REMEDIAL MATH

Grace Gives Thanks to Rebecca Treisman of the New Yorker: the number of women fiction writers has gone up under her tenure there.

However, the New Yorker is still 79% male overall.

Check out the full Grace research on the New Yorker here.

Why we need a Remedial Math class:

Grace has noticed some problems with the basic arithmetic skills of the editors at our leading American literary publications, so she's taking time out from her very busy humanities schedule to offer a bonus refresher math course:

Women writers still only make up, in general, about 20 percent of the bylines at our top publications in American letters. This is true even at many of our favorite young fresh upstarts. Grace suggests that you make it a habit of counting bylines, and remember that bylines translate into having a writing career or not, health insurance or not, that kind of very basic survival for women writers.

In the meantime, check out the numbers:

THE NEW YORKER:

Moby Lives documents the trend as far back as 2002, and when USA Today asks, New Yorker editor David Remnick promises a stronger female voice in the magazine.

Has it improved? Let's find out:

Homework for Grace's Remedial Math class this week: Count your bylines.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW:

At the last official count we know of, back in 2003, 72% of the reviews here were of books by men. Do men really write more books than women? Hmm. Maybe they do! The Grace Research Squad will get someone on that immediately.


BUT BACK TO THE DEEP THOUGHTS:

Grace does not believe that the liberal editors of these and many others of our most prestigious publications are secretly Rush Limbaugh. She is, however, very interested in the ramifications of a May 2005 article in the UK Observer that indicates that literary men simply are not very interested in reading books by women:

" . . . a gender gap remains in what people choose to read, at least among the cultural elite. Four out of five men said the last novel they read was by a man, whereas women were almost as likely to have read a book by a male author as a female. When asked what novel by a woman they had read most recently, a majority of men found it hard to recall or could not answer. Women, however, often gave several titles. The report said: 'Men who read fiction tend to read fiction by men, while women read fiction by both women and men."

What to make of this? You read what you want to read--reading is at its best when a desire-based endeavor in adulthood, like kissing. This information merits much more discussion. Perhaps a special seminar. Reading should be full of pleasure and no grown-up should feel constantly forced to read literature they absolutely have no interest in, although keeping an open mind and expanding one's horizons is always a good idea. The idea of trying to convince men to read more women writers, however, seems like a real snooze.

Very complicated. But we're not here for such a debate--remedial math is all about the numbers.

Well then, class, this wraps up our first round. Check the blog for announcements of our next session. And please do your homework--counting is easy and fun.

See you next time--
Grace



PS: EXTRA CREDIT: Do check out the, um, seminal Francine Prose article, "Scent of a Woman's Ink," from Harper's Magazine back in 1998. Below you will find a taste of Francine Prose's genius in this article--clicking through to the link to read her full argument is strongly suggested:

"So only a few paranoids (readers with a genuine interest in good writing by either gender) may feel that the literary playing field is still off by a few degrees. . . Of course, not even the most curmudgeonly feminist believes that accolades or sales should be handed out in a strict fifty-fifty split, or that equal-opportunity concessions should be made to vile novels by women. But some of us can't help noting how comparatively rarely stories by women seem to appear in the few major magazines that publish fiction, how rarely fiction by women is reviewed in serious literary journals, and how rarely work by women dominates short lists and year-end ten-best lists.

None of this, presumably, is a source of psychic--or financial--pain to a writer such as Danielle Steel, or to the authors of the mostly middlebrow books on which Oprah bestows her lucrative blessings. Commercial fictions--those that traffic in cliches, in titillation, in reassuring conventions, in suspense, gore, consumer and romantic fantasies--have, as it were, an autonomous existence, a trajectory with almost no relation to the more cerebral book-review pages and the literary prizes. But as any publisher will tell you, and many frequently and volubly do, writers of so-called serious literary fiction--work that is tough-minded, challenging, eloquent, disquieting, and demanding of its readers--depend far more heavily (indeed, almost entirely) on reviews to ensure that their books will break even and earn back their advances; this, in turn, enables their editors to convince wary marketing departments to publish the writer's subsequent works. A major prize frequently translates into a drastic increase in sales, which can firmly establish an author's formerly shaky career--though (perhaps needless to say) it is the same book that has sold weakly before the award and more strongly after its recognition.

Meanwhile, every writer knows that the desire for stronger sales has little to do with a craving for luxe apartments or racy cars: what writers buy with money is time--that is, time to write, time that would otherwise be spent in activities (teaching, waitressing) required for economic survival. To ask what effect critical neglect has on the careers of women writers is rather like inquiring into the health of the female population in cultures that place girl children at the bottom of the food chain.

And yet there are women writers of literary fiction: the species, however endangered, has not as yet been eradicated... Perhaps our apprehensions about the ways in which fiction by women is received are merely symptomatic of some feminist dementia?"