Of Gatekeepers and Bedtime Stories

The Ongoing Struggle to Make Women’s Voices Heard.

- Alison Anderson

Do we still need magazines, anthologies, prizes, and publishers’ lists devoted solely to women writers? For a start, have recent electoral events not shown that women now have access to the highest position of power in the world, that the glass ceiling . . . etc.? Don’t we know that women have been winning the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer, the Booker in increasing numbers? Can we not just relax and read people and put all this gender debate, at least as far as something as relatively benign as literature is concerned, behind us?

No. And the reason why we cannot may lie, precisely, with the readers who ask themselves these questions.

When the then-“Orange” Prize for Women (now the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction) was created in 1996 in the UK, there were dissenting voices, including that of A. S. Byatt, who maintained that the prize was sexist, defeating its very purpose by ghettoizing women in a category of literature that was both different and exclusive. This was not the intention of the prize’s founders, which was rather to redress a situation—and call attention to it: namely, that women were woefully and systematically underrepresented on the shortlists of literary prizes. The Stella Prize was similarly created in Australia in 2013 in response to the all-male shortlist two years earlier for the country’s leading literary prize, the Miles Franklin (ironically named for one of Australia’s pioneering women authors). If Australia, the second major country on the planet to grant women the right to vote, had a “literary gender problem” as recently as 2011, what does this mean for the status of women writers both in the Anglo-Saxon world and globally?