5 Lessons Learned from My Experiment #JustReadingWomen
Shortly after the Black Lives Matter protests started at the end of May, I picked up Why I am No Longer Talking to White People About Race, by Reni Eddo-Lodge. My immediate desire was to learn more about how Black people have experienced racism, but I found myself with an even broader takeaway.
The book made me reflect on how few Black authors were on my bookshelf, and what it meant. Although I had been aware of this problem, and even copied down a Guardian booklist of important works from Black authors and carried it around in my wallet for a year, Eddo-Lodge’s book was the first from the list that I had actually picked up.
Why? And what else was on my bookshelf?
I moved countries almost four years ago, so my bookshelf is a pretty solid indication of what current voices and interests are on my mind: lots of memoirs and Asian travel novels, books by and about Germans and Germany, psychology and spirituality, and of course, the classics. I did a quick tally and found a laughable eight books by POC authors. Then, I decided to tally up male vs. female authors: 15 books by women and 35 by men!
Before Eddo-Lodge, the last book I read by a black author was either Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, or Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah.
I considered continuing to only read Black authors, but I knew the problems on my bookshelf went beyond a lack of Black representation. And I also knew that the female authors on my bookshelf contributed to most of its diversity. What if I focused on reading authors of color while maintaining a broad openness to authors from all over the world? What if I committed to reading only women for the remainder of the year? What would I learn about what women write, which women I’d missed reading, and why my bookshelf was so white?
Lessons Learned #1: Women Write about Things I Care About
My reading objective is usually to quench my curiosity, without consideration to the author. And somehow, that has most often meant that I’m reading men. Is it that men write more books about subjects I care about? Since my new objective was representation and diversity, I figured I would start with that as a subject, too.
So I turned to my “meaning to read that” list and found Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. Although this had been in the back of my mind since it won the Booker prize in 2019, I had always found something that captured my momentary interests more, and thus hadn’t read it. The book experiments cleverly with form, telling a sprawling family history through a dozen fresh feminist perspectives. And little did I know, it touched on my favorite themes of identity and family history, subjects I’ve often sought out on their own. It was an amazing anytime-read. I followed it up with more stories of Black Britishness and read Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, which had a lot of resonance with the novel I have been writing. Although I’d been reading travel memoirs as comps to what I’m working on, Smith’s book gave me a different take on the idea that I’d been trying to flesh out.
Changing my author priorities didn’t change my reading topics, it simply gave me new perspectives on them.
Lessons Learned #2: You Guys, We All Don’t Read Enough Women
In casual conversation, I ended up telling a few friends about this task I’d set for myself. From women, I often received an affirmative nod, and maybe a few recommendations.
But not always.
Some people (men and women) asked me why, or told me what a shame it was that I wasn’t reading X, Y or Z author they recommended. Two of them literally gave me books by men.
Often, if I had asked for a book recommendation before stating my #JustReadingWomen qualification, friends would recommend books by male authors. Once I stated my preference though, different and new recommendations would come. Women as a “second thought,” as it were. Only one person — a man — who I had asked for a book recommendation without stating my #JustReadingWomen requirement recommended a female author.
Although women seem to read more female authors than men, it’s clear that people of all genders don’t read enough women, or recommend them enough.
Lessons Learned #3: How Bookstores Curate Books Matters
Looking at the book displays in bookstores became a new experience. Sometime in the summer, I walked into a well-trafficked indie bookstore and started picking up titles. I wanted to read them all but would put down each one just as quickly as I picked it up when I saw it was written by a man. Skimming an entire section of posed and advertised books (ones that lie flat, and not on their spines), I noticed about a dozen male authors and two female authors.
I often browse the recommended books when looking for something new to read. I count on the expert curation of independent bookstores to help me make interesting, fresh choices. And usually, my curiosity is not disappointed. But finally noticing how few female authors were in the section, I realized how much bookstores themselves had been contributing to the frequent male authorship on my shelves. And I also realized why I hadn’t read anything on my list of POC authors: I never see them in those stacks either!
It became a habit to look at the flat books in bookshops as a barometer of the bookstore’s diversity. Are there male and female authors? Are there authors of color? Maybe most importantly: if I’ve heard of every single book and author lying flat, what good is this section of the bookstore doing for the reader?
When women and BIPOC authors are so rarely in the display, it’s inevitable that the average bookstore browser won’t choose them first.
Lessons Learned #4: We Haven’t Heard of Most Women Authors
Generally, I read a lot of non-fiction and a lot of classics. Since the vast majority of “classics” are books written by white men and deemed “essential” by school systems and popular culture, this had always skewed my reading list. I wasn’t specifically trying to dis women, it’s just that women in the classics are limited to a few big ones, like Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, and Emily Dickinson, to name the ones that come easily to mind. I’ve read them all, but hadn’t gotten around to so many men on that list, simply because there are so many more. Having limited my reading list to classic — and not contemporary — authors had severely diminished my exposure to women.
