Letters to the Editor
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Citation
If anyone's actually interested in the development of this dynamic, they might want to start with the seminal The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice by Bonnie G. Smith (Harvard UP 2000).
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As someone who studied history
...I would say the generalization that "history is for men" is long dead. Everywhere I studied, from a state school in the US to Leeds and Oxford in England, the lion's share of my fellow history students were women. It's true that a bare majority of my teachers were men, but among the younger professors, women predominated. And even Oxford's School of "Modern" History, which is about as hide-bound as you can get really, was run by a woman who happened to be my supervisor--someone I am honored to count as a friend--Felicity Heal.
On the contrary many of my colleagues studying literature at Oxford had male supervisors....
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I can't help myself
"If anyone's actually interested in the development of this dynamic, they might want to start with the seminal The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice by Bonnie G. Smith (Harvard UP 2000)."
Seminal? An interesting adjective choice to describe a study of gender (assuming there was no intended irony).
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idea of subjectivity
Great pc in the NYer and I enjoyed how you framed it here. Fun when two faves crossover like that. The quote about the best novels boasting more truth could not be more.....
true.
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If this were true, the fiction section would be dominated by women writers
But it's not. Last time I checked, it seemed to be split fairly evenly. Of course, certain categories of fiction are dominated by one gender or the other. But other categories that were once primarily the domain of one gender now feature writers of both genders (e.g., science fiction). Besides, you can't always go by the name on the book cover -- ever hear of the nom de plume?
Speaking of the nom de plume, if fiction was historically a female-centric endeavor, why did so many female novelists once feel compelled to publish anonymously or adopt male pen names? (For instance, Mary Ann Evans published her work as George Eliot and the Bronte sisters published under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.) There must have been some sense that writing fiction was an inappropriate pastime for women, or at least women of certain social classes.
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Ovarial?
Would you have preferred "ovarial"? I would have used that if this were the late 1980s and we were sitting in a Smith College "ovular" (ie, not a seminar) room.
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Trends
And how is this any different from those NY Times ‘Trend’ pieces you always denounce. You know, the ones where the author relates anecdotal evidence from 2 friends who also live in Fort Greene and calls it a Trend?
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Well Known Facts
In the publishing industry, its a well known fact the majority (and I mean HUGE majority) of fiction is purchased by women. When men do read fiction, it's mostly tough stuff like Grisham and Clancy, as well as science fiction.
I can't cite a source for this fact, and it may even be an oft-quoted truism that's really false, but Lepore is not saying anything radical or unusual in this, nor, as I recall from my literature classes, is she saying anything unusual in the novel evolving as a female form. The gothic tradition, particularly, was feared by critics to be leading young women to hell in a handbasket.
Again, I don't know if Lepore's claims are objectively true or false, but her claims are widely held in academia.
But it hardly matters: less and less people are reading fiction anyway, so it's a tiny matter. See this article from the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain?currentPage=1
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I don't read history for the men
My mother has a phd in science, works as a venture capitalist but refuses to read non-fiction. It is not the lack of education or talent which dissuades women from reading history.
The idea that men read history because it is male dominated and women read fiction for the opposite reason seems oversimplified. As a man I read have read a biography of Thatcher (my favorite PM) and enjoy hearing stories of Joan of Arc. It is less whether the greats of our past were female or male but whether they behaved in a manner which interests either sex. The divide in literature merely represents a divergence in the hierarchy of needs between the sexes. Until women place self-importance and power as a higher priority women will continue to view history as men view culture studies (as a waste of time).
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Maybe in the 18th century...
...But today that thesis is just stupid. Most of the novels I've read were written by men. Just going into the fiction section of any book store will disabuse anyone of the idea that fiction ia primarily written by OR for women.
The last book I bought out of the history section was authored bt DIANE Wolkstien and Noah Kramer.
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Okay, so I know something about 18th century literary habits
And it is not true that men didn't write novels. Tom Jones and Pamela were both written by men and were presumably read by men.
But women ... who we ought to remember had only achieved a critical mass of literacy in the 18th century ... were *allowed* to write and read novels because novels were trash even when written by men and therefore no one cared what women did with them.
In the early 18th century, people were still arguing about the worth of literature written in the vernacular. Serious literature was in Latin. Only in the latter part of the century was anything in English considered *important*: history, satire, poetry, Boswell's Life of Johnson, anything. And it should be noted that all those great male 19th century novelists ... Dickens, Dumas, Thackery ... were writing in a genre that was the cultural equivalent of the comic book ... not graphic novel, comic book. Oliver Twist and the Count of Monte Cristo were published a chapter at a time in cheap newspapers. Novels only became serious literature somewhere around the turn of the 20th century.
Women often have more opportunities in literary forms that are "trash": children's literature, romance, fantasy and sci-fi, etc and so forth. In the 19th century, novel writing was one of the very few professions open to respectable women -- along with teacher and librarian, two other professions that put women in a position to shape young people's reading habits.
Of course women probably still read more novels than men -- but the reasons are not biological or neurological -- they are historical.