Here's my draft for tomorrow's lecture on Women's Lit (SO FAR!!!):
Women’s
Lit: Lecture One
“The I.O.C. had ruled that
women’s ski jumping had too few elite competitors to qualify for the Olympics.”
“In 2005, Gian Franco Kasper, the
president of the International Ski Federation, told an NPR reporter that ski
jumping “seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.”
This is how it works. First, we’re told women can’t do it because
they’re just incapable of it – it’s literally impossible.
Then, we’re told, well, maybe you could do
it, but it would be wrong to let you.
It
would harm women to do it (mentally or physically). You’re too weak to do it (mentally or
physically).
Then we’re told, well,
maybe SOME of you are capable of doing it – but look! There just aren’t ENOUGH
of you doing it. See? Why bother making a special fuss for the few
freaks of you who want to do it?
(Why weren’t there hundreds of Olympic-class women skiers in
1998, or 1978, do you suppose? Why weren’t there hundreds of women writing brilliant plays
in Shakespearean England?)
Then, once we have fought for the right to do it, we’re told
“we let you do it, stop whining now” – though “now” generally equals less
funding, less access, less time, inferior tools, and a world which continues to
ignore us/take us less seriously (see WNBA, or ANY women’s sport, frankly).
So – Women and Literature.
Virginia Wolfe gave a famous series of lectures in 1929, which
were later reworked and published as a book, called A Room of One’s Own, in which she attempted to explain why there
have been no women writers. (We’ll be
reading bits of it.)
Her basic thesis, though, is that women have never written
great works because they have never been educated, they have never been given
the time, and they have never been taken seriously. The creation of art, Woolf says, requires
those things – knowledge, leisure, respect as an artist.
There are problems with Woolf’s text (she’s way classicist,
for one thing),
but her basic thesis is valid.
Where are the women artists?
Where are the women cartoonists?
Where are all the women SF writers?
Where are the women fantasy writers? (Oh – wait.
BTW, do you know when Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and Nevill Coghill and the
rest of the Inklings were holding their meetings at Oxford, they banned women
from their writing group?
In fact, one of their favorite activities at their meetings was reading
books written by women outloud for fun – mocking women’s writing.)
Where are all the women poets?
(Again, this is one that used to be true – it used to be believed that
women could not write poetry – and is no longer. But – as with fantasy writing – when men
write poetry, it is often [usually, always] taken more seriously than when
women write poetry / fantasy.)
Where are all the women bloggers / novelists / screenwriters /
directors / essayists….
VIDA: An organization which each year
looks at important publications (Nation, Granta, Atlantic Monthly, etc) and
counts how many women they publish/review v. how many men they publish
review. Spoilers: Each year the news is
the same, and extremely depressing.
Starting in 2009, when VIDA first published their counts, the
publishing world, and the blogosphere in general, reacted to this news as you
would expect – if women did not get published and reviewed in equal numbers
with men, obviously the blame for this lay at the feet of women.
(Also in 2009, by the way, a blogstorm was happening in the SF
world concerning women, LGBTQ, and people of color not being published and not
being written about in anything like a representational number with white
cismales. Called Racefail09, it had the same
reaction – if gay people, PoC, and women were not getting published in SF/F, or
written about properly in SF/F, well, that was their own fault, and not the
fault of the editors and publishing houses in the SF/F world.)
Excuses, I mean, reasons that are given for why fewer women
get published/reviewed:
(1) Fewer
women submit their work
(2)
Women don’t write the “right” kind of stories –
who wants to read that stuff?
(3)
Women give up too easily – they’re quitters. Men stick it out!
(4)
Editors are just publishing what’s good. Men are better writers.
On examination, none of these turn out to be valid. (They’re all the same reasons that were given
in the RaceFail09 storm too.)
·
That is, while fewer women do submit, the quality of
work being submitted by women is higher – men tend to be over-confident
(due to how they’re nurtured in modern society) and women tend to be
under-confident; so men send work out quickly, in early draft stages, and women
send it out later, when it’s been polished.
·
And “right” kind of stories, obviously, depends on
what sort of audience we’re thinking about.
Given that most readers turn out to be women (and this holds true for
almost all genres of fiction and many genres of non-fiction as well), it turns
out to be not the case that women won’t read women’s writing. True, they will
also often read most men’s writing -- unlike many men, who refuse to read any
women’s writing.
·
Number 3, sadly, is valid. Many women, having huge demands on their time
from family and their men and their jobs, if they don’t see some success in the
publishing world within a reasonable period, will quit trying. This is even more likely to be true if their
family, their men, and their jobs do not support them as writers and if the
publishing world tells them (as it currently does) that women aren’t worth
taking seriously as writers. (Twilight!
What crap! Harry Potter! That’s for kids! But Joss Whedon! He’s a GENIUS!)
·
Number 4 is one of those points that can’t be
argued with in this world. In a
hypothetical world, we can argue the crap out of it. Or we can argue by analogy. It used to be said, for instance, that women
could not be classical musicians. (We’re
still told that they just can’t be
composers.) And we knew women couldn’t be classical musicians because look – no
women classical musicians! Every time a
woman auditioned, pssh! No symphony took
her. Because she was crap, obviously,
compared to the guys auditioning. Then
here’s an odd thing. Let’s try this, one
symphony said. Let’s let the musician
audition behind a curtain, so the judges can’t see anything about them, not
what they look like, or how they dress, or – you know – what gender they
are. And when that started happening,
oddly enough, we started having classical musicians who were women. Amazing.
Same thing with classics journals, btw.
Used to be, no articles (or very few) being published in classics
journals were by women. Because – you
know – women just couldn’t think critically.
Or do Latin. Or whatever. Then they went to blind submissions. Now?
Very nearly half of all publications in classics are by women. Well, in the publishing world we’re not ready
to take such a radical leap, because (here’s news that will shock you)
publishers and editors don’t actually go into any edition blind – they actually
solicit writers. That is, they often choose who they publish before an
anthology or edition is put together, asking writers they know to send work to
them. (Two guesses whether they are
going to choose writers who are already famous or not. One guess about what sex that writer is most
likely to be.) We do have information,
however, about what happens when a woman
writer chooses a male name and submits work under that – George Eliot did
it in the 19th century, Alice Sheldon did it in the 1950s, J.K.
Rowling did it in the 1990s, James Chartrand
did it on Craigslist. (1) You get
published more readily. (2) You make
more money (3) You get taken more
seriously. (Alice Sheldon (as James
Tiptree Jr) won dozens of awards and touched off a firestorm in the SF world
when it was revealed (at last) that she was not a reclusive man but a woman
scientist. The (male) SF writers who had
lauded her work were infuriated.)
This will be a class, not on how evil men are and how they
have oppressed women and how much we hates them, precious – but on women’s
writing. On women’s literature. How it gets created. How it gets silenced. Why it is important. And why we cannot quit.
