May 7, 2021 - 11:56am
OCR, one of the three main exam boards in the UK, is currently asking teachers to vote on a proposed series of changes to help diversify its GCSE and A-level courses. One of the suggestions is whether to change its A-level module ‘Women in Literature’ to ‘Gender in Literature,’ as this would apparently ‘help pupils better understand the topic.’
What this would really do is erase women’s voices and their contribution to literature.
In an ideal world, female writers would have enough representation on the curriculum to not need our own “special” category — sadly this is not the case. In the four other optional modules for the Context and Comparison paper, only two out of eight set texts are written by women. In the other paper — Shakespeare, drama and poetry before 1900 — only one out of eleven optional writers are female.
The situation is the same across exam boards. In the Edexcel Drama module, only one in eight writers are female, and in the AQA Love Through The Ages poetry anthology, only one poem out of fourteen is by a woman. The poem is Remember by Christina Rossetti, who also happens to be the only named female poet in both the Edexcel and AQA Poetry papers, and therefore apparently the only female poet pre-1900 worth studying.
OCR’s ‘Gender in Literature’ proposal leaves me with questions. Firstly, why can’t they just create an additional category? Women’s art, literature, and contribution to history have been ignored, lost and disregarded for centuries. How would removing women therefore enhance diversity? And anyway: why is it always women who are the first group to be subsumed in the name of inclusivity? Why are there no calls for fewer men — or should I say, people who don’t menstruate — on the curriculum?
Also, why reduce the topic to something as vague, subjective and contentious as gender? In theory all literature is gendered as it is written by human beings, and so it may as well be called ‘People in Literature.’ This is hardly going to help pupils understand the topic better, and so it will in all likelihood be an unpopular choice for teachers.
OCR’s attempt to modernise its curriculum to ensure a fair balance of “gender, races, disabled/non-disabled people and cultures” is symptomatic of this much wider cultural shift in prioritising identity over quality. Political agendas and arbitrary equality quotas have taken centre-stage, and the literature itself has become peripheral to the discussion.
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Some year ago they had an article about modern female writers in the Guardian. Being a witty (?) chap I commented that I did not really enjoy female writers and my favourite writer was that long-dead white male, George Eliot.
I got a reply from somebody mockingly telling me that they had found out (perhaps from wikipedia?) that George Eliot was actually female.
The commenter got several recommendations for putting me in my place.
Probably the same sort who were embarrassed to discover Gay Girl in Damascus was a male academic in Scotland, if they ever did.
Ruby M Ayers, that very popular woman writer of the early 1900s, why is she not on any list> PG Wodehouse spoofs her writing with the character:
“Rosie M. Banks is a fictional romance novelist. A tall, lissom girl with soft, soulful brown eyes and a nice figure,[2] she is devoted to her pekingese dogs and owns as many as six at a time.[3]
She is the author of works such as: All for Love; A Red, Red Summer Rose; Madcap Myrtle; Only a Factory Girl; The Courtship of Lord Strathmorlick; The Woman Who Braved All; Mervyn Keene, Clubman; ‘Twas Once in May; By Honour Bound; and A Kiss at Twilight. She also wrote the Christmas story “Tiny Fingers”.”
Thumbs up. It won’t let me click the icon.
Pekingese written without the capital P, perhaps? Derogatory to Chinese people who deserve a capital, for sure. “Lissom”, for all its insinuations of feminine curviness, perhaps? “Nice figure”, though, is for me, the real clincher. How utterly sexist. A nice figure is 9. Did you know that all multiplications of 9 add up to 9? And do you know the 9-times-table game you can play play on your fingers? And it’s curvy, though it shouldn’t have to be. Now that’s a seriously nice figure. Not all grouchy like the figure 7, or ideas beyond its station like 5.
Awaiting for approval – I challenge anyone to find the trigger word, if they do post the above on Rosie Banks….for sending the post to moderation.
I think its run by a bored teenager who just stops a comment when they want-as I’ve been stopped as they decided something was ‘wrong’ but the previous person’s comment was allowed.
Currer Bell isn’t bad either.
As I have said before, if ‘They’ identified as Male, they are male, so George Eliot, a 1800s woman taking a male identity, is in fact a Dead White Male. If any University tried to include her in a Woman’s Literature class they would have to give a very long explanation of how this is not intended to offend the Gender Fluid readers.
