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  Why Are There No Great Women Writers (Yawn)

  Posted Wednesday, March 04, 2009 11:23 AM | By E.J. Graff

  Well, Dayo, if the Guardian is making a reading list, you can bet it's going to be overwhelmingly male and European. How you've lived your life influences what you like to read. Am I the only one who thinks it's silly to pretend otherwise, that it's ridiculous to pretend that we can be Platonic Guardians deciding absolute merit?

  Which brings me into the discussion of Why Are There No Great Women Writers—which I sat out last week, since it always makes me really, really sleepy. Maybe I just got worn out by the English dept. culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s. Or maybe it reminds me too much of the enraged fights my father and brothers used to have over who was the greatest baseball player of all time—fights that sent me off to my room, where (being a total nerd) I escaped into War and Peace. Is Edith Wharton better or worse than Herman Melville? Is Jane Austen better or worse than Evelyn Waugh? Are Great Pitchers Better or Worse than Great Catchers or Great Hitters or Great All-Around Players? Why even debate it, when we need all of them to enjoy the game?

  But when it comes to the Platonic Guardians making their lists of 1,000 necessary books, well, whether because of nature, nurture, or culture, men and women—on average—have different interests and tastes in life. Not all of us, not all the time; I find reading chick lit to be as much fun as a bumpy flight in a tiny prop plane, while I couldn't put down Bleak House. But on average, over time, what women and men find more riveting tends to be different.
  

  So here's a modest proposal. Why not have separate prizes—and lists—for male and female writers? The queer community realized long ago that we would slit one another's throats (figuratively speaking) if we had to decide whether Frank O'Hara was Better or Worse than Adrienne Rich—so our groups give prizes for Gay Poetry and Lesbian Poetry, and so on. Why can't all lit prizes—or lists of great literature—do the same?

  Now I have to go take my nap.

  Filed under: women writers, great american novel, women authors

About E.J. Graff

• E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

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