Western Book Roundup

Literary Gender Imbalance Uncovered by VIDA is Reflected in Western Lit

By Jenny Shank, 2-16-11

For some time I’ve noticed that the majority of the books submitted to me for review are written by men, a ratio I’d estimate at five books by men for every one book by a woman. I noticed this discrepancy particularly among the big six publishers—very few of the books set in the West produced by major publishers are written by women. I am more likely to find books written by women from small and academic presses. I wondered if this male dominance was just a Western thing.

As I read and enjoyed books regardless of the gender of their authors, I also noticed a disturbing trend, a formula that Western books by major publishers included again and again: a depiction of horses plus violence against women in books written by men. Usually these authors are compared to Cormac McCarthy, either in the blurbs or the jacket copy. I realize it weakens my argument not to mention these books by name, but I don’t want to single out anybody, because I think each writer chose to use these elements for personal, artistic reasons, and I don’t blame any of them for it. But I just may have been a wee bit crankier in my reviews of these books.

I began to dread reading books with horses on the cover. Sure, on the outside, it’s all the pretty horses, but on the inside it’s going to be all the beaten, cowering women.

Was I being paranoid? I discussed this gender imbalance a little with my friends but I didn’t write anything about it here because I didn’t have any concrete statistics to back it up. But now I do: VIDA, an organization that supports “women in the literary arts” counted the number of male and female book reviewers, and the number of books written by male and female authors reviewed at the most prestigious magazines, including the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and the New Republic and found that male writers were favored at most places by a ratio of three or four to one. (The complete data are here.)

Ruth Franklin of The New Republic decided to run her own count. She wondered if more books by men were being reviewed because more books by men were being published. Voila—it turned out that was true. She analyzed the fall 2010 catalogs of 13 big and small publishers, and only one, Riverhead, had anything close to an even ratio. The second most even was Random House, with 37 percent of the books they published by women. It went down hill from there, with women accounting for just twenty percent or so of the books produced by most publishers.

So it’s clear there is a pervasive gender imbalance in books that are published and reviewed. Although I look for the best book to highlight on New West, regardless of whether the writer is male or female, I’ve always tried to review as many books by women as I can. And given the results of these studies, I’m going to try harder to bring to light more books about the West written by women—they are out there if you look hard enough. Last week, I reviewed an overlooked gem, Ruth McLaughlin’s memoir Bound Like Grass, published a few months ago by the University of Oklahoma Press.

• Speaking of excellent Western woman writers, Joanne Ostrow wrote a long profile of the journalist and author Helen Thorpe for the Denver Post last week called “The accidental first lady.” As the title suggests, the article is about Thorpe’s reluctance to assume a traditional first lady role as her husband, John Hickenlooper, recently became the governor of Colorado. Ostrow reports that Thorpe finished an update for the paperback edition of Just Like Us, one of my favorite books from a couple years ago. Ostrow also writes:

“Next, a stage adaptation [of ‘Just Like Us’] has been commissioned by the Denver Center Theatre Company. Thorpe will serve as adviser to playwright Karen Zacarias (who adapted the novel ‘How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents’). Denver Center artistic director Kent Thompson believes this play could be the next ‘Plainsong’ or ‘Eventide,’ previous adaptations that became DCTC signature pieces, and, with its focus on immigration, ‘may have more resonance even than those did.’”

• Denver Post book section contributor Colleen Smith reported on her blog that Tom Walker, the longtime Books Editor of the Denver Post, has left. Last month, the Post shrunk its Sunday books section from four pages to two, which typically include one or two reviews written for the Denver Post. The rest of the space is now filled with wire stories, mostly from the Washington Post.

• New West book review contributor David Abrams wrote on his literary blog, The Quivering Pen, “There’s something going on in the woods of Idaho’s northern panhandle… Seattle and Missoula may have (rightfully) earned reputations as literary epicenters in the West over the past three decades, but they had better watch their backs because Idaho is fast becoming a more visible contender.” Abrams discusses the new issue of the literary journal Fugue, published by the University of Idaho in Moscow, which includes notable work by Richard Hugo, Kim Barnes, Brandon Schrand, Benjamin Percy, and Anthony Doerr.

• The Casper College Humanities Fest in Wyoming will take place from February 23 through 25, with three days of free lectures on the theme of Pilgrimage: Sacred and Secular.

• On Saturday, February 19, I’ll be participating in the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s “The Story of Book” with Eleanor Brown, Harrison Fletcher, and Jackie St. Joan in Denver at 910 Arts, (7 p.m. free). We’ll read a little from our new or forthcoming books and discuss how they came to be written and published.

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