This series has revisited women’s writing of the past 50 years, tracking its recognition and visibility, and in the 21st century there has been undeniable progress.
Irish women have fared exceptionally well, with Anne Enright and Anna Burns winning the Booker Prize, Lisa McInerney and Eimear McBride the Women’s Prize; and the rise and rise of the cultural phenomenon that is Sally Rooney. Literary gatekeepers, it would seem, have seen the error of their omission and moved to rectify it.
It would be cause for celebration were it not for the pesky numbers. In the past 25 years, there have been 17 male Booker Prize winners to 10 female, two of whom had to share. That’s a ratio of almost 2:1, or to spell it out, two great male writers to every great woman writer. In the 21st century.
Other prizes tell a similar story. Since 2000, nine women have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction compared to 16 men (two shared).
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The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction (formerly the Samuel Johnson), first awarded in 1999 and billed as the UK’s premier annual prize for non-fiction, boasts just eight women winners to 17 men. The shortlists tell their own story: 98 men were shortlisted compared to 50 women, and on only three occasions did a shortlist feature more women than men. These three years boasted a woman winner. Coincidence? No. Shortlists matter. It goes without saying that this year’s 25th anniversary one-off “winner of winners” was a man.
The Pulitzer General Non-fiction prize did no better: eight women, one shared with a male winner, to 19 men. (Literary prizes only seem to be shared when there’s a woman involved.) It’s almost as if subjects of interest to women historians and biographers and journalists could not possibly be of interest to anyone else.
Once again, the Women’s Prize took up the slack, introducing a non-fiction prize in 2023. Writer and broadcaster Kate Mosse, announcing the launch of the prize, said it was “not about taking the spotlight away from the brilliant male writers, it’s about adding the women in”.
You can’t argue with the numbers, yet so often that is precisely what happens. To those who would claim that one doesn’t need gender balance on every shortlist and panel as long as it evens out in the long run, know this: it never evens out. The counts tell us this again and again: the VIDAs; #WakingTheFeminists’ gender analysis of Irish theatre; Anne Enright’s 2017 London Review of Books essay, Call Yourself George (fun fact: VIDA, in 2016, found that the London Review of Books had “the worst gender disparity” in its reviews, with women representing only 18 per cent of reviewers and 26 per cent of authors reviewed).
If we are to even pretend that we consider women writers equal to men, gender balance is needed in every literary journal, every newspaper review section, every prize list, long and short: everywhere.
In spite of a system stacked against them, 21st-century women writers flourished. For this woman writer, books kept me sane (by 2008 I had four children), and finally, after an extended apprenticeship, I wrote a couple myself. My PhD on women writing trauma kept me firmly in the zone, with a focus on Eimear McBride’s singular novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, and its astonishing stage production directed by Annie Ryan.
There are too many books to talk about in this period, so I will pretend there is a gun to my head and I must choose just two. The Baillie Gifford in 2004 could not overlook Australian Anna Funder’s brilliant Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, which sheds light on life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), “the most perfected surveillance state of all time”, where it was estimated that there was one informer for every 6.5 citizens.
Funder placed an ad in a newspaper asking to speak to former members of the secret police force, the Stasi, and received an overwhelming response. Following leads that took her to the most unexpected of places, she writes about the women “who sit in Nuremberg puzzling together the shredded files the Stasi couldn’t burn or pulp”, and East Germans such as Sigrid Paul, who found herself on the opposite side of the wall to her baby, who was being cared for in Westend Hospital in West Berlin.
Stasiland is not a history, trotting out impersonal facts; rather, it’s a collection of essays, and essays digress. Deploying what Edward Hoagland calls the artful “I” of an essay and other tools of fiction, Funder weaves her own story through the book, revealing life in the GDR in engaging, witty and often highly personal prose, joining the ranks of the many women essayists who made their mark over the timespan of this series: Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Rebecca Solnit, Roxane Gay, Rachel Cusk, Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine, to name but a few.
The Booker got it right with Milkman, Anna Burns’ 2018 novel, which was also named best Irish fiction title of the 21st century in a recent Irish Times survey. I would go one further and take out the word Irish. Milkman is an extraordinary feat of telling the truth, slant, to invoke Emily Dickinson.
Who knew that one of the most insightful and enlightening voices of the Troubles would be that of an unnamed teenaged protagonist who likes to read while walking? “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died,” it begins, and if you haven’t read it yet, what are you waiting for?
The category and methods that have largely defined this series – women and counting – show that progress has been made, albeit from a very low base, yet the gender gap in the literary field stubbornly remains. Not only are women authors seen as producing literature of lower literary value – literary prizes hammer this home again and again – there is even a gendered genre hierarchy.
Dutch researcher CW Koolen uses computational analysis and other methods to demonstrate that so-called “chick lit”, usually perceived to have been written by women, is seen as of lesser quality than spy or thriller novels, usually perceived to have been written by men. Counting is dull work, but as long as we live in societies that value and prioritise men’s voices and experiences over women’s, it remains necessary.
(Space does not allow for distinctions of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, economic status, age, education, disability, etc, of the writers discussed in this series, but “woman” is not a monolith, and over the past 25 years, across forms and genres, women writers have provided essential global sociopolitical perspectives.)
This series has been about accountability, but it has also been a celebration of brilliant writing by women that informs, entertains, provokes and inspires. Women like myself, writing in the 21st century, owe an enormous debt of gratitude to our literary foremothers – the essayists, poets, dramatists, critics and novelists – of the past 50 years.
Leaning into my personal fiction bias, what other 21st-century flavoured novels would I press into your hand? In no particular order: Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin; 2003’s Adolescence; My Year of Rest and Relaxation – the ultimate Millennial read, in which Ottessa Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator spends most of the novel sleeping (yet we’re still talking about it); Room by Emma Donoghue; Zadie Smith’s White Teeth; Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers; A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan – playing with all the forms; the Neapolitan novels, of course, by pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein), starting with My Brilliant Friend in 2012; The Weekend by Australian author Charlotte Wood; Theory and Practice by Sri Lankan-Australian author Michelle de Kretser, for anyone who has ever experienced the dubious pleasures of literary theory with a capital T; and there are so many more.
Looking back has been a joy. And now I’m looking forward: here’s to the next 50 years of women’s writing.
Paula McGrath is a novelist and assistant professor of Creative Writing at UCD
Reading list
Stasiland by Anna Funder (2004) – pulling back the Iron Curtain one essay at a time.
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life (2024) – yes, I’m sneaking in Funder’s novel, too. Wifedom combines the biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, wife of George Orwell, with personal memoir, exploring for both women what it means to be a writer and a wife.
Milkman by Anna Burns (2018) – the GOAT, in this writer’s humble opinion.
Generation (2015) and A History of Running Away (2017) by Paula McGrath – because if you liked this series, you might enjoy the novels ...
