No sisterhood in book reviewing ...
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In its latest issue, the feminist magazine Bitch takes the New York Times Book Review to task: ‘It has become the place where serious feminist books come to die.’
Author Sarah Seltzer writes in the article (titled, in part, ‘All the Misogyny Is Fit to Print’) that ‘catfights’ flare in the pages when younger women review books by older feminists. She points to Wonkette founding editor Ana Marie Cox’s dismissiveness of bra-burning in her 2006 review of Katha Pollitt’s essay collection, ‘Virginity or Death!,’ as a typical example:
“[Y]oung, educated, and otherwise liberal women who might, in another era, have found themselves burning bras and raising their consciousness would rather be fitted for the right bra ... and raising their credit limit. Katha Pollitt is the skunk at this ‘Desperate Housewives’ watching party.”
Older female reviewers also draw criticism. Seltzer cites ‘Arts section doyenne Michiko Kakutani’s’ 2007 put-down of Susan Faludi’s book, ‘The Terror Dream’: ‘This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name.’
Seltzer finds the opening line of Kakutani’s review ‘particularly perplexing because it reveals her belief that feminism has a bad name to begin with (it certainly seems to around the Timesoffices) and that feminists themselves, rather than sexism, are responsible for said bad name.’
That’s certainly well-reasoned, and Seltzer’s article, if a little snarky, is definitely worth a read. It includes some sobering figures: The ratio of male-to-female-authors in the NYT’s Book Review is about 2 to 1. Reviewers? Same thing.
Of course I wondered how the L.A. Times Book Review’s gender balance stacks up. I did an incredibly unscientific survey of three Sunday Book Review sections from early 2008. There were a total of 28 books by male authors reviewed compared with 11 by female authors (a ratio of about 2.5 to 1). When it comes to the reviewers, the majority flips: 16 women to 14 men.
These figures don’t really tell the story. How do you tally a book by a man who has a female editor? (I count it as both a male and a female author.) How about the book written by a man and translated by a husband-and-wife team? (Answer: two men, one woman.) As I said, it’s an unscientific tally.
For hard numbers about gender balance in book reviews across the country, Sisters in Crime keeps careful track, but just of the number of mystery novels by men and women.
Counting is fun, but how useful is it? Such summaries don’t track which books get cover treatment and considerable length versus those given capsule reviews. Nor do the numbers address the tone of reviews, which really is at the heart of the complaint in Bitch.
Carolyn Kellogg