From sports to academia there really is a new `patriarchy’ at work (spearheaded by the gender police) who seek erase the lived experiences of women. No trans woman has the lived experiance of a woman just as no trans man has the lived experience of a man. This is especially true of the past where women lived more restricted lives that are reflected in the literature they produced. Misogyny strikes again. Stop erasing the gains made by women.
there are plenty of women who are complete in this erasure. Where are the women to speak out against things like “birthing people” as if someone other than females can get pregnant? The women who point to the problem of bio boys in girls’ sports are shouted down, often by other women. If women don’t care enough about the existential threat facing them, then you can’t expect everyone else to do the heavy lifting for them.
An uncomfortable truth is FGM is almost entirely driven by women. It is mother in laws who require this be done for any bride, and mothers actually haveing it done to their daughters, by women cutters.
That’s true; Somalia-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s father who was, for his time and culture, educated and forward-thinking, didn’t want any of his young daughters to undergo FGM, but her mother and grandmother overrode his objections and got her and her sisters mutilated when their father was away. Which suggests in part that that culture is not quite as “patriarchal” as assumed. An incredible amount of cruelty and violence in this world is perpetrated, enabled, and tolerated by women.
Where are the women to speak out? I think you’ve answered your own question. They’re shouted down.
if that is the case, then it is hard to muster sympathy for them.
As I said in another comment, it’s a lot more than putting up with hecklers. Speakers are uninvited to events, if they were invited in the first place, and careers are at risk. And I believe – would someone who knows please confirm or deny this? – social media ban such ideas as hate speech. So why do you find sympathy hard to muster?
I find it hard to muster because a great deal of this punitive action is engineered by women. It’s not men who came up with the TERF label; men are far more likely to be allies of women who believe that womanhood is a real thing and not a matter of how one identifies. Men have made the most noise regarding women’s sports. Other women are propagating the mangling of the language.
It’s not men who came up with the TERF label
Again, I’m not sure about this, but I suspect ‘women who were mislabelled as men’ had a lot to do with inventing the term – and from the sound of it, I guess you might simply call them men.
What do you mean by a new patriarchy? You mean a different group of men are again oppressing women? You modern Liberals, it is always men isn’t it. I would say it is the patriarchy which has been replaced by more erratic and, unreasonable, hysterical, nongenderspecificarchy. (who have more matriarchal qualities than patriarchy qualities.)
Yes, in my experience when people talk about making their child gender-neutral, it almost always means non-masculine.
Good point, what woman says ‘I am raising my daughter non-gender spefic. Please bring her toy guns instead of dolls.
Some women are jumping on the gender bandwagon by trying to raise their children ‘gender neutral”, whether they are boys or girls. I discovered this a few years ago when my sister mentioned that a collague of hers had just had a baby. When I asked wether the baby was a boy or girl, my sister said hesitantly, “Well, it’s biologically female.” Apparently the baby’s parents (they were a female couple) had made it known that, even though they were willing to disclose their child’s biological sex, they didn’t want to use terms like “girl” or “boy” and would use the pronouns “they/them’their” when referring to the baby. And they’d given the baby a very masculine-sounding but presumably gender-neutral name. I think I made a comment like, “So, the baby’s a girl; what exactly is wrong with that?”
The fact that your sister was hesitant – I think that’s the aim of all this gender ideology. It causes people to question reality and trust their own judgment less. Scared of putting a foot wrong, they wait for the latest update on correct-think from authorities they’ve come to trust.
Its also a game of one-upmanship-oh how old fashioned , calling your child a boy/girl.
And to come back to Linda’s post, when people exchange the word “experience” for the phrase “lived experience”, I tend to internally vocalise the sentence with a “moronic interrogative” terminal rising inflection. This often happens at the expense of my regard for the writer’s opinions, rightly or wrongly.
What I don’t understand is why people don’t complain. Everyone seems to take these insults to our intelligence by shrugging and saying, “What can you do?”
I don’t pretend to have an answer to this question but I do have ideas. OK, the ideas could be stupid but when more and more people join to present better and better ideas, then you get a proper response.
