Women and Nonfiction

(From 2009. No idea what I was responding to, except that it had to do with Elaine Showalter.)

I’m a great admirer of Elaine Showalter’s scholarly contributions, and I certainly do hope her new book will start some conversations about whether women have been underrepresented in the canon of fiction.

That said, it’s unfortunate that conversations about women’s contributions to non-fiction aren’t drawing the same kind of mainstream media attention. That’s not because an equivalent book hasn’t been written, either: my quickie Internet search came up with a very recent one, last year’s Women in American Journalism: A New History by University of Colorado journalism professor Jan Whitt.

Perhaps that’s because non-fiction has long been a boys’ club, despite the disproportionately large numbers of women receiving a formal journalism education. Since the late 1970s, women have made up a only a third of the full-time journalism workforce, despite that they comprise two-thirds of journalism school students nationally, according to the Annual Survey of Journalism and Mass Communications.

Women, of course, are in large part to blame for their own (self) exclusion from the genre. Looking around my own journalism M.A. program here at the University of Missouri, I see most of my talented female friends specializing in magazine editing and design — NOT in writing. The fact that so many of them will become editors is particularly ironic, given that it doesn’t seem to translate to them promoting women writers on women’s turf — that is, in women’s magazines.

Take a look at this year’s National Magazine Award finalists for feature writing and profile writing. Although a whopping two out of the ten nominees are women, NONE of the nominated stories appeared in women’s interest magazines. (That’s in contrast to Esquire and GQ’s two nominations each.)

In an especially ironic twist, your other featured guest on Thursday’s show, Sarah Thornton — an accomplished journalist by any measure — was profiled in Vogue last October in a piece that seemed to spend more space analyzing her toenail paint color, her designer label clothing, and her “uncanny youthfulness and vitality” (imagine, at age 43!) than to her incisive new book, Seven Days in the Art World.

So back to the Showalter-inspired question of whether female writers are similarly underrepresented in the non-fiction canon. (Or at least, the question of whether the topic will be afforded real estate in the mainstream conversation.) The answer: when they muster up the courage to give themselves the prominence and respect they deserve.