Silences (39 page)

Two-thirds of the illiterate in the world today are women.

Frederick Douglass was able to leave for us the legacy of his life and thoughts as he chose to write it; Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth (Truth one of the most eloquent users of spoken words in her time)
^*
come to us filtered through the words of others: words they were not able to read to correct or change.

Faulkner’s “real life” Dilsey lived and died (one hundred seven years old) walking distance from the world-famous writer to whose books, language (and self) she contributed so much—never enabled to read a word he had written, let alone write; tell in her own powerful language, her own imaginings, reality.

Camus, Dreiser, had unlettered mothers. Remarkable women by their son’s testimony. Lost
writers?

How many of us who are writers have mothers, grandmothers, of limited education; awkward, not at home, with the written word, however eloquent they may be with the spoken one? Born a generation or two before, we might have been they.

The dying Ellen Glasgow writes in
The Woman Within
of the “Mammy” of her childhood who first roused, nurtured, her love of language, her imagination; taught
her endless stories and encouraged her to create her own. They had a compact: when the
little girl learned to read and write, she would teach her too. It never came to be. Glasgow’s tears, the half-century after, are felt on the page.

These last few decades, we have begun to have an impressive body of prison writing by men previously near-illiterate (or the kind of illiteracy consisting of never
reading books, and inarticulateness in written expression). Men writers, not women. Even in prison circumstances, there is a marked difference in circumstances and encouragement.

*
Her famous “And Ain’t
I
A Woman?” speech is a perfect statement of “real life” Women in Fiction—and in Fact.

▴
ONE OUT OF TWELVE PP
. 23–24

ONE OUT OF TWELVE—THE FIGURES FOR WRITERS ACCORDED RECOGNITION
^▴

Proportion of Women Writers to Men Writers
^*

Included in Twentieth-Century Literature Courses: One Out of Seventeen (6% women, 94% men)

            
In 223
undergraduate
course offerings and bibliographies (1970–1976) at community, state, private, colleges and universities, one woman writer was studied to every
seventeen men writers. The disparity would have been even more marked, if the proportions of women writers studied at the graduate level, or permitted as subjects for master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, had been included. As a guess: 2% women, 98% men?

Criticism and Critical Surveys in Fiction: One Out of Thirteen to One Out of Thirty

            
Authors, editors of works of criticism:
One out of Fifteen (7% women, 93% men):

            
Of seventy-six works listed in the
Poets and Writers Directory,
seventy were written or edited by men, four by women, and two co-edited. One of the four by women was on writers who are women, and so identified by the title. Not one of the books considering
only men writers included “male” in the title to similarly define their content, nor would
it have occurred to their authors to do so.
^*

            
Inclusion in critical works:

            
Name in a list, no discussion of work: One out of Thirteen

            
Page-space accorded: One page out of Thirty
^**

                  
To illustrate: in Tony Tanner’s
City of Words—American Fiction 1950–1970,
there are 445 pages. Plath is written of on two pages, mentioned three times otherwise;
Sontag is given four pages and three mentions. No other women are discussed. In Alfred Kazin’s 317 page
Bright Book of Life,
forty-three concern women writers. They are segregated into one chapter, not for purposes of illumination, discovery, or because of similarities in theme or style—legitimate reasons for grouping and a different matter from segregation —but simply because they are women.
One page in the chapter on Southern writers includes O’Connor and McCullers.

            
No more than 10 percent of the women writers named in “One Out of Twelve” are discussed in the critical works surveyed.

Critical Reference Works: About One Out of Eleven (9% women, 91% men)

            
Contemporary World Literature:
2,519 entries, 178 of them on women. One out of fourteen or fifteen on
a world scale.

            
Contemporary Literary Criticism; Cumulative Index to Authors:
540 entries, 87 on women.

            
Contemporary Novel; A Checklist of Critical Literature in Britain and America Since 1945:
181 listed, 30 of them women.

            
Modern American Literature; A Library of Literary Criticism:
about 290 entries, 42 women.

            
With the exception of a few authors,
the page space accorded women is comparatively meager.

Interviews
(selection according to critical judgment):
One Out of Ten (10% women, 90% men)

            
As instance, the
Paris Review
interviews—considered a literary honor. In seventy-four interviews—to the end of 1975—only seven were women.

Anthologies, Textbooks: One Out of Eleven (9% women, 91% men)

            
The Anthologies Themselves:
Ninety books were in the 1976 sampling; twelve included only men authors.
^*
A listing of forty-three anthologies by title, editor, and percentage, is on
pages 190
–
192
.
Editors: Close to One out of Thirteen (8% women, 92% men):
Sixty-four anthologies are listed in the
Writers Directory
(CODA); five were edited by women, one co-edited.

Inclusion in Selective Writers Directories: About One Out of
Seven (13% women, 87% men)
^**

            
These include
Contemporary Novelists
(all advisers male);
200 Contemporary Authors; Twentieth Century Authors: World Authors (1950–1970)—
of the latter, 960 writers, 125 of them women.

Prizes, Awards—One Out of Six? Seven? Eight?
(Difficult to come to a figure, because some awards are considered weightier honors than others.)

Book Review Index (sampling in 1974, 1975, 1976):
Between One out of Six and Seven.

Books in Print, 1975 (sampling from 100 pages):
One out of Five or Six. (A like sampling in 1971 indicated One out of Four or Five. I would welcome a computer study.)

Memberships:
About One out of Four.

            
P.E.N. American Center, 1970, 1971, 1975, about One out of Four. Listed in CODA Poets and Fiction
Writers Directories, between One out of Four and Five (20% to 25% women).

All Fiction Published:

            
Fiction Catalog (sampling) 1971–1974, about One out of Four.

Anthologies of Student Work (prose, poetry):
Less than One out of Three.

            
These include
Intro, New Campus Writing,
and
Twenty Years of Stanford Stories.
(What happened with those young women?)

Films, Videotape
(as listed in the
Directory of American Fiction Writers):

            
Of 123 films whose subjects are writers, only nine are of women; five others include women; of 287 videotapes, fifty-eight are of women.