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. more »