There’s a new online space called WILLA i.e. Women in Letters and Literary Art. Fresh up is Amy King who is following up a decade later on Ursula K Le Guin’s 1999 talk, “Award and Gender,” in which she tallied up the historical counts of many major literary awards. It is included in her collection of essays, The Wave in the Mind. In it there was a 10:1, 8:1, 6:1 male to female as common.
The Count for 2009 checks on how things are now. Genre fiction and children’s literature is going its own parity path but in other sections, there’s still quite a skew on the order of 4:1 or sometimes 2:1 just within 2009. I’d have to line it all up on a chart to see trend lines but it does seem on the face of it, both discouraging and hopeful.
A touchstone for noticing cultural habits of gender is the Bechdel Test for a movie, comics, conversation or book
1. Has at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man.
It’s surprisingly rare.
I kept looking for the answer to
“out of how many?”
I found some research on small press
submissions:
http://greatamericanpoetryshow.com/articles-and-essays/are-women-unrepresented-in-the-small-press/
There are submission figures in there.
Still not a poet count, but generally
60% male submissions.
Amy had an earlier feature on
Publisher’s Weekly’s very male list.
That’s for all books. I looked at
sales. The same year,
women took most of the top 10 titles
sold. The PW guys said they are
charge of picking what sells. They didn’t
seem to pick the right ones.
A few years back I saw several female editors
messages about how they got into editing
to give women a chance but their results
tended toward male poets. Are there
nuances in personal likes built in?
One of them thought…women become
editors often, especially prize-winners,
and when they start editing, the best get
sapped from doing poetry and winning.
The whole concept of “good” “bad” and
“better” gets mingled with personal
preference, though. People say a poem
is “better” when I think it only means
“I liked it”. It’s personal. If you’ve
ever winced through the choices of
one BAP year or another, I submit that
as evidence.
Should the best women submit more,
to more male editors? Are the sales numbers
in volumes different from the named titles?
I wish more meticulous professional analysis were out there. Actual science…
I have more female poets in my shelf.
I don;t know why. There’s tons of
“good” poetry, but things I really like..
..that’s rare. I say I like them the most,
not that they are best. I’ve seen “best”
that just went flat on me. It’s personal.
It’s not welding ships…it’s art.