In the realm of non-fiction, I like books about philosophy, psychology, and spirituality. Although women write these books, how many names do you know in these fields? Men have so much more name recognition when it comes to these “serious” categories, and the list of male comps to these authors is enormous.
All of these things dawned on me slowly, but then I picked up a book of essays by Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. So many of her essays about men in the arts resonated so much with different facets of this experience. One essay, “No Competition,” addresses this problem with literature.
Women are often not taken to be “serious” writers, to the point that many men never even read women authors. She cites a statistic that 80% of the audience for female authors are women, while women who read books by men make up only 50% of their audience. Men, it would seem, have achieved gender parity in their readership — a readership that remains much larger than that of women.
This was the hidden secret that had been coloring my reading list. And when you think about it historically, it makes sense. Emily Dickinson was so underappreciated by the literature scene that she remained unpublished through her lifetime. Mary Shelley, who wrote one of the most wildly popular Gothic novels of all time, Frankenstein, has been written off by many critics who want to credit her husband as a co-author of her work. Her husband, a poet whose name-recognition helped get her published and whose work she edited, is probably the reason so many of us know her today, and not her mother, the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft.
Even though Patricia Highsmith and Dorthy B. Hughes were both highly regarded mid-century crime novelists, why is Raymond Chandler the most frequently cited noir author? James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. are Civil Rights-era saints, but Audre Lorde and bell hooks are less well known outside of academic and activist circles.
I asked a friend who reads a lot of science fiction for a recommendation of a utopian novel with some specific utopian characteristics. I don’t read a lot of science fiction or fantasy, but I know the classics in the “future utopia” and fantasy genres: Orwell, Huxley, Lewis, Tolkien, Banks. My friend recommended The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin. I had never heard of her. Some of my other sci-fi/fantasy friends hadn’t either, although upon a little bit further inspection I realized what a popular and influential author she was. Octavia Butler was the only female author I had ever heard of in the context of science fiction, and I haven’t read her either. I have no good reason, but everyone thinks you should read Brave New World and 1984.
Hustvedt, a “serious” author herself, and an authority on neuroscience and art, experienced the lack of seriousness with which “the public” takes female authors firsthand. When interviewing a male author who had cited many authors who influenced him in his latest book, she asked why only one of the authors he listed was a woman. He replied, “No competition.” As if women authors didn’t compete or live in the same realm as male authors.
Hustvedt explores the literary world’s reception of “feminine” and “masculine” writing in her essay, and finally comes to a pretty solid conclusion:
When I look back at the “no competition” remark, I suppose I should be offended or righteously indignant, but that is not at all how I feel. What I feel is compassion and pity for a person who made a remark, no doubt in earnest, which is nevertheless truly silly… It is not enough to notice that a feminine text by a man and a feminine text by a woman are received differently or to call attention to numbers that represent sexual inequality in the world of letters. It is absolutely essential that men and women become fully conscious of what is at stake, that it is blazingly clear to every single one of us who cares about the novel that there is something at once pernicious and silly at work in our reading habits, that the fate of spurious homo-social contracts written under the aegis of fear, that such a clause is nothing short of “insane.”
A friend made a related argument to me when I told him about my self-imposed women-reading rule: “Since men, and often white men, have been the dominant frame for most of Western history, and have been given the most publishing opportunities, aren’t you cutting yourself off from a lot of knowledge and expertise if you cut them off of your reading list?”
Actually — no.
On the contrary, the fact is that although historically women didn’t get published as often as men, the ones that broke through and managed to be published were almost always exceptional because they had to be.
Reading female authors forced me to confront my own knowledge bias and explore authors that are maybe just as authoritative, but not as well-known or frequently read.
Lessons Learned #5: New Voices Lead to New Connections
Reading Ursula LeGuin meant that her name started coming up in a lot of conversations. One was with a friend who had read an essay that used one of LeGuin’s novels as a frame. I read the essay, The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture, and immediately ordered the non-fiction full-length book that it had inspired, by Nora Samaran.
In her book, Turn This World Inside Out, Samaran develops the concept of “nurturance culture,” a social structure that allows people of all genders to bring their full selves and emotions into relationship without judgments, in conversation with other intersectional feminists. Although her idea is far from the otherworldly utopia that LeGuin creates in her fiction, both women’s books don’t simply complain about social ills they don’t like; they create new societies based on feminist values.
Following female authors and learning about who inspired them can lead one down an entirely different reading path because one choice usually instigates another.
Reading List
Although it’s only November and I’m continuing my commitment to #JustReadingWomen until the end of the year, I already know that this experiment will transform my reading list and my choice of books long into the future.
With that, here’s what I’ve been reading:
Why I’m No Longer Talking About Race to White People, Reni Eddo-Lodge
Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo
Swing Time, Zadie Smith
Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture, Nora Samaran
The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuin
Educated, Tara Westover
A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, Siri Hustvedt
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin
She Would Be King, Wayetu Moore
All About Love, bell hooks
And a few bonus recommendations you might not have read:
The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story, Hyeonseo Lee
Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino, with special reference to the essay Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, Patty Yumi Cottrel
The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, Audre Lorde
