Women-writers manifesto aims to build community of female authors

The internet is not always a safe place for women, so there is something hearteningly radical about women staking a claim to this space to assert their own ambitions and interests. The new #women_writers hashtag does just this; a campaign to annex a little corner of the internet for women talking and supporting each other […]

The internet is not always a safe place for women, so there is something hearteningly radical about women staking a claim to this space to assert their own ambitions and interests. The new #women_writers hashtag does just this; a campaign to annex a little corner of the internet for women talking and supporting each other in their shared passion for writing.
And before anyone says this is not needed, it is: women read more fiction than men, yet come up short in both publishing deals and media coverage. The annual Vida (US) and Stella (Australia) counts show consistently that there is a lingering bias against women. This picture is slowly improving, but women remain under-represented as book reviewers and authors reviewed. Books by women are scorned as “domestic”, books about women are less likely to win prizes. One woman writer found that she garnered much better responses to her manuscript when she submitted under a male name. Looking at the numbers, it is frankly unsurprising there might exist an insecurity among female writers.
There have been grassroots movements and online activities dedicated to promoting female writers and literature in the past, but none has been quite as inclusive as #women_writers. The WoMentoring Project (on sabbatical until November) saw high-profile writers and women in publishing linked with aspiring female writers, agents and editors. However, as the mentorships required an application process and it was sold on the line of “exceptional women supporting exceptional women”, the whole campaign had a certain amount of exclusivity built in. The #Readwomen hashtag, spearheaded by literary polymath Joanna Walsh, promoted works by women, but only for already published writers. Where was the space for women to whom a book deal was little more than a speck on the horizon?
“There seemed to be a gaping hole, when there is such an abundance of women attendees of writing and literature courses, in writers’ groups and at literary festivals,” says Laurie Garrison, an academic, writer and researcher. Garrison runs Looking for Xanadu, a blog that offers courses for women writers, and is also the mastermind behind the #women_writers hashtag. Developed for a live chat on underrated female writers, the hashtag immediately took off and evolved into a wider conversation on Twitter, serving as a launchpad for women to discuss their own projects. Subsequent Twitter conversations using the hashtag have been themed – a chat on self-publishing and one on women in translation. The next is set to be on DIY methods for online marketing.
Garrison says that the low proportion of women with book deals is not always the fault of the publishers. Based on anecdotal evidence, she believes women are less likely to send their manuscripts in the first place. “I’ve heard anecdotal accounts of publishers getting more submissions by men from agents, and women being much less likely to send in second submissions even if encouraged to do so when the first hasn’t been accepted – and, even more bizarrely, when the first has,” Garrison says.
Could the “confidence gap” and “imposter syndrome” perhaps account for this? The confidence gap is a theory that a disparity of self-assurance between women and men is devastating in creative industries, where self-belief can be as important as competence. But Garrison is reluctant to use these terms. “I think it’s become a bit of a sweeping explanation for why women don’t experience as much success as men in a lot of areas,” she says. “It seems to suggest that if we’d all just act as confident as men, the problem would be solved. In other words, it’s the women that need to change their behaviour, not the external world of publishing, education, working environment.”
Garrison has now released a manifesto for the # women writers hashtag, laying out the need for community-building among female writers, for rejecting traditional models of publishing and for building confidence in the face of rejection. A veritable call to arms for would-be women writers, the manifesto also addresses how both men and women are conditioned to emulate masculinised practices in the workplace and how this is not necessary for success in pitching or writing.
Almost 20 years ago, Norman Mailer dismissed writing by women as “always fey, old hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn”. Five years ago, VS Naipaul said there was no living female author who was his equal. And this year, Gay Talese said he could not name one woman writer he admired. As these attitudes persist, it is Garrison’s view that we need to work to create an environment where women feel they can carve out their own space, regardless. And online, communication, community-building and innovative ways of disseminating writing can be pursued to best advantage, even with all the potential naysayers lurking on the #women_writers hashtag.
“We need dedicated spaces for women writers to improve their technique in a non-competitive environment, learn resilience to deal with all the rejection and criticism involved in professional writing and to be able to show vulnerability without being judged,” Garrison says. “If we can create spaces for women writers where these things can be discussed and put into perspective, I think it could go a long way toward levelling the playing field.”
Source: The Guardian UK