Faulkner’s “real life” Dilsey lived and died (one hundred seven years old) walking distance from the world-famous writer to whose books, language (and self) she contributed so much—never enabled to read a word he had written, let alone write; tell in her own powerful language, her own imaginings, reality.
Camus, Dreiser, had unlettered mothers. Remarkable women by their son’s testimony. Lost writers?
How many of us who are writers have mothers, grandmothers, of limited education; awkward, not at home, with the written word, however eloquent they may be with the spoken one? Born a generation or two before, we might have been they.
The dying Ellen Glasgow writes in The Woman Within of the “Mammy” of her childhood who first roused, nurtured, her love of language, her imagination; taught her endless stories and encouraged her to create her own. They had a compact: when the little girl learned to read and write, she would teach her too. It never came to be. Glasgow’s tears, the half-century after, are felt on the page.
These last few decades, we have begun to have an impressive body of prison writing by men previously near-illiterate (or the kind of illiteracy consisting of never reading books, and inarticulateness in written expression). Men writers, not women. Even in prison circumstances, there is a marked difference in circumstances and encouragement.
*Her famous “And Ain’t I A Woman?” speech is a perfect statement of “real life” Women in Fiction—and in Fact.
ONE OUT OF TWELVE PP. 23–24
ONE OUT OF TWELVE—THE FIGURES FOR WRITERS ACCORDED RECOGNITION
Proportion of Women Writers to Men Writers*
Included in Twentieth-Century Literature Courses: One Out of Seventeen (6% women, 94% men)
In 223 undergraduate course offerings and bibliographies (1970–1976) at community, state, private, colleges and universities, one woman writer was studied to every seventeen men writers. The disparity would have been even more marked, if the proportions of women writers studied at the graduate level, or permitted as subjects for master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, had been included. As a guess: 2% women, 98% men?
Criticism and Critical Surveys in Fiction: One Out of Thirteen to One Out of Thirty
Authors, editors of works of criticism: One out of Fifteen (7% women, 93% men):
Of seventy-six works listed in the Poets and Writers Directory, seventy were written or edited by men, four by women, and two co-edited. One of the four by women was on writers who are women, and so identified by the title. Not one of the books considering only men writers included “male” in the title to similarly define their content, nor would it have occurred to their authors to do so.*
Inclusion in critical works:
Name in a list, no discussion of work: One out of Thirteen
Page-space accorded: One page out of Thirty**
To illustrate: in Tony Tanner’s City of Words—American Fiction 1950–1970, there are 445 pages. Plath is written of on two pages, mentioned three times otherwise; Sontag is given four pages and three mentions. No other women are discussed. In Alfred Kazin’s 317 page Bright Book of Life, forty-three concern women writers. They are segregated into one chapter, not for purposes of illumination, discovery, or because of similarities in theme or style—legitimate reasons for grouping and a different matter from segregation —but simply because they are women. One page in the chapter on Southern writers includes O’Connor and McCullers.
No more than 10 percent of the women writers named in “One Out of Twelve” are discussed in the critical works surveyed.
Critical Reference Works: About One Out of Eleven (9% women, 91% men)
Contemporary World Literature: 2,519 entries, 178 of them on women. One out of fourteen or fifteen on a world scale.
Contemporary Literary Criticism; Cumulative Index to Authors: 540 entries, 87 on women.
Contemporary Novel; A Checklist of Critical Literature in Britain and America Since 1945: 181 listed, 30 of them women.
Modern American Literature; A Library of Literary Criticism: about 290 entries, 42 women.
With the exception of a few authors, the page space accorded women is comparatively meager.
Interviews (selection according to critical judgment): One Out of Ten (10% women, 90% men)
As instance, the Paris Review interviews—considered a literary honor. In seventy-four interviews—to the end of 1975—only seven were women.
Anthologies, Textbooks: One Out of Eleven (9% women, 91% men)
The Anthologies Themselves: Ninety books were in the 1976 sampling; twelve included only men authors.* A listing of forty-three anthologies by title, editor, and percentage, is on pages 190–192. Editors: Close to One out of Thirteen (8% women, 92% men): Sixty-four anthologies are listed in the Writers Directory (CODA); five were edited by women, one co-edited.
Inclusion in Selective Writers Directories: About One Out of Seven (13% women, 87% men)**
These include Contemporary Novelists (all advisers male); 200 Contemporary Authors; Twentieth Century Authors: World Authors (1950–1970)—of the latter, 960 writers, 125 of them women.
Prizes, Awards—One Out of Six? Seven? Eight? (Difficult to come to a figure, because some awards are considered weightier honors than others.)
Book Review Index (sampling in 1974, 1975, 1976): Between One out of Six and Seven.
Books in Print, 1975 (sampling from 100 pages): One out of Five or Six. (A like sampling in 1971 indicated One out of Four or Five. I would welcome a computer study.)
Memberships: About One out of Four.
P.E.N. American Center, 1970, 1971, 1975, about One out of Four. Listed in CODA Poets and Fiction Writers Directories, between One out of Four and Five (20% to 25% women).
