When I was three years old I lost my favorite doll. I didn’t want another one, I wanted that one. To ease my hysteria my mom wrote a children’s book about my woes. She illustrated each page with me, there I was, a chubby cheeked, toddler Emerald with buckteeth. In the story I was called Bread Ball because when I was a wee little thing I would scrape the inside of french bread, roll it into a ball, then eat it. The story my mother wrote was my own, a girl loses her doll, is really upset about it, only to discover she had left it at her grandma’s house.
Ultimately, the story, my mother’s gesture, meant a lot more to me than my silly doll and it was at three that I decided that, like my mommy, I wanted to be a writer. I’d scribble nonsense, chicken scratch with crayons and pretend it was cursive. I could barely read.
When I got to my first creative writing workshop in college, my professor asked me who my favorite writer was and I said it was Thomas Hardy. Something about Tess of D’urbervilles and Jude The Obscure‘s existential sadness appealed to me. I listed a few others like George Saunders, David Sedaris, and Roland Barthes. Suddenly I realized that I couldn’t think of a single woman writer whom I aspired to be or looked up to.
I wondered why. I wondered why I would see a woman’s name on a book and feel a little repelled. I felt sexist. I was seventeen and trying to figure out who I was. The best way to do that is to figure out who you are not and seeing the frilly, pink and ornamental book covers targeted to women at Barnes and Noble made me squirm. The books looked like they were written for a “certain kind of girl” that I didn’t identify with. I wasn’t exposed to many authors, only what my public school and pop culture had to offer. The only female writers I remember reading in class were Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley and Lois Lowry.
The more I thought about it the more I realized that female writers were basically excluded from my public school curriculum but also how much I enjoyed the female writers I did read. Luckily, in my creative writing class we read the short stories of Flannery O’ Connor, Alice Munro, Grace Paley, Joyce Carol Oats and plenty of women (and men) who were inspiring, interesting, weird and offbeat.
I felt really stupid but I didn’t know women’s writing could be that and I didn’t know how brainwashed I was. The male experience was always painted as universal, as the most human experience, while women were always written through the eyes of men—reduced. I didn’t necessarily relate to the men in these stories but I related to the broad themes of existentialism, isolation, alienation and social expectations—so why did I think the female experience would be different or inferior to the male experience when those men were examining such general themes? The answer is simple: everything in culture tells us that women’s experiences don’t matter as much.
There are so many lists of great American authors and some of them make mention of only a handful of women or none at all. Women, all people, are conditioned to watch TV shows, movies and read stories about men coming of age, of men being heroes, of men evolving but hardly do we ever get a story about a woman doing the same.
The reason why I was repelled by women authors in the first place was because those book covers were condescending to women. No, it’s not because pink and cute means dumb, it’s because everything from the synopsis to the marketing of these stories is reductive and trivializes the actual story being told. The marketing assumes that on the surface all women are pink-loving, vapid beauty queens or want to be. Doesn’t matter if you’re reading about murder or politics, slap a tube of lipstick onto the cover of The Bell Jar and women will read it because “all women love lipstick.”
Moreover many of the books that are published “for women” are the ones that reduce the female experience to finding some lame guy to complete her. I can’t think of a single male-driven story where finding a wife is the resolution. Even if the guy gets the girl, it’s after he kills the bad guy and saves the day.
Truthfully, I believe, at least my experience tells me, is that the “Great Women Authors” of our time are deliberately made an afterthought, that they are often deliberately written out of history and are only presented to those who seek them out. Great women writers are reserved for the more open-minded academic classrooms, they’re reserved for the book lovers who type “great women authors” into their Google search. They weren’t apart of my classroom growing up and for those who aren’t lucky enough to go to college or to go to a college where women are considered equally important to literary history, you may never hear of them.
I grew up in a poor, Black and Latino neighborhood so why weren’t we reading Zora Neal Hurston, Octavia Butler or Zadie Smith? Wouldn’t that have been more appealing to my peers and me? In a high school where the girl to boy ration was 2 to 1, I barely remember reading anything by women or very many authors of color. Why is that? Why doesn’t The New York State Education Department believe women writers are important voices?’ We never even read Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson or anything from the Bronte sisters, like, c’mon!
It’s sad to say but I’ve been exposed to more brilliant women writers through Tumblr than I have through classrooms. As I navigated college my lists of favorite female authors grew to equal my list of favorite male authors but most importantly what grew was a deeper understanding of myself and my country.
Have you ever had someone say something to you that made you uncomfortable but you couldn’t figure out why? All of those thrown away comments about my body, my weight, about sex, about how even though I said I didn’t want children “I would change my mind,” how I felt, as a kid, that my femininity was a weakness, how the thought would enter my mind that maybe women were a little crazier. All these gendered thoughts, accusations, all those words like “slut,” “rape,” “sex,” “beauty,” all of those words began to paint a picture that became clearer. It was a picture that had been traced in my subconscious but that felt ineffable for so long.
It was that those born female will be treated differently than those born male. Women writers could acknowledge that society treated their male counterparts differently. That there was something quietly suffocating about growing up as a woman because there were very specific expectations about what you ought to being doing with your life and your body. Male authors had the privilege of not having to discuss sexism either because they were unaware of it, took it for granted or wanted to satiate their sexist values by portraying women as bat-shit-crazy inferiors.
Male authors had shaped how I saw women and thus, inadvertently myself. Women were always in an unenviable position, either victims at their most endearing or psychopaths at their least. As a writer I thought if I were to be a good writer I should read male writers, I should write like male writers. Men could explore the meaning of capitalism, of individualism, of humanity because they were seen as human beings.
They did not have to first acknowledge themselves as marginalized the way women do, which is part of the reason why women writers only get marketed for women readers. Women talking about how challenging it is to be a woman is perceived as only appealing to other women. Men aren’t supposed to be interested because to them either sexism isn’t real or it isn’t interesting.
Just think of how J.K. Rowling, S. E. Hinton and so many more women writers changed their names because they knew being identified as female would shrink their audience and eliminate the prospect of male readership.
What women offered me was invaluable when compared to male authors. I learned all about the dissolution of the American dream from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Herman Melville but I learned about what it means to be a women navigating those ideals in a society that often doesn’t want me to from Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith and Helen Gurley Brown. What I also learned is that being a woman doesn’t mean you have to get all preachy about what it means to be a woman.
The greatest statement a female author can make, and so many female authors have made it, is simply to write the way women actually are. Katniss Everdeen and Hermione Granger don’t need to constantly discuss the pangs of womanhood, yet they still manage to subvert sexist expectations because they are smart, capable and heroic. Amazing Amy in Gone Girl subverts the expectation that a likeable female character needs to do the right thing.
The importance of reading women authors isn’t merely to support women, I don’t like every women writer I encounter, it’s to shed light on the experience of women and to understand that our shit pretty much stinks too. We are human. SHOCKER.
For me, it gave me the vocabulary and grammar to understand my own identity and to relieve myself from some of the sexist thinking that had permeated my subconscious. For men, women authors can expose them to more authentic and dynamic female characters, moreover it can show them how men are also subjected to unfair expectations when the world wants to clearly define gender.
Lastly, women writers are important simply because they are. No ifs, ands, or buts.
The Importance Of Reading Women Authors
