I read Fantasy, Female Writers & The Politics of Influence by Tansy Rayner Roberts and found myself repeatedly thinking, “Yes!” while reading her piece.
I have always read female authors. For a long time it was in some ways an unconscious choice. I wasn’t seeking out books because they were written by women; I picked out stories that looked interesting, and I’m interested in stories about women, and stories about women are written predominantly by women.
So I have been somewhat confused by complaints about the lack of female authors. After all, I’ve been reading and recommending books by women for years!
The first mystery author I fell in love with was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I still have those books, well-worn and beloved, and on the first pages you can find the words “Happy Birthday, Love Mom & Dad.” The second mystery author I fell in love with was Agatha Christie, and I found her all on my own and devoured every single Miss Marple story I could get my hands on (The Poirot mysteries? Not so much. He never really appealed to me.)
The first fantasy book I read was JRR Tolkein‘s The Hobbit, and I literally read the book to pieces.
This book was also a gift from my parents. (My father also tried to get me to read SF, which he loves, but I could never get into it. (In my life I’ve probably read a double handful of SF books I liked, and more than half of those are by an author I can no longer read, because I can’t tolerate his hateful politics.1))
Although I loved The Hobbit, I didn’t really read fantasy again until I was in college when I received used copies of Davis Eddings‘ 2 Belgariad in a Christmas gift exchange. I devoured it, and then a friend recommend Guy Gabriel Kay‘s Fionovar Tapestry. After that I started searching out fantasy books.
What I found first was Mercedes Lackey‘s By the Sword and MZB’s Sword & Sorceress (Volume who knows at this point). From there I found The Mists of Avalon3 and anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and Thieves World. When I’d read an anthology, I’d find new authors to seek out: Mickey Zucker Reichert, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Tanith Lee, Diana Paxson, Jennifer Roberson. And I’d browse the shelves of my favorite used bookstore for more books: Holly Lisle, Robin Hobb, JV Jones, Jane Lindskold, Katherine Kerr, Jane Yolen, Sara Douglass, Morgan Llewelyn.
As I said, I wasn’t seeking out female authors specifically. And I read plenty of books by male authors, some of whom became favorites: Charles de Lint, Steven Brust, Terry Pratchett, Dennis McKiernan.
But there’s a funny thing about those men–they all write female characters with agency. Women who don’t need to be saved.
Because that’s what I was truly looking for in my stories. People who saved the world. People who saved their country or their family. I didn’t want books about people who needed saved, I wanted books about people who saved themselves.
And that’s what I found in those authors.
As is obvious to anyone who has known me for more than about 15 minutes, I’m a tremendous geek, so I have a book blog for keeping track of what I read, and that has allowed me to go back and compare the number of male vs female authors I’ve read.
Also because I’m a tremendous geek, I just went and looked at the authors who appear in my review site. (I just pulled the author lists from the menus and counted the number of men and women, discarding joint efforts.)
To be honest, even knowing my reading preferences, I was surprised at the numbers.
| |
Male |
Female |
| Fantasy Authors |
110 |
188 |
| Mystery Authors |
47 |
55 |
| Non-Fiction Authors |
39 |
29 |
(I chose Fantasy and mystery because those are my favorite genres, and then checked non-fiction because it should theoretically be relatively gender neutral. 4)
Then I looked back at what I’ve read over the past several years, which includes books outside of these three genres. However, let me clarify something about this table first. When I started tracking author gender, I was curious as to the number of women who were writing under male pseudonyms or initials, and how many women were writing under female names, (I don’t have a breakdown of this by genre, but I generally only see it in fantasy and mysteries) which is why I have two different totals for female authors.
|
2006
|
2007
|
2008
|
2009
|
2010
|
2011
|
2012
|
2013
|
2014
|
2015
|
|
Avg
|
|
Male
|
51%
|
37%
|
55%
|
51%
|
48%
|
46%
|
25%
|
21%
|
31%
|
38%
|
|
40%
|
|
Female with Female Name
|
39%
|
47%
|
34%
|
42%
|
42%
|
38%
|
53%
|
52%
|
48%
|
52%
|
|
45%
|
|
Female Total 5
|
46%
|
52%
|
40%
|
46%
|
48%
|
44%
|
72%
|
59%
|
56%
|
52%
|
|
52%
|
NOTE: These totals are not going to equal 100%, because I have removed data for anthologies and jointly written books 6 to reduce the number overload looking at the table.