All Fiction Published:
Fiction Catalog (sampling) 1971–1974, about One out of Four.
Anthologies of Student Work (prose, poetry): Less than One out of Three.
These include Intro, New Campus Writing, and Twenty Years of Stanford Stories. (What happened with those young women?)
Films, Videotape (as listed in the Directory of American Fiction Writers):
Of 123 films whose subjects are writers, only nine are of women; five others include women; of 287 videotapes, fifty-eight are of women.
A Sampling of the Ratio of Women Writers to Men Writers in Anthologies and Textbooks*
Fiction—Anthologies, Ethnic (CODA, Poets and Writers Directory, classification)
Poetry Anthologies
A recent New York Times reviewer (April 1976), making the prevalent (unexamined) assumption, chastised Ellen Moers, author of the superb Literary Women, for limiting her subject matter to women and “exiling the other half of the writing race.” As these figures establish, women are the exiled. By the most generous estimate, simply the percentage of fiction of all manner and kind published, men are three-quarters of the writing race; in the more selective and indicative estimates, they are 88% to 98%.
*These are round figure, rough estimates that include both the 1971 findings used in the original talk, and 1976 ones which confirm. As only the conclusions remain from 1971, most titles herein are 1976 work, in or on what was readily accessible in limited time.
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 24
*Among their titles: Adversity and Grace: Studies in Recent American Literature; Beyond the Wasteland, A Study of the American Novel in the 1960s; Contemporary American-Jewish Literature, Critical Essays; Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post Contemporary American Fiction.
**The proportion would have been more accurate had the number of pages in books concerned only with male writers also been figured in.
*I am looking forward to the anthologies (and works of criticism) which, though including women writers only, will be titled: The Major Young Poets; Innovative Fiction, Stories for the Seventies; American Literature, 1950–1975; or: Critical Studies in Recent American Literature. Or conversely, when only men writers are being discussed, The Male Imagination or Literary Men.
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**The percentage figure is misleading. Page space accorded women writers is considerably less than that given to writers who are men; on rough estimate—one out of eighteen.
Especially in view of some of the men included, the omission of women writers whose work is far more vital, substantial, important is indefensible. Noticeably absent are black women writers. (Even among women authors chosen for inclusion, several of the directories—in disadvantageous contrast—have a preponderance of popular, genre, “fluff” women writers.)
*Most of these titles listed in Poets and Writers Directory.
The leeching of belief, of will, the damaging of capacity, begin so early.
THE BABY; THE GIRL-CHILD; THE GIRL; THE YOUNG WRITER-WOMAN
Little put-upon sisters . . .
What keyhole have we slipped through,
What door has shut? . . .
Everything has happened.*
[Baby] Bess who has been fingering a fruit-jar lid—absently, heedlessly drops it—aimlessly groping across the table, reclaims it again. Lightning in her brain. She releases, grabs, releases, grabs. I can do. Bang! I did that. I can do. I! A look of neanderthal concentration is on her face. That noise! In triumphant, astounded joy she clashes the lid down. Bang, slam, whack. Release, grab, slam, bang, bang. Centuries of human drive work in her; human ecstasy of achievement, satisfaction deep and fundamental as sex: I can do, I use my powers, I! I! Wilder, madder, happier the bangs. The fetid fevered air rings with . . . Bess’s toothless, triumphant crow. Heat misery, rash misery transcended.**
Was the beginning sexual?
I remember a girlboy in one
(Although haunted by father pain)
Sexless like tree shoots, roving
Along seemingly flowerless trees
So sensual, she lay on tree trunk
Or quick-changed, burrowed into
Silts and banks. I remember her bridling
In the sex of a stallion (never the mare)
Driven along by string reins, mouthbit.
Did He draw She? (In her sleep
She heard them argue, never in her
Dreams dare he come.) . . . I don’t doubt
Him, snake swaying like a man, in the tree
Drawing her away from her true god.*
Looking back at poems I wrote before I was twenty-one, I’m startled because beneath the conscious craft are glimpses of the split I even then experienced between the girl who wrote poems, who defined herself in writing poems, and the girl who defined herself by her relationships with men . . .
—Adrienne Rich
. . . Oh, the jealous and anxious passion I had for solitude, O solitude of my young days! You were my refuge, my panacea, the citadel of my youthful pride. With what might and main did I cling to you—and how afraid I was even then of losing you! I trembled at the mere thought of the more ruthless and less rare ecstasy of love! At the thought of losing you I felt already demeaned. And yet . . . who can resist the pull of love? To become only a woman—how paltry! Yet I hastened eagerly toward that common goal.
Did I hesitate a minute, one solitary minute, standing between your beloved specter, O solitude, and the menacing apparition of love? . . . I don’t know.
—Colette
As lonely in her trouble as if she had been the only girl in the civilised world of that day who had come out of her school life with a soul untrained for inevitable struggles; with no other part of her inherited share in the hard won treasures of thought which generations of painful toil have laid for the race of men, than shreds and patches of feeble literature and false history.
