Maxine Kumin, the author of many poetry collections, including Up Country (1973), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and most recently, Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 (2010), which was published last spring, said:
Until the Women’s Movement, it was commonplace to be told by an editor that he’d like to publish more of my poems, but he’d already published one by a woman that month; this attitude was the rule rather than the exception, until the mid-sixties. The highest compliment was to be told, ‘You write like a man.’
–Maxine Kumin
What do you think about what Maxine Kumin had to say?? Have we come a long way? Or do you think we still have farther to go? I do. Women writers are still not published as often as men are. Statistics are taken every year and we have yet to catch up. But I’m hopeful that we will. It just may not be in my lifetime. Think about it, J.K. Rowling didn’t want to use her feminine name. And there are a lot of other women writers who are using their initials, too.
Questions? Comments? I respond to all.
P.S. I am an ex-shrink who writes award-winning novels. Check out my books here.
I don’t know about the publishing world, but I can speak for the clergy world, and I imagine one is as good a barometer as another. So, I would say that we still have a long way to go. Just as above, clergy women who take on masculine characteristics to do their job are the ones who succeed in the church. They become willing to compromise their true selves often times in order to fit in and be accepted, and then gradually become just another one of the “boys”! Their success is not a sign of progress for women, it is an indication that nothing has changed, it just looks different.
Your post prompted me to look at this week’s New York Times Review of Books (online. I found 8 reviews of books by women and 7 reviews of books by men. That was a pleasant surprise, as often I still see that news stories, articles and reviews focus more on men. There have been a lot of changes since I was a kid, when I wanted to be the first woman to go to Yale and the first woman to climb Mt. Everest, both of which happened before I was old enough. My thanks to all the “uppity” women for all the achievements so far!
Great comments. I’d like to think we’ve come a long way, but it also seems that we still have a long way to go.
Anne, the NY Times was criticized just last month by Jodi Picoult and another female writer (sorry, I can’t remember her name at the moment) that 70% of their book reviews are of books by men. So maybe they were more equal this week in reaction to that.
I think a lot of women have become complacent or maybe just plain tired. We have so much on our plates with full time jobs, families, etc, that its hard to be always sounding the alarm at the inequalities.
Now I think it is the environment and earth that are calling out for our attention (also the feminine, from how I understand it, and symbolic of how we treat women in our culture). So I think we are still fighting the same battles, just on different playing fields.
From one of my wonderful email subscribers:
“It’s still a “man’s” world basically, and women are always going to have to go the extra mile. That having been said, I’d like to add that women must support other women. We must buy and promote music, art and writing by women. Compared to the volumes available out there created by men, women’s contributions are minuscule. Let me say as well that I am not some “man hating”, banner waving feminist. I was actually closer to my father than I was to my mother. In the poetry circle that I belong to in Paris, I only read, recite or share poetry by women. I will present something by Maxine Kumin next Wednesday. We have come a long way indeed, but we still have a long way to go. Sisters of all ethnicities, cultures, sexualities, beliefs and ages must find a common thread and weave our tapestry together. We could herald a new beginning. That’s my two cents worth.”
As far as writing goes, I don’t feel discriminated against because of my gender – neither as a writer nor as a buyer/reader who gravitates towards books written by women. But I’m certainly not behind the scenes of the publishing world, so maybe ignorance is bliss?