What Was It Illegal for Women to Read
A Cursory History of the Beef Confronting Women Reading
Photo past Ali Al-Saadi/AFP/GettyImages.
This week, a 26-twelvemonth-old American woman was awarded $3.five million to write a book of advice for immature women. And a sixteen-twelvemonth-old fan-fiction writer was mocked for striking a deal to plow her One Direction fantasies into published reality. Also this calendar week, New Yorker author Joan Acocella read writer Belinda Jack's sweeping history of women'due south literacy, "A Woman Reader," and wrote all about information technology in ane of the most respected magazines in the world. This could not accept happened at any other point in history.
For the start thousand years of the historical beef against women readers, as Jack'south book documents, most women were barred from reading entirely, and the ban was a powerful tool in their subjugation. "In thinking nigh wisdom, it helps to read about wisdom—most Solomon or Socrates or whomever," Acocella writes. "Also, goodness and happiness and love. To decide whether you accept them, or want to brand the sacrifices necessary to go them, it is useful to read about them. Without such introspection, women seemed stupid; therefore, they were considered unfit for education; therefore, they weren't given an teaching; therefore they seemed stupid."
Once women were allowed to acquire to read—as calorie-free and leisure time and printed religious indoctrination spread, information technology became harder to keep them from it—social campaigns against women readers and writers mutated with the millennia, their justifications shifting to suit the era. After the fall of the Roman Empire, reading among both men and women was restricted to noble elites and religious figures, people with the fourth dimension and privacy to pick up a book. But when Charlemagne took over the Frankish empire in 800, he decreed that both men and women nether his dominion would be educated, though women however read in the vernacular, while men were more probable to exist schooled in Latin. And and then the stigma against chick lit was built-in. Popular books written in words that women could understand were shunned by men as "sentimental and realistic" stories "about love and friendship and animals and magic potions," Acocella says. When women began writing themselves, female authors were often accounted insane, or else secretly male person.
Equally the marketplace for words increasingly skewed female person, men started trolling, challenge that women's novels were sexually corruptive, dangerously distracting, and hopelessly unrealistic, or even dissentious to women's mental health. (One nineteenthursday-century physician, faced with a novel-reading woman, prescribed a book on beekeeping instead.) Male authors adapted by publishing helpful advice for women targeted at keeping them in their place. Women—and the market—fought back. Every bit early as the 16th century, publishers began offer minor, cheaper versions of books that could be easily hidden abroad from husbands. Book clubs formed, where women talked amid themselves. "What was it that men feared most women's reading?" Acocella writes. "A big fear was that it was something they could do lonely, without anyone to guide their thinking. They would learn to recollect independently."
Nosotros all know how that shook out. Pocket novels and book clubs have given way to a bustling publishing marketplace for chick-lit novels, where the voices of male writers are not valued; countless fan-fiction boards, where women log on to draft their own fantasies in their spare time; and social networking sites, where women—who regularly make up over i-one-half of users—are empowered to document their lives in existent-time, ane navel-gazing status update at a fourth dimension.
But the fright of educated women—women who might larn to think for themselves—still persists in many parts of the world. This is why universities across Islamic republic of iran recently banned women from studying dozens of subjects, including English literature. This is why Afghan girls face acid attacks while walking to school. And this is why the Taliban targeted the 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai, who penned a pseudonymous diary for the BBC, get-go at age 11, where she detailed her struggle to be educated under terrorist rule. So they shot her in the head. At present she'south in the hospital, not the classroom.
Even in countries like the Us, where the lucrative market for women readers is happily exploited, the stigma against women and books takes on new and exciting permutations. Female person authors similar S.E. Hinton, J.K. Rowling, and Curtis Sittenfeld (given name: Elizabeth) still truncate their names to appear more than masculine.
But why? Women today make upwardly more than than half of the population, and eighty percent of the fiction market, yet nosotros are however considered a niche. The fact that ladies read is still somehow news, and whenever too many of the states pick up one detail book, like 50 Shades of Grey, commentators dissect the contents for clues as to what women (all of them) are thinking. As Jessica Grose detailed in Slate earlier this month, books written by women—like her own debut novel, Pitiful Desk-bound Salad—are frequently instantly subjugated as "for-girls-but," marketed as something bottom-than, then unfairly scrutinized. "[W]hy, for case, was a series similarTwilight and then much more critically derided than Stieg Larsson'southward Millennium trilogy? Both sets are huge best-sellers, and both are horribly written (unless you like elaborate, repetitive descriptions of sandwiches). But Larsson'south were never painted as embarrassing, pathetic props for bored housewives (or their husbands)," Grose wrote. "Larsson'due south weren't sneered at by the critical class the mode that popular books in women specific genres tend to exist."
This seems to be merely another iteration of that old fear: What specialized knowledge might women exist absorbing, alone in their rooms? And, yes, sometimes the books we're reading exercise provide peeks into the social and political realities that women face today. Merely other times, we're just reading because we tin. "A corking virtue of Jack'south book is that she repeatedly reminds united states of the internal pleasures of reading," Acocella writes. It is "not then much the acquisition of ideas or information as just the pleasance of going to new places in 1'southward mind."
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Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/10/a-woman-reader-by-belinda-jack-women-s-books-have-always-been-marginalized-from-the-roman-empire-to-chick-lit.html
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