—George Eliot
And in all the usual college teaching . . . little to help that young woman understand the source or nature of this inexplicable draining self-doubt, loss of aspiration, of confidence.
It is in these years that another significant turn to silencing takes place. What was needed to confirm and vivify has been meager—and occasional, accidental. The compound of what actively denies, divides, vitiates, has been powerful—and continuous, institutionalized. The young unhelped “sexless, bound in sex” being is now in
. . . the glade
Wherein Fate sprung Love’s ambuscade, . . .
To flush me in this sensuous strife. . . .
Of that which makes the sexual feud
And clogs the aspirant life.*
There was that . . . conception, which I’d been brought up to and wanted to believe, that I should find the solution to my life, not just companionship, in a single, other person. . . .
At Iowa . . . a classmate told me he believed that to be a woman poet was “a contradiction in terms.” . . .
Princeton . . . intensified my own sense of dichotomy between “woman” and “poet.” I knew a number of men who wrote, but no women. Work by women was still sparsely represented in contemporary poetry anthologies. . . . Men’s praise of poetry didn’t seem to go much beyond Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, whose work I admired but couldn’t then use, in the deep sense that writers use the discoveries of other writers as steps toward their own growth.
. . . From the age of twenty-two to the age of twenty-six, I worked strenuously and perfectly seriously on a book of poems (a book, not just poems), then “gave up poetry” and never tried to publish but one of them.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you it was all right to write?” asked the psychiatrist who came along much later: “Yes, but not to be a writer.” Behind me lay the sort of middle-class education that encourages writing, painting, music, theater, so long as they aren’t taken too seriously, so long as they can be set aside once the real business of life begins. . . .*
Now she is still not beautiful but more
Moving than before, for time has come
When she shall be delivered; some-
one must have, move her, or the doors
Be shuttered over, the doorlids shut, her
Eyes’ lies shattered. In the spume
Of a triple wave she lives: sperm,
Man and life’s mate break like flags upon her shore.
Marriage must take her now, or the sly
Inquirer, inviting her to ship for his sake,
Will share all islands inland with her, her sky
No one else shares, will slake
Conquerlust. Seas wash away her ties
While through her thigh-trees water strikes like a snake.*
Everything has happened!
* “The Babysitters,” Sylvia Plath.
**From Yonnondio, by the young (twenty-year-old) mother-writer who was myself.
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, PP. 27–30
*From “Adam and Eve and the Child” in Ladder of the World’s Joy, Sarah Appleton.
*From Melville’s “After the Pleasure Party.”
How many making up the eleven in the possible twelve founder here?
(With more than is recognized, it has not been a leaving of literature, but an attempt at solution, a keeping and using of it within precedented woman ways. So is born the enabler, the encourager, the wife, the helper; where there is economic imperative—that mammoth silencer only indicated in this book—the teacher, librarian, editor. And still the want to write does not die; it waits, unsleeping, sleeping, unsleeping.)
*Jane Cooper. Maps and Windows.
*“Eve,” written in 1947 when Jane Cooper was twenty-three, was put away with other poems, and not published until Maps and Windows, in 1974.
THE DAMNATION OF WOMEN
I. Within the Injunction
Perfection is terrible.
It cannot have children.
It tamps the womb.
Was it so that “most women writers of distinction never questioned, or at least accepted [a few sanctified] the patriarchal injunction;* this different condition for achievement not imposed on men”?
A few sanctified, yes. Willa Cather:
Art of every kind is an exacting master, more so than Jehovah. He says only “Thou shalt have
no other gods before me.” Art, Science, Letters cry: “Thou shalt have no other gods at all.” They accept only human sacrifices.
For Ellen Glasgow there was not even a question. She answered the literary man who told her,
The best advice I can give you is to stop writing and go back to the South and have some babies. The greatest woman is not the woman who has written the finest book, but the woman who has had the finest babies
that “all I ever wanted was to write books. And not ever had I felt the faintest wish to have babies.”
Henry Handel Richardson (quoted in “Silences”) and Katherine Anne Porter acquiesced; it was one or the other:
There are enough women to do the childbearing and the childrearing. I know of none who can write my books,
wrote Richardson. Porter told an interviewer:
Now I am all for human life, and I am all for marriage and children and all that sort of thing, but quite often you can’t have that and do what you were supposed to do, too. Art is a vocation, as much as anything in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. . . . We really do lead almost a monastic life, you know.
In that long roll of childless women writers who paid the cost of being able to do their best work, was there not one who felt it as damnation? Not one? Silence, reticence, until with Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, in our century, an anguish, a longing to have children, breaks into expression. In private diaries and letters only.
Virginia Woolf, writing of the causes of her descent into madness as a young woman:
. . . and all the devils came out—heavy black ones—to be 29 & unmarried—to be a failure—childless—insane too, no writer . . .
At thirty-eight:
Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss?
. . . It’s having no children, living away from friends, failing to write well. . . .
Silences Page 24
