s not that he hated women but he wanted them to aspire to be more than society of the time allowed them to be. To break the chains that society and themselves had put on them. Did he take it to far? Possibly but how many other authors that you know of have used done that in order to make a point???

I also found this intresting, it’s from the same article quoted above…

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Heinlein’s influence was hardly limited to the genre of science fiction, or to his fellow writers. He also managed to insert himself into mainstream popular culture — influencing language (“waldo” and “grok”), politics, sexuality, and even spirituality. His 1962 Hugo-winning Stranger in a Strange Land was not only a kind of guidance manual for the 1960s free love counterculture but it actually spawned a number of imitative churches. To a lesser but no less noteworthy extent his 1966 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is credited with drawing many young people to Libertarianism and to the Libertarian party itself.

Although Robert Heinlein was actually most prolific, and perhaps most influential upon the genre of science fiction, with his short fiction, he was also the first science fiction author to produce a best selling novel. Other long works of note include the Hugo Award winners Double Star (1956) and Starship Troopers (1959) as well as the thought provoking Methuselah’s Children (1958), and Time Enough For Love (1973). Another groundbreaking novel I Will Fear No Evil (1970) is noteworthy for it’s daring exploration of transexualism. Farnham’s Freehold (1965), which deals with the futuristic racial oppression of white Americans by cannibalistic black Muslims, is considered by some to be one of the most controversial novels in the genre of science fiction. Finally, “For Us, the Living” (2004) was so scandalously racy that when Heinlein first sought publication for it in 1939, the book was deemed unpublishable. (Note that even if the book had been published at that time, it would have been illegal to ship it through the U.S. mail.)

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I’ve read every one of his books and short stories and they are all very entertaining and thought provoking. At it’s essence isn’t that what science fiction is susposed to be. Makes you smile and makes you think, even if you don’t like some of what it deals with?

Let me ask you this (opening a can o’worms here)
Have you considered that the treament of women in his works could have come from his observation that women at the time were seen to be weak and he knew this not to be the case. Because in almost – if not all of his works (certainly the later works) his female characters are really the leaders and strongest of the characters. They have just learned that to get past men’s deep set beliefs – that men are the ruling class – they have to convince the men that they believe that to be true, and what better way to convince a man that he is in controll then to play the week sexpot and play up his desires while all the time making the decisions for him, and in turn taking his position of power.
I would go as far as to say that Heinlein did not hate women, but infact saw them as the stronger (intellectually) of the species. Sence during the majority of the time he was writing, women were considered to be second in class and public stature to men, he took a path to bringing women to the forefront by permiting them to use their sexuality (something that would have been considered shamefull at the time) as a way to become dominate.
(and yes I know I can’t spell – to many male teachers!)

Or it could be that he got his jollys writing about boobs – the world may never know!!!!

This: you will find that he had incredible insight into the social, political and religious culture of the time he lived in about Heinlein kind of throws me, because my argument against him is that he’s completely inaccurate since he cannot see the reality of 50% of the people he’s writing about. He does not, in fact, describe the world or the culture that women of his time lived in; he describes a male fantasy fairly characteristic of that time. Now, if you want to say that he has incredible insight into male fantasies, we agree. Ursula LeGuin wrote a great story, “The Pathways of Desire” about using that kind of SF to think you’re understanding anything.

But I grant you that Heinleiin’s stories from the ’40s and ’50s, though they’re not exactly gender-neutral, aren’t going to damage Zaphod either. I wonder, you know, what a child of today makes of the current/future state of science in those early works, and in Norton’s, too. I mean, do the kids ask how come no one has roaming access to computing power?

Shorter Heinlein: women are either beautiful-sexy-brainy-creatures-who-voluntarily-give-up-their-own-autonomy-to-serve-an-even-more-superior-man -and-tell-you-at-great-length-how-fulfilled-they-feel-because-of-it-take-that-you-nasty-feminists or they are evil, evil, evil.