Comments on: Where Are the Renaissance Women?

By: BethanyTri

BethanyTri — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:09:04 +0000

How many great authors are slipping through the net because they are unproven? Everyone has to start somewhere and, sadly, the bias against young female authors is still very much alive.

By: irsbod

irsbod — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:51:03 +0000

Are big publishing houses still not giving women a fair chance? Surely they'd be mad to adopt this attitude.

By: vpostrel

vpostrel — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:24:41 +0000

I wonder if a publishing house would buy Gödel, Escher, Bach today, regardless of its author's gender.

By: vpostrel

vpostrel — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 20:20:26 +0000

At the risk of generalizing wildly from a single datapoint–my own work–the market for synthesis rather than polemics, journalism-you-can-use, or narrative is miniscule, regardless of gender. Even Malcolm Gladwell presents most of his work as profiles, complete with the personal descriptions that so annoyed Richard Posner when he reviewed Blink in The New Republic. That said, women are even less interested than men in reading, or producing, work without lots of personal content. Hence, the brilliant but stereotypically female essays of my Atlantic colleagues Caitlin Flanigan and Sandra Tsing-Loh.

For the record, my second book, The Substance of Style, did not fall into the libertarian-politics category. It did have more female readers than TFAIE, but, as far as I can tell, men still predominated. Subject matter also makes a difference. The book I'm working on now, about glamour, is by far the biggest big-think thing I've done and will probably have a higher percentage of female readers than either of my first two books.

By: Amy Abatangle

Amy Abatangle — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:36:26 +0000

More troubling to me than the issue of gender in “big idea” books is the more general paucity of sincere intellectual discourse in the US. There has never been a culture in America (at least in my lifetime) that supported the intellectual-as-celebrity. If such a thing ever existed, it has been replaced (at least on the bestseller list) by the kind of B-school fodder that is self-commodifying and disposable (The World is Flat, Wisdom of Crowds, Long Tail, etc.). I hesitate to even call these “big idea” books; instead, they are masturbatory extrapolations of single, often rather obvious, ideas. Part of the rush to embrace them comes from the simultaneous desire to fetishize the new and validate the current milieu. Their titles are passphrases for entry into certain business circles, certainly the most old boy of old boys’ clubs. One must wonder if their “ideas” are so infectious or if instead a market has been created for a work that confers value upon itself simply by declaring itself valuable. I think this applies equally well to the books themselves, the MBAs who gain street cred by brandishing them and the start-up companies who count them in the footnotes of their business plans.

By: Joanne McNeil

Joanne McNeil — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:14:36 +0000

Thanks for the comments! The more that I think about this, the more I feel it might be just that women are less inclined to label situations in stark b/w terms like “the wisdom of crowds.” Just about every guy i know has told me at some point, “Joanne, there are two kinds of people: (sharks or guppies/runners or walkers/sheep or herdsman/etc)…” I don’t think women label their ideas in this way — not that it’s an intellectual challenge they are incapable of, or couldn’t do if an editor or publisher encouraged them to write a book in that style.

By: claire

claire — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:26:17 +0000

don’t forget barbara ehrenreich. and barbara tuchman. the two babses are called a journalist and a historian respectively, but they’re big ideas people.

By: Kathleen de la Pena McCook

Kathleen de la Pena McCook — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 14:23:13 +0000

So long as women destroy other women–Samantha Power calling Hillary Clinton a monster–women won’t be taken seriously. Did Obama destroy Hillary? No, he used her to extend his base. Women will chew each others’ ankles off to get an edge and men seem to pick up on this. Look at the hostility at Elfriede Jelinek when she won the Lit. Nobel. She is a big thinker. The Sarah Palin attacks in this thread are another indicator. As long as women’s first response is pettiness the big ideas won’t be noticed.
Don’t think that men aren’t smirking at this.

By: Joanne McNeil

Joanne McNeil — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:20:09 +0000

Also, thanks for pointing out here that Marisha Pessl is the Sarah Palin of literature. It’s true.

By: Joanne McNeil

Joanne McNeil — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:19:02 +0000

Part of the problem here is defining what is a Malcolm Gladwell-esque book. I would say Rob Walker, James Surowiecki, Chris Anderson, and others fall into the category. And all of these are kind of business/marketing/ad/technology culture books. Which is why those women authors aren’t “big ideas” writers in the same way.

And it’s probably my mistake to throw in a novelist like Helen Dewitt, as that just ads to the confusion, but she’s so good at digressing in an compelling way and that’s another Gladwell technique. Were Virgina Heffernan to write a book, she might fall under the umbrella. But there are so few female journalists who are even trusted with that intellectual responsibility