So why all the complaints about the dearth of female authors, when there are lots of female authors out there?
Because, IMO, female authors are marginalized.
When you have male members of SFWA constantly belittling women and a campaign to make sure that award balloting goes to white males–who wants to be associated with that kind of nastiness? When you have female attendees of SFF cons suffering harassment and sometimes even abuse–why spend your money and attention with people who have made it clear they don’t want you?
And then there’s the question of why is it that female readers will read male authors, but the reverse quite frequently is not true?
Part of the problem, perhaps, goes back to something I noted earlier: I wanted to read books about people who saved themselves, not people who had to be saved by others. This is why for decades I avoided reading romance novels. I’d been loaned a couple in high school and (aside from all the boinking) I really wasn’t interested in women who needed to find a husband (which is the sub-genre of romance I was loaned). So I avoided romance, because that’s what I assumed it was full of. (Well, plus the boinking. “Can we skip the kissing parts?”)
I didn’t want to read about a happily ever after! I wanted sword fights! I wanted escapes on horseback! I wanted magic duels!
My discovery of the Harlequin Imprint Luna changed everything.
There you go, that’s the cover that Changed Everything for me. (That cover STILL makes me swoony, it’s so beautiful.) I HAD to read that story, and I desperately hoped that the woman in the story was exactly like the model on the cover. (She was!)
Romance novels COULD have heroines who rescued themselves!
Yes, some of the stories had boinking–but not all of them! And the boinking was (for the most part) quite secondary to the adventure. Plus, I realized that I could just skip over all the boinking! (And sometimes I didn’t even BOTHER to skip the boinking! Because sometimes there was interesting dialog and discovery there! Like in real life!) Here were all these stories I really had no clue existed! My wallet panicked! (With good reason.)
And thus we get back to the heart of the matter: why are some people so adamantly opposed to female and minority writers being classified as SFF authors? Why are so many women made to feel like they aren’t allowed to be a part of the SFF community?
Why the hell does the term “Fake Geek Girl” even EXIST?
It’s like SFF fandom is full of hipsters who refuse to like anything once it’s popular. Who refuse to believe that something can be both good and popular at the same time–that once “normal” people like something, it’s no longer awesome. That once girls and relationships are let into the clubhouse, everything is RUINED. (It’s not like there isn’t kissing in SFF, it just seems that only the captain Kirk love ’em and leave ‘en kind of kissing is tolerated.)
Why has the SFF community seemingly not progressed past “Far Beyond the Stars“?
Is there anything to be done? Many women are joining SFWA, despite being made to feel unwelcome by a minority of members, and doing their part to change things from the inside. Many men (Jim C. Hines and John Scalzi come immediately to mind) are standing up and trying to make SFF more inclusive, and pointing out when things are wrong and or ridiculous with the SFF ecosystem.
You can take the title of this post, “Where Have All the Female Authors Gone (Answer: Nowhere)” in two ways. Unfortunately, I think it probably should be taken both ways. Women are still writing, but they’re also still stymied on their way to success as SFF authors.
——-
1 Yes, of course Orson Scott Card.
2 Interestingly, later books had both David & Leigh Eddings names on the cover, once David Eddings had enough pull to put on the cover what he said reflected the authorship all along.
3 Let’s not talk about how problematic I now find MZB. Let’s just accept that Mists was a hugely influential book for me, and move on.
4 Of course it’s not gender neutral. If it weren’t for the number of cookbooks I’ve read, the male:female ratio would be skewed even further in favor of men, because I love reading about science and religion and history, and despite my love of Karen Armstrong and Mary Roach, they are less common than male authors in those areas
5 Including pseudonyms and initials
6 Because only Davis Eddings’ name was on the cover, when I re-read The Belgariad and Mallorean it counts as 10 books in the male column instead of the Joint authorship column. I’m not sure this wasn’t an error on my part.
