Ah, the gender bias in literature: Are YOU secretly a sexist?

What was that one old timey woman author that used a man's pen name? I thought it was George Sanders, but turns out, no. Jane will know.
Anyways, i think there needs to be more of that, pen names. Really get at the whole unreliable narrator thing.

Also, there was George Eliot.

I believe the Bronte sisters all initially used male nom de plumes too?

This thread, and the article you linked definitely bring up some interesting points, xec8. I think women authors are often overlooked in certain areas of fiction, barring a few exceptions, eg. Ayn Rand (whose writing, I would consider more masculine than a lot of men anyway). A writer like Margaret Atwood is branded as a 'feminist' writer, which she undoubtedly is, but I think that breeds a negative perception of her writing which may turn off a lot of people if they can't really separate the idea of true feminism from bra-burning femi-nazis.

Of course women are quite recognised in the sci/fantasy, romance, popular fiction/chick-lit types of areas, but anything beyond that - you mentioned experimental fiction - they seem to fall by the wayside. I'm not entirely sure if it's due completely to a kind of underlying sexism, though I think a large part of it may be. I would be interested to know the ratio of male to female experimental fiction writers. Part of it may be just the numbers? Even as a woman myself I read more male authors, and all of my favourite writers are male. I don't go out of my way to avoid reading female authors, but that's just the way it's worked out.

I do wonder (like the quote you bolded) if family-centric dramas like The Brothers Karamazov would be perceived differently if written by a woman.

Wasn't there a rumour for a while there that Stephen King's wife wrote a couple of his books and they just put his name on them to sell more?

I hadn't heard that, Nate, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Many women also use their initials rather than their first name to appear more gender neutral. AM Holmes, AS Byatt.. even JK Rowling.

Seems like the same reason Chuck doesn't want to be known as a gay. Just quash the perception and read the damn book kind of thing.

Yep.
Ellis Bell - Emily Bronte
Acton Bell - Anne Bronte
Currer Bell - Charlotte Bronte

Not to belittle the argument, but I'd say that's most of it right there. (I think I've read about ten variations on this article over the past month.) It's always regrettable when quality work goes unrecognized, but the law of averages says that 95% of it probably isn't publish-worthy, and then you factor in the smaller numbers of women who even attempt it to begin with, and it doesn't seem unusual. It's like living in a city composed of a 13% black population and wondering why its basketball team is 75% black, which is a result of interest, skill, and opportunity, among other factors.

So they don't get the respect, or they get marketed as chick-lit regardless of what they write — that's gotta be frustrating. But for those popular authors who bitch about not getting their critical due, well, they can just dry their eyes on their fat royalty checks; they'll get no pity from me, because the public has spoken and voted with their wallets.

Susan Faludi wrote this really excellent article in this month's Harpers about the generational divide between second and third wave feminists, calling it a matricide. Second wave feminists being more the kind we think of as being granola crunchy, bra-burning (like my mother, who has literally never worn makeup) and third wave being more about sexual empowerment, I'll wear high heels if I fucking feel like it. Obviously that's kind of a reduction but you know what I mean.

Applying this to literature, I sometimes think that the reason women belittle the writing of other women has to do with a generational gap--writing is often the art form of older people, as opposed to arts like painting or dance. It's difficult for me to identify with the writings of someone like Doris Lessing, or Marilyn French, or Erica Jong, because what they're writing about is so far removed from my experience as a young woman. The landscape has just changed since the 60's and 70's, and the writing canon is so slow to turn over that we're not yet reading things that we can say, yes, this is something I identify with, as a woman and as a person.

In sum, just not enough time has gone by yet for us to have a really solid crop of writing by women that can be seen as just that--women's writing. I think we'll have to have another generation or so go by before we can see it as anything else but literature of otherness.

Also, I cannot fucking stand Jonathan Franzen. If there's anyone that I hope is not vindicated by a place in the American canon, it's that man.

You definitely raise a valid point, Jane. It really seems as though in today's writing world, the modern female experience has been boiled down to somewhere between Bridget Jones' Diary and The Devil Wears Prada. I guess Zadie Smith is ok, but I don't know that I really relate much to her characters either.

If one more person tells me to read Eat, Pray, Love, I'm going to knock them out.

I was walking with my uncle yesterday, over to the new rabbit warrens we built to repopulate the farmlands with little bunnies, and he was explaining to me his views on the differences between men and women. He said his generation, in America, was raised to believe not that men and women were EQUAL so much as they were the SAME — ie, we all have exactly the same rights, yes, but also the same attributes, the same potential, the same intelligence, the same duties. To affirm a difference between male and female was taboo when he was growing up, and that caused a lot of resentment in both his male and his female friends.

When we reached the warrens, we tried to get the rabbits out of the cage and into the warrens. There were six females and one male. Guess how we could tell which one was the male? He was the only one who bit, charged and hopped around furiously when we tried to pick him up. My uncle gave me a knowing look and said, "Don't tell me there's no difference between male and female."

It was a striking way of proving a point, even if it was silly and simplistic. Feminism started out as a way of asserting the equality of women — then the fight changed, and it's become what the (probably conservative, I'm not sure) "feminist" Christina Hoff Sommers calls "gender" feminism.

Maybe as a reaction to this unpleasant new kind of thinking — we often associate angry, bitter lesbians who hate men with this so-called gender feminism — the literary world has become even more male-centric than it used to be: to acknowledge the key points of "gender feminism" as correct would mean a pretty serious reevaluation of the canon, criticism, etc; and to be cynical, if chick-lit sells so damn much, why allow Dworkin or Brownmiller to change that? Why let a minority of women speak for all others when they accuse such-and-such a practice of being sexist or detrimental to women, if that's going to entail a big-ass shift in perspective and practice? Remember, people are lazy — if you want to change things, don't scream at them, just let them be idle in your house instead of theirs.

Well. Everyone knows women don't understand literature, anyway!

I don't think this is necessarily a feminist issue, though putting that hat on does help me see it in a different way. Of course there are gender differences (although I think your uncle's thinking, about the sexes being the same, is something that's starting to become more outmoded as we move farther away from Dworkin-type feminism). I could never be a firefighter. I turned my ankle trying to climb a tree this morning.

I identify much more strongly with characters written by women in the pre-feminist era. Someone like a Jane Eyre, who is living her life by principles that we would now identify as feminist within the bounds of Victorian society.

And of course, publishing is a moneymaking industry, just like everything else. It's a Catch-22: people read the things that sell well and then things that are sold are read. There's not always room for innovation.

Personally I would like to see more books by someone like Zadie Smith, who writes both men and women very well in a variety of situations--World War II, urban London, collegiate New England. I want books that I can recognize as having been written by women that could've just as easily have been written by men. I don't want a sexual division in literature. I'm tired of that.

Also, the meanest rabbit I ever had was a girl. She was probably pissed because I was 10 and I named her Chocolate Jennifer Snowflake.

There was an recent article I read about female characters in movies almost always be relegated to second class. They had some criteria which determined if the movie was female positive, one of them being along the lines of two or more female characters that engage each other over something other than men. 95% of movies fail these criteria. Unfortunately, I can find the article.

I found this article interesting because I was reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, who as was previously mentioned is quite feminist, and even her book completely failed these criteria.