Where Are the Renaissance Women?
Checking Google Reader this morning I found Virgina Postrel linking to two posts on the lack of women writing “big ideas” books (26th Story and Galleycat.) Meanwhile, C-Monster and Art Fag City both linked to Personism who noticed “The IDEA Conference” didn’t book female speakers. What’s going on here? Are there no modern day Renaissance women?
HarperStudio editor Julia Cheiffetz’s original point of discussion was the omission of women in Macolm Gladwell’s new book on “high-achievers”:
The omission of women in Outliers says more about the nature of “big think” books than it does about Mr.Gladwell. Since the publication of The Tipping Point we’ve seen a proliferation of books that present a single, shrink-wrapped idea as a means of understanding the world at large: books like The World is Flat, The Black Swan, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Long Tail. Now some of these books (the ones written by behavioral economists) tend toward the gee-whiz-isn’t-that-interesting set like Predictably Irrational, Freakonomics, and The Undercover Economist. But the point is, all of them promise access to a club whose sole activity is the exchange of ideas; all of them promise, however covertly, to make us feel smarter. And all of them are written by men.
It is hard to know whether women are better at telling stories than propagating ideas (I’m thinking of Susan Orlean, Mary Roach, Karen Abbott), or whether the intellectual audacity required to sell our hypotheses about the world simply isn’t in our genetic makeup. But until we get in the ring and start claiming our own big ideas in book form, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised if current discourse leaves us on the sidelines.
Gladwell’s editor, by the way, responds, a “big part of the book’s argument investigates the arbitrary, often sexist ways women have been summarily excluded and denied opportunity and success.”
From a comment in a related post by Alison Flood in the Guardian:
Part of it is innate to women – simplistically speaking – i am sure we have all seen this but men are just naturally more confident – in my family and my peers where my girlfriends have brothers – the boys were encouraged to speak out at parties and anything they said was considered witty and insightful… there was a definite double standard – i would get grades far better than my brother but when he came home with no D’s or F’s he was congratulated and yet I never got D’s or F’s?!
I think men naturally think what they do is probably a good idea and they tend to get more support and then they go ahead with it.
Whereas I meet loads of smart women but they dont realize it or they think fair enough – i am rather academic but hardly groundbreaking and they dont go forward with the idea.
Indeed. Women aren’t encouraged to fake it ’til you make it. Instead we study and study so that no one will mistake confidence for bluffing (Unless, of course, the woman is Sarah Palin.)
For whatever reason, the perception of a female intellectual is usually that she is linear in her reasoning and interests. She doesn’t think about “the intersects” of this subject with that, but instead specializes in a single field. There are countless great woman-penned history books, and many women write biographies, but the bestseller trend right now is nonfiction that attempts to explain the world in a big, blustery way and women just aren’t authoring them.
Postrel, author of the very good big idea book The Future and Its Enemies, writes “Maybe because women don’t buy our books?” I would be interested in seeing the numbers, because I find it hard to believe readership of Freakonomics and The Tipping Point isn’t equal between genders — if not more women reading. (If fewer women read Postrel’s books it’s probably an outlier. She’s associated with libertarian politics, which has a notorious gender imbalance.)
Ron Hogan names Susan Faludi and Naomi Klein, off the top of his head, while admitting to find, “Cheiffetz’s distinction between ’storytellers; and ‘big thinkers,’ and the suggestion that these two types of writing might play out along gender lines at least as far as what sells, intriguing.”
There are a good number of women speakers at TED and PopTech. And women tend to make up half of the annual MacArthur Fellows. But too few women writers are making creative connections and sweeping observations like Gladwell, Lawrence Weschler, and others. I’m struggling now to think of more examples than I can count on my hands. Without Susan Sontag, it’s hard. The novelist Helen DeWitt, is continually described as “brilliant” and “brainy,” and makes those kind of digressions that are especially difficult in fiction. There’s Laura Kipnis, but because she writes about feminism it’s pretty much only women who know she exists. Sherry Turkle and Rebecca Solnit write those kinds of books, (although neither recently.) Solnit, by the way, wrote a wonderful essay last spring that could be related to all of this.
I wonder if it might be that women instead write books of essays without a unifying theme. Contemporary essays, as explained in this um, essay –by the woman writer– Cristina Nehring, are less intellectually daring than in the past. “The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable.”
No doubt there is existing cultural hesitation in identifying women as big idea thinkers. Just look at the many examples of publishing houses advertising science fiction written by women as literary fiction. Which is why I find it hard to imagine publishers ever selling a “big ideas” book written by a woman as just that. Mary Roach might have been encouraged to write Stiff with a long arch (If The Selfish Gene can be considered a big ideas book, than one can arise from any subject.) Even Klein and Faludi are considered specialists in activist-left politics and gender studies, rather than digression-heavy sprawling thinkers. Likewise, I can’t imagine The Boston Globe ever green-lighting a woman who wants to write a blog called Brainiac or the NYT “Ideas”. Or Wired with a columnist Ms. Know-It-All. Look at how Marilyn vos Savant has for so long been ghetto-ized in Parade magazine, with a column amounting to not much more than a Sudoku of word problems.
I don’t doubt that a big publishing house would buy Gödel, Escher, Bach were it written by a woman, but I do doubt they would accept a pitch of that scope from an untested young female writer. Which is a shame, because I would read it and so would you.
Art by Jansson Stegner
Previously:
Science Fiction: Women Do It Better
Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
Related links:
- A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Rebecca Solnit
- Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
- The American Way of Death by Jessica Milford
- On Photography by Susan Sontag
- The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
- Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women, ABCNews
- “Brilliant Women” in the National Portrait Gallery
-
vpostrel
-
vpostrel
-
irsbod
-
BethanyTri
-
A collection of interesting ideas curated by
Joanne McNeil. About ➚
Sponsors
