The XX Factor: What women really think.

Do Women Novelists Really Work in "Miniature"?

Do women novelists work in "miniature"? This was the question posed by the cover piece in the New York Times Book Review this weekend. The piece was a review of Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women, a novel that offers a canny fictional portrait of how women's rights have (and have not) evolved over time. In the book (which I haven't read in full yet) Walbert tries to summarize women's history by dramatizing it. At the opening of the piece, the review's author, Leah Hager Cohen, restates Virginia Woolf's famous quote about how we see men and women's novels differently: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.” Ahh, I thought. Hager Cohen is going to take on the old dichotomies and demolish them! And she's going to do so in the Book Review itself, one of the few literary edifices that still shapes people's careers—and itself sometimes reflects these same old fallacious assumptions. She is going to create a revolution from within!

Alas, no. In fact, this review is a prime example of what I'll now call literary Stockholm Syndrome, in which women reviewers and writers all too eagerly embrace the sexist—and hell, yes, let's call it what it is—terms by which women's writing is still evaluated. An example: ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)