When I started looking into the issues of gender—specifically women—in the publishing industry, I was blissfully serene about them. Which is to say, I thought we were past all that. I’m of the generation of women who can remember a time when Harriet Nelson and June Cleaver (pearls and a dress, mopping the floor!) were what we thought we’d aspire to. When I was in high school, the McDonald’s across the street only hired boys to flip hamburgers; when I was a young married woman working in a bank, I was asked to train a young married man who, it turned out, made significantly more money than me, although I’d been with the bank for three years, and he’d just started. When I complained to management, the (male) boss told me the reason for the disparity was … this guy had a wife to support. (I’m still a bit shocked as I write this.)

Well.

I’m older now, and the world has changed a lot. One can get lulled by that and even, with one’s diminishing reserves of energy, can overlook some things because one knows nothing happens fast. Particularly change. Particularly in the publishing industry. 🙂

But dagnabbit, those VIDA Count numbers are damning, aren’t they!

And at the same time I was really looking at VIDA and thinking Yeeeeeah, that’s … not good, I was reading The Shelf, Phyllis Rose’s marvelous book about, well, books. She has an entire chapter she’s called “Women and Fiction: A Question of Privilege.”

Let’s go back to the fundamental question of women and literary achievement, the question Virginia Woolf raised in A Room of One’s Own. What conditions are necessary for women to produce great literary work? Woolf’s answer was, to begin with, down-to-earth, practical, material. Women need an income and time and space to themselves in order to write—metaphorically, five hundred pounds a year income and rooms of their own. When Woolf was writing, in 1927, married [English]women had only had the right to own property since the year of her birth [1882]. So women, as a class, were poor, and Woolf believed that their poverty affected their creative power in subtle as well as obvious ways. For one thing, they were not educated as well as men. If they were lucky, they might attend the women’s college at Oxford or one of the two women’s colleges at Cambridge that existed at that time. But even there they would see, from the austerity of their own surroundings and the splendor of the men’s colleges, what relative value their society put on their minds and the minds of their brothers. This, in turn, would affect their self-confidence, and more than anything else except talent, self-confidence is what an artist requires, a belief that what you have to say, or the vision of the world that you feel it in yourself to convey, is important.* (Emphasis mine.)

Woolf recognized and accepted that she was who she was because she was a woman. But Rose goes on,

She hadn’t been allowed to have the wide experience of a Tolstoy. But even more important than the experience was the ability to transcend anger [about gender injustice]. She called this state “the androgynous mind” and saw it as a state of consciousness in which all of the artist’s sense of his or her own individuality was burned away.*

This passage made me sit up in bed. Yes! I’m not a novelist, I’m not an artist, but when I read, it’s with that androgynous mind—and I think that’s why I’ve been so oblivious to the idea that there is, still, a gender divide in the way books reach the marketplace and who reads them once they’re there.

The thing is, it’s maddening, but I don’t have the energy to carry this torch of anger about the way women are thought of as somehow less. I know I’m not (less). Partly because of the people who raised me, partly because of the men I’ve known, partly because I’m just tough and stubborn.

So I’m going to let author Joanne Harris (Chocolat) be angry (in her blog post “Capitalize This”—and you should read the whole thing), and tell you why you—man or woman—should be too (language warning):

So, why am I dwelling on this? Well, I think it’s the tip of an iceberg—an iceberg we glimpse so often that we tend to forget it’s even there; a great big iceberg of sexism within the whole book industry, which stealthily perpetuates the belief that no woman writer can ever really be successful without having somehow copied from, used or otherwise capitalized upon the popularity of a man. …

I can’t even remember all the crazy, sexist assumptions that have been made (and voiced) about me during my career as a writer. Here are just a few of them:

      My husband supported me financially while I was starting out. (He didn’t. We both had jobs.)

      My husband secretly writes my books. (Oh, for fuck’s sake.)

      My media, university or Hollywood connections helped me start off. (They didn’t. I don’t have any.)

      I’m sleeping with my agent/editor. (One is gay, the other female. And no, I’m really not.)

      I’m desperate to make more movies, to boost my writing career. (Nope. Much as I like movies, I’ve never needed a leg-up from Hollywood. That’s why I keep turning down offers.)

      I only write for women. Because, you know—vagina. (Nope. I write for anyone with a pulse.)

We know that the book industry is largely unfair to women. Women writers are in the majority, but generally get smaller advances; fewer reviews; fewer prizes; less respect.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a list like Harris’s. Academic, critic, and feminist author Joanna Russ, in her book How to Suppress Women’s Writing, pointed out that successful women authors hear …

• She didn’t write it. (Her husband or lover did, of course.)

• She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have. (Because it’s political, sexual, masculine, feminist. In short, unwomanly.)

• She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. (The bedroom, the kitchen, her family. Other women!)

• She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. (“Jane Eye, poor dear, that’s all she ever …”)

• She wrote it, but … it isn’t really art. (It’s a thriller, a romance, a children’s book, sci-fi.)

• She wrote it, but she had help. (You know, Robert Browning, Branwell Brontë.)

• She wrote it, but she’s an anomaly. (Woolf, with Leonard’s help …)**

It’s hard not to be angry when you see it all laid out like this, isn’t it! Yes, Meg Wolitzer should be angry, Joanne Harris should be angry. We all should be—even you guys. So put on your androgynous mind. Because you are missing out on a lot of great books.

* I transcribed this from page 100 and 102 of the hardcover first edition of The Shelf, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

** I adapted this from the 1983 cover of Russ’s book, which you can see here.

Read the other posts in this series:
1 Women, Men, Readers, Me
2 Is Women’s Fiction a Dirty Word?
3 It’s Hard to Catch Up When You Start Out Behind

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”