Monday, February 14, 2011

Slowly wheeling, like the rays of a searchlight, the days, the weeks, the years passed one after another across the sky.

That line is from Virginia Woolf's 1939 novel The Years, which I am not presently reading but which I've been thinking about intermittently for the past several days. It's been lying on my desk among the other splayed-open books that I've been working among--Shelley's Defence of Poetry, Wordsworth's Prelude, Bolton's Last Nostalgia, Melville's Moby-Dick, Ford's The Sportswriter, Roget's Thesaurus. "What a crew of white men," as stalwart observers of disparity might declare. Typically, though, I hadn't really noticed that till now.

I'm never sure if my reading patterns make me complicit in my own oppression or able to override it. But have you read the Vida statistics about the male-female publication ratio? They have been infiltrating the news lately, with responses from all over the literary map--including one extraordinarily rude one from Peter Stothard of the Times Literary Supplement. They are disheartening but not surprising, and certainly fit with what more than one publisher has told me to my face: that my writing has too feminine a flavor. This despite the desk covered with the works of famous white men.

My first response to such a remark is to feel guilty, not angry. My second response is obliviousness: to go back to reading the books I was reading anyway and to write about whatever I feel like writing about. I really don't know what else to do.

6 comments:

Maureen said...

Brevity had a post this morning on Vida and did its own admittedly unscientific review of its pages, finding that it's achieved some parity. The post mentioned the importance of the look inward, which I thought was graceful at least.

I don't know enough about lit mags' ratios to comment on those but I do know that the ratio in museums remains appalling. I wish we did not need a National Museum of Women's Art or the proposed National Museum of Women's History but, sadly, we do. Otherwise so many wonderful contributions would never be known to anyone.

I make a point of seeking out artists who are women, and I include writers who are women in that group.

Dawn Potter said...

The Southern Review also did its own study in response to these figures, and I like your phrase "graceful at least" as a way of noting the willingness of a few journals to take these figures seriously. Still, it disturbs me how endemic the disproportion is. And apparently hiring women editors (as Katha Pollitt's Slate article suggests as a possible solution) is not an automatic answer: Threepenny's editor is a woman; the Nation's editor is (I believe I'm remembering correctly) a woman. That seems to make little difference in the results.

Maureen said...

The same is true of museums with respect to curators.

Here's Ed Bryne's take:
http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.com/2011/02/poetry-gender-and-vpr-update.html

It is fascinating to see and read all the different posts on the issue. I'd like to take the navel-gazing as a good sign. It would be worse if there were no reaction.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately ladies with the advent of new conservatism we are heading back into the middle ages for Women s rights and advancement.
A few will be admitted to the bar and ask to smoke the big cigar pretend they are male so as to fit in with the good old boys!.
The few will leave the struggle to the rest and sell themselves to the highest bidder. The deal with the Devil has been made now its back to the stone age and return of women bondage.
You have no rights as they get stripped away By the false morality authorities. Genetic misfits from the South and Mid-West with god on their side they will right whats been wrong. Put Freedom back in its bottle they vow, obedience to Mad hatter and his tea party.
How could this be in a enlightened society lets all retreat to our favorite authors until the storm of stupidity blows itself out.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Wow-- check out that anonymous there. I know that the most brilliant jewels will shine through all of this macho murk and of them yours is surely one and I do not and would not ever say that lightly. xxJenne'

Dawn Potter said...

Jenne, I know you, too, are fiercely committed to doing the work that your heart and mind drives you toward. Together, in our solitudes, we'll all just soldier on.