RSS Feed
Publisher’s Weekly recently released their Best Books of 2009 list and it didn’t include a single woman author in the top ten. They half-heartedly acknowledge this in a editor’s note at the top…
We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz. We gave fair chance to the ‘big’ books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet. It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.
…but it doesn’t change the fact that no woman wrote a book worthy of the top ten, in their minds. They didn’t go back and change their methods upon realizing this. In addition, only one of the men in the top ten is a person of color.
PW also addresses this in a press release announcing the list:
We wanted to pick the best 10 and we came ready to mix it up, and although we were surprised that, when the dust settled, it wasn’t the most politically correct list—there are no women authors, for example—the balance of our top 100 reflects a remarkable diversity.
What exactly does “a remarkable diversity” mean in this case? I’m sincerely curious. WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) has a great quote in their press release responding to the comment about political correctness:
So is the flipside here that including women authors on the list would just have been an empty, politically correct gesture? When PW’s editors tell us they’re not worried about ‘political correctness,’ that’s code for ‘your concerns as a feminist aren’t legitimate.’ They know they’re being blatantly sexist, but it looks like they feel good about that. I, on the other hand, have heard from a whole lot of people—writers and readers–who don’t feel good about it at all.
SheWrites, a new social networking site for women writers, has info on the day of action they organized in response to the PW scandal. WILLA has created a wiki to compile a list of the best books of ‘09 by women authors. The list is fully editable, so go ahead and add your top picks.
One day, I’d be interested to see the list dissected by other categories: LGBT people, writers of color, immigrant writers, writers without an MFA, writers born in a working-class family, etc. One can only dream…
Alex has been saying this a lot lately and I think it’s appropriate to use here, so I’m a-stealin’ it:
BOO URNS! BOO URNS!
I have to wonder though, if the list had turned out to be all women, would people be upset because it excluded men? Or would they be singing PW’s praises for being so modern?
I’d say that this has less to do with Publisher’s Weekly, and more to do with the opportunities given to white men in our society. It would point to a causal factor in why men may have written better books than women this year. Besides, this is the first year that PW has done a top 10 list, so perhaps on a longer timeline the ratio of books by white men:anyone else might change.
I’m just happy that there was a graphic novel on that top 10. Way to go, geeks!
One other thing that I would like to add with regards to WILLA’s supposition that ” …that including women authors on the list would just have been an empty, politically correct gesture?” The answer to that is YES. So long as people can’t just be cool and understand that opinions are simply opinions, whether they are informed or uninformed, people are going to make hollow, empty attempts to please everyone, when in fact society can’t exist in a form that pleases everyone. Way to go, WILLA, starting a Wiki was the right thing for you to do. Express your opinions, allow other women furiously enraged by this to express their opinions of the best books by women in 2009, but don’t force another to change their opinions solely because you feel threatened by this year’s victory by Team Men.
Also, for the love of all things literary, give PW the benefit of the doubt.
Wouldn’t making the “extra effort” to include women and minorities make it worse? Imagine that boardroom conversation, “Well we need ONE of them in this list somewhere so we don’t upset people.” As a woman and a minority, I’d hate to even have a hint of the feeling that I only made it because I’m an ethnic chick and fill a quota.
That being said, does anyone remember a similar defense given by Time Out New York regarding their New York 40 (the 40 most influential people in the city)? Their idea of diverse was a token black man, a fictional character (Spiderman), and an inanimate object (the Metrocard). At least they had like… um, a handful or so women in there.
http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/40th-anniversary/62251/the-new-york-40
It’s sortof sad that this is even an issue. It’s only ten books.
… So what?
I’m a woman writer. A while ago it came to my attention that my favorite books all happened to be written by men, with the exception of two YA authors. It doesn’t make me sexist. Get over it, people.
I’m suggesting that whatever methods they used where clearly flawed if they got these results.
Even if that’s not the case, I think PW could have made a much bigger stink about it, more than the sad hat-tip in the editor’s note. Perhaps an article about women in the publishing industry? Why women make up 60% of the buyers and readers but probably a small fraction of authors (that might not be true for non-fiction)?
Or maybe PW should reveal who the judges were. By simply looking at the masthead of their website, I deduced that of 25 senior editorial positions, only 9 are women (and I’m guessing even less are people of color, etc.).
Yes to throw in a token woman and more people of color would have been offensive, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t other solutions and other responses that could have been made.
[...] Stitches which made Publisher’s Weekly’s top 10 books of the year. Yes, written by a man, just like every other author on the list. But cut them some slack! The book is so so so good and [...]
“I’m suggesting that whatever methods they used where clearly flawed if they got these results.”
I’m sorry, you mean this isn’t a satire piece? I thought such nonsensical gibberish went away after the 1990s. It’s a “top ten”, not a “top ten carefully selected so as not to offend any possible minority, majority, political or religious group, animal breed or anyone else who might possibly be unhappy about it”.
What does it matter if the top ten books were written by men? Or women? Or children? Or purple giraffes with homosexual tendencies? The only reason it’s important to know who wrote them is so you can find other books by the same people.
Should I have voted for Sarah Palin because I’m a feminist?
That’s absurd. No need to be inflammatory. Being a feminist doesn’t mean blindly voting for a woman because she’s a woman. And I said nothing about feminism in this post. The editors’ status as feminists is not the question at hand — they never purported to be feminists. The point is that they are not outraged and upset that their results were a list of ten men. They could have made a point to address that, speculate on what it means about the industry, etc.
I remember being really shocked when I read the PW “Best Books of 2009″ list because of the rather flippant commentary before the list.
My guess is they wanted to be ‘up front’ about their choices (since they figured many people would notice the lack of women on the list), but I think they did more harm than good with their ‘commentary.’
I obviously can’t say that what they chose was ‘wrong’ because the list is only an opinion of which books they thought were best. But instead of tackling how ‘politically incorrect’ the list was, couldn’t they have done a better job of explaining the value of the books in the intro? Books should be chosen because of their content — not necessarily because of who wrote them.
By the way @Courtney: Agreed! Way to go geeks!
And @Tanya Paperny: Agreed; they could have made an effort to write about women in the industry instead of not doing anything at all.
It is said by feminist literary critics that if you take two books, one written by a male and the other a female, and crossed out the names of the authors, the reader would not be able to tell the sex of the person writing it with a truly great work of literature.
As a woman and a writer, I believe it is more important to focus on the successes of woman in literature, instead of being angry about a list made by group of people sitting fatly in overstuffed chairs in a boardroom somewhere. It is purely opinion, and while it may be unjust, it is important to remember that we live in a time where we are lucky that we can write under our own names instead of a male pen name; that our voices can be heard.
If this year went the the men; hell, it happens. This just means as writers we need to step up our game and prove ourselves just as worthy of a top ten list.
Publisher’s Weekly is taken seriously by a lot of people, so yes, this is a big deal. I think a lot of women (including some of those writing comments) are quite complacent about the status of sexism in our society–it’s still there, in a more insidious form. Women DO write differently than men, on the whole, just as women vote differently than men (generally, we’re more liberal) and have different political concerns. Let’s not insult anybody’s intelligence by suggesting that gender differences have no impact whatsoever on ideology, beliefs, behaviours, etc. Gender is not transparent. Women writers did not appear on this list in part because the male-dominated selection committee does not think their voices “matter”.
Some may think this all sounds inflammatory. But come on: take a look at who occupies all the positions of power in our society (politicians, executives, etc.) and look at which gender, on average, makes more money than the other. Sexism is alive and well, and it just becomes more pernicious if we all allow things like this list a pass.