Well, they can pick up a pen, surely. But do they need gender-exclusive paths to the Cocktail Party of Greatness? It’s an old debate, and here’s Australia writer Benjamin Law’s quick summary, in this article, viz. a debate over the for-women-only Orange Prize:
The literary world’s £30,000 Orange Prize has always been controversial since its 1996 launch. Writer and critic Paul Bailey was on the Orange’s alternative male judging panel in 2001, but believed the prize itself shouldn’t exist, saying “sexes should not be separated like this in art”. Alain de Botton pondered (as he tends to do), “What is it about being a woman that is particularly under threat, in need of attention, or indeed distinctive from being a man when it comes to picking up a pen?” These are valid points. Women write equally as well as men. And if women’s voices are, indeed, somehow marginalised, why should we marginalise them further with female-only awards?
These criticisms didn’t just come from men. South African writer and Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer famously rejected her Orange nomination, arguing the very concept of the award was sexist. A.S. Byatt is not a fan either, to the point where she has forbidden her publishers from ever entering her works. Anita Brookner, a Booker winner, said: “If a book is good, it will get published. If it is good it will get reviewed.” Following on from that, if a book is the best, it will be awarded.
And then he says this, which seems to me far closer to the truth and a major reason to distract you with this post, which is to repeat it: “The danger [i]n relying on meritocracy is assuming one actually exists.”
The other thing that seems true is that celebrated British writer Zadie Smith, who won the Orange Prize for “On Beauty,” and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian writer who won for “Half of a Yellow Sun” and then won an MacArthur “genius” award, don’t exactly seem to me to have been marginalized by the award. But shucks, it’s awful nice of everyone to be so concerned.
Recently, there was a long public conversation (and surely many more private ones) about the dearth of female bylines in American publications, sparked by VIDA‘s look at just how few women are being published, or reviewed, by the major magazines. Jenn Szalai, Meghan O’Rourke, Katha Pollitt and Elissa Strauss are worth reading on the topic (so are the “23 short points” on criticism here). Each of them encounters, in their quest to explain this, that belief in women’s mysterious interiority — a belief Law summarizes this way:
“In the book world, I’ve also heard writers, editors, critics and publishers complain that female writers don’t write about the ‘big picture’ enough, as families or interior lives aren’t part of something panoramic and worldly.”
He has a point. On the other hand, so do those writers, editors and critics. I recently started a pretty pedestrian novel about marital strife. This guy was having an affair; his wife was pissed and wouldn’t speak to him; he was worried about how his kids would take the news of his betrayal, blah blah blah. I put it down. Enough people have read Anna Karenina that I can just crib from them.
Law also quotes a reader who advocated, via Twitter, women-only awards by pointing out, “Drop categories [and the] awards become cockforests.”
And, really, who wants to read in a cockforest?
H/T @DayofHoney.
It’s interesting to me that the core principle of this issue and controversy mirror a number of issues that have for many years plagued the world of humanitarian relief and development. Namely, how do you apply the principles good, participatory, recipient-community-led development in some of the most marginalized and disempowered communities in the world? Do you blithely assume that “the poorest of the poor” inherently have the same ability to fully participate? Or do you ethnocentrically assume that you have to bend traditional best-practices and give stuff away or use subsidized models of programming because “they can’t do it on their own”?
It seems to me that the assumption of a meritocracy in the writing world is very similar, if not directly analagous, to the assumption of a common baseline of agency in the humanitarian world.
Either way I won’t claim to know the “right” way forward. But it seems obvious that playing fields are not level in either case, no matter how much we might wish it otherwise.
Wow, I never would have thought of that. Really interesting. What would be the development equivalent of the trick herein, using the language of an argument against itself — ie, “It’s more anti-feminist to ‘segregate’ women than to let them compete against the men”
Is some time that I follow you and I’m like how you write and so I’ll continue to publish your blog on my African Voices page on facebook.
Thanks, Marco
Thanks, Marco!
Roald Dahl wrote about this very subject in 1983.
At the request of a publisher, Dahl collected a selection of short ghost stories and picked what he felt were the best. In the process, he realized most of the ‘best’ (conceding ‘best’ is subjective, but knowing Dahl had good taste) were written by women. He writes in the collection’s introduction that women often do not attain the same fame in the arts as men, but when it comes to children’s and ghost stories, women kick male ass.
He argues, strongly, that children’s literature shouldn’t be condescended to the way it is.
“All other forms of fiction are written purely to divert and entertain the adult mind. Children’s books must also divert and entertain…but they actually teach a child the habit of reading. They teach him to be literate, they teach him vocabulary and nowadays they teach him that there can be better ways of passing the time than watching television.”
Dahl, better known for “Matilda” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” than his stories Playboy or even his work in WWII, also laments that the genre dominated by women is considered “less than” in literary circles.
“The manner in which children’s books are virtually ignored by literary magazines, by Sunday newspaper reviewers and by the so-called literary establishment in general is scandalous.”
He also argues that children are a more fickle audience than adults:
“How many adult novels are written every year that will still be read widely twenty years later? Probably about half a dozen. How many children’s books are written every year that will still be read widely and avidly twenty years later? Probably only one…None of the entrenched literary establishments of London, New York or Paris realize the power of a children’s book once children have fallen in love with it…Generation after generation of children continue to read a classic children’s book over and over again and school teacher’s keep it always in their classrooms.”
“The writer of a classic children’s book can go into any school or home [in England or America] and he or she will be known and welcomed.”
So when I read stuff about awards and prizes I’ve never heard of (I started “On Beauty” — also about a wife whose petty husband cheats on her — but didn’t finish it) I have a hard time getting worked up.
I’m sure there are complicated sociological and psychological explanations about why women write children’s books and why those still developing cognitively can get so attached to the stories, but I value literature for the connection I make with it, and on that front, Dahl is dead on.
For example, just yesterday, I was reporting at a pig farm and found myself calling one of the swines to the slaughter “Wilbur.” Whenever I visit the Public Garden in Boston, I think of Louis, the swan that played the trumpet and stayed at a fancy hotel nearby. And when I interact with a child, I think of why the kids love Aunty Sissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:
“Francie felt that Sissy understood how it was with little girls. Other people treated children like lovable but necessary evils. Sissy treated them like important human beings.”
For me, as a writer, it’s more important to connect with my readers than win an award, though I recognize the importance of winning awards. Maybe I don’t care because I’ve never won one. (Blush.)
But, speaking of those sociological explanations, as I was hunting for that quote about Aunty Sissy, I reread why her seemingly hard-hearted sister Katie made the decisions she did.
“Katie had a fierce desire for survival which made her a fighter…She exchanged her tenderness for capability. She gave up her dreams and took over hard realities in their place.”