Three cures for mslexia PAGE1 | PAGE 2 | PAGE 3 3 A fair reading Even if a woman does muster the confidence and carve out the time to start - and edit, and polish - a complete manuscript, research shows her work is unlikely to be judged on its merits. Just like in school. In a now-famous experiment by Philip Goldberg in the Seventies, manuscripts by John T McKay were consistently judged as cleverer, better, superior in every way to identical manuscripts by Joan T McKay.26 As Norman Mailer once candidly remarked: ‘A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls’. This finding has been replicated over and over again during the intervening years: with male and female teachers, male and female students, with boys and girls; with academic treatises, short stories and poems. Just last year psychologist Amy Surmann found that writing attributed to a woman author was judged less clear and less competent than when attributed to a man.27 ‘That’s why you don’t need to read women’s writing to know it’s no good,’ says Dale Spender. ‘The only reason I ever got published is because they thought “Dale” was a man. Imagine if I’d been called Dolly! I’d never have been taken seriously.’ Charlotte Brontë understood this when she submitted Jane Eyre under the pseudonym Currer Bell. At publication there was some debate over the gender of Currer Bell and it was generally acknowledged that ‘if the novel had been written by a man it was a marvellous achievement, but if written by a woman it was scandalous’.28 When the apparently male author of Adam Bede was revealed to be a women: ‘It is quite clear that people would have sniffed at it had they known the writer to be a woman, but they can’t now unsay their admiration.’29 Even when the subject matter is ‘feminine’ it is accorded more respect when handled by a male author. A Ted Hughes poem about the natural world, or about love, is seen as having a gravitas, a muscularity, not accorded, say, to the poetry of Selima Hill. And Anthony Trollope’s painstakingly-observed gossip novels are seen as politically astute, whereas his descendant Joanna’s painstakingly-observed gossip novels are disparaged as mere ‘Aga-sagas’. But for women to tackle more ‘masculine’ subject matter is not necessarily the answer. ‘A man who reviewed my Procedures for Underground … talked about the “domestic” imagery of the poems,’ complained poet and novelist Margaret Atwood in Sexual Bias in Reviewing, ‘entirely ignoring the fact that seven eighths of the poems take place out of doors’.30 Woman authors, it seems, just can’t win. Indeed, it was the complete absence of women on the 1991 Booker shortlist that prompted Kate Mosse to start raising sponsorship for a woman’s fiction prize. ‘If an all-woman shortlist had been announced, there would have been all kinds of accusations of bias,’ she told us. ‘But an all-man shortlist hardly raised an eyebrow.’ Four years on from the first Orange Prize in 1995, she believes it has had an enormous effect. ‘It’s encouraged debate about literary prizes, about the subjectivity of judges. And it’s helped debunk the idea that there are “good books” and “bad books”.’ Cures for Mslexia If women have the innate ability, then they have the potential to be just as good - if not better - than male writers. And to be recognised as such. All they need is what male writers already have: time, confidence - and a fair reading. Mslexia magazine will tackle these issues systematically in the coming months. We will be looking at women’s lack of time and asking whether arbitrary age limits - for grants and prizes, for example - effectively discriminate against women whose writing lives tend to be so much more fragmented than men’s. Or whether special bursaries could be earmarked to help writing mothers with the costs of childcare. Topics like this - housework, solitude, rotas - will all be looked at in the magazine. Writing time is so important: seizing it, stealing it, managing it, will be recurrent themes. If that means a time-and-motion analysis of manual washing-up versus dishwashers, you’ll find it here in the pages of Mslexia. If confidence is your problem, we’ll be reporting on the latest psychological research into creativity and suggesting ways you can boost your output, your originality - and your ability to cope with rejection. We’ll be discussing courses and writing groups and how they can work for you. There’ll be features on reading aloud, on performing for an audience - and on stage fright. And we’ll be doing what we can to ensure your work gets a fair reading. That’s why we’ll be examining the publishing world itself, talking to the people who work in and around it. We’ll be telling you what agents and editors are looking for - and, just as crucially, what puts them off. That’s why you’re as likely to find a feature on envelopes or type size in the pages of Mslexia as you are to read an interview with an editor at Fourth Estate. Another question we’ll be tackling regularly is how women’s writing is assessed. In the next issue, for instance, we’ll be looking at this year’s Orange Prize shortlist and asking whether women write differently to men. Things have changes a great deal since Charlotte Brontë’s day. Women now outnumber and outperform men at university. We can decide when and whether to have children. We can decide to make writing our priority - if we want to. The latest UK census revealed a dramatic increase in the numbers of women who have done just that. From being just 34 per cent of people whose main occupation was writing in 1981, ten years later the number of women had increased to 43 per cent.31 And that’s not including the many thousands writing part-time, in snatched and stolen time, in ‘that still blue almost eternal hour before the baby’s cry’. There’s no time to waste wingeing. Stick with Mslexia and we’ll help you all we can. SOURCES 1. Halpern, DF, Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986 2. Office for Standards in Education, 1998 3. Universities Statistical Record, 1995, Vol. 2 4. The Reading Partnership Survey, 1997 5. Books and the Consumer: Report for Non-subscribing Companies Based on 1997 Data, Book Marketing Limited, 1998 6. Social Trends, Office of National Statistics, 1998 7. Women in Management in Publishing survey, reported in The Bookseller 1992 8. Mslexia survey, 1998 9. Chappel, JA and Polland A, The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, Manchester University Press, 1966 10. quoted in Olsen, T, Silences, Virago 1980 11. Sieghart, MA and Henry, G, The Cheaper Sex: How Women Lose Out in Journalism, Women in Journalism, 1997 12. Tweedie, J, In the Name of Love, Jonathan Cape 1979 13. quoted in Olsen, T, op cit 14. ibid 15. ibid 16. Spender, D, Man Made Language, Pandora/Rivers Oram, 1997 17. Spender, D, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Woman Writers before Jane Austen, Pandora, 1983 18. Rich, A, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-78, Virago 1980 19. Pajares, F and Johnson, MJ, ‘Self-efficacy beliefs and the writing performance of entering high-school students’, Psychology in the Schools, Vol. 33, 1996 20. Spender,D and Sarah, E, Learning to Lose: Sexism and Education, Women’s Press 1980 21. ibid 22. reported in Spender, D, Invisible Women: The Schooling Scandal, Women’s Press 1989 23. Baer, J, ‘Gender differences in the effects of anticipated evaluation on creativity’, Creativity Research Journal, Vol. 10, 1997 24. Allen, G and Thompson, A, ‘Analysis of the effects of networking on computer-assisted collaborative writing’, Journal of Educational Computing Research, Vol. 12, 1995 25. transcript of conference to discuss: Sieghart, MA and Henry, G, The Cheaper Sex: How Women Lose Out in Journalism, Women in Journalism, 1997 26. Goldberg, P, ‘Are women prejudiced against women?’ in Stacey, J et al (eds) And Jill Came Tumbling After: Sexism in American Education, Dell Publishing, New York, 1974 27. Surmann, A, ‘The effects of race, weight and gender on evaluations of writing competence’, Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 137, 1997 28. Peters, M, Unquiet Soul: a Biography of Charlotte Brontë, Futura, 1977 29. Stern, J, ‘Women and the novel: the Nineteenth-Century explosion’, Women’s Liberation Review, Falling Wall Press, Bristol 1972 30. reported in Atwood, M, Paradoxes and Dilemmas: the Woman as Writer, 1973 31. UK Census, National Statistics Office, 1991 PAGE1 | PAGE 2 | PAGE 3
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