Because they’re accused of some phobia or ism. Look at the women who dared notice an issue with biological boys competing in girls’ sports. Look at the women who have dared say “only women have periods.” The few who have spoken have been largely abandoned by the feminists.
There are a huge quantity of feminists who are on a collision course with trans activists.
Unfortunately, wokeists seem to have a great deal of momentum, which can determine the outcome of collisions.
More women went to university , I think they are in the majority now? More women became lecturers and designed courses for themselves-which often seem to be of the subjective social science type-now woman 1 ie Germaine Greer are being cancelled by woman 2, the younger lot who want to make a name for themselves. It never seemed to be about studying the actual texts. Even a writer on this site seemed to think Jane Eyre was about the working conditions of governesses. Personally I think they should just read Mr Francis or Jilly Cooper-much more fun.
Now that’s something I would pay to watch, unless I have to wear a face mask.
Perhaps these feminists might want to enlist the aid of men, most of whom find this madness to be, well, madness.
There is a fight you would want both sides to loose
People are already doing something about it, by tending to disfavour in recruitment those who have selected easy A Levels to study.
That’s a shame, I have always enjoyed the work of George Eliot, the Brontes, Jane Austen, Stevie Smith, Virginia Woolf (sometimes), A L Kennedy, Anna Burns, Nadine Gordimer (sometimes), Monica Ali, Edna O’Brien, to name just a few.
Me too, though I’d very definitely have included Mary Shelley in that list.
I don’t know exactly what this move to Gender in Literature entails, but I guess it means such women will be lumped in with gay male writers.
I suspect it will be supporting the modern woke views – forget literature, or readability and replace with “its written by a transitional BEM who used to be a Martian before becoming a camel who transitioned into a woman”
Have you noticed that Frankenstein and Blade Runner share a plot?
I’ve noticed disturbing parallels with recent developments in biotechnology. Mycoplasma laboratorium may be superficially different to Shelley’s creature, but I’m sure she’d have recognised the similarity.
Mary Shelley is included in the AQA A-level spec.
“I don’t know exactly what this move to Gender in Literature entails, but I guess it means such women will be lumped in with gay male writers” – brilliant – thank you for making me laugh out loud.
I think there is a move to make women a protected minority – which, of course, is madness. I’ve always liked H G Wells and Enid Blyton without any consideration for which sex they were.
I would have thought that women were good enough at writing novels and poetry not to need their own section. Let’s just have English Literature.
Sorry, there’s no chance of that.
Amen to that fond hope: heaven knows there is no shortage of first rate authors who are also women. Sadly I suspect we are to be disappointed though. The current reductive tendency will eventually edit us all out of existence. (If we allow it.)
I’m a F&SF fan, can’t stand the majority of the classics but I have noticed that a lot of the best writers in my preferred genre are women.
To declare you dislike the very best of literature devalues your credentials as a judge of writing.
Errrr – best is a subjective judgement. So in reverse your declaration that the “classics” is the very best of literature devalues your credentials as a judge of my judgement of writing.
Its all a matter of opinion.
I have read and enjoyed Dostoevsky gave up on Jane Austin and found Dickens on a par with trying to eat a kilo bag of sugar with a spoon – at one sitting.
Its all a matter of opinion.
If what you say is true, then Mog the Cat can be declared greater literature than Vanity Fair. I beg you to revisit your last comment.
I love the classics, but your cancel comment should be cancelled. Preference does not compromise credentials.
Just because women happen to be prolific in this particular genre of pulp, it doesn’t mean that they are any less capable writers as a sex. All ladies are women, but not all women are ladies. I’m sure I’ll revisit Wuthering Heights with pleasure, some day, notwithstanding the fact that the Harry Potter books are tripe. Do be serious.
Frazier, I suspect your listing means you are a closet misogynist as you feel the need to list women writers to burnish your credentials as being unbiased proves you are in fact a sexist. Remember, there is no winning in this game of trying to show a White Man is anything but racist, misogynist, and trans-phobic- and likely an Islamophobe too. Own your Privilege, Frazier.
And lets not forget Donne, the second best Elizabethan poet, Love’s Alchemy poem:
“‘Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,
Which he in her angelic finds,
Would swear as justly that he hears,
In that day’s rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres.
Hope not for mind in women; at their best
Sweetness and wit, they’are but mummy, possess’d.”
What are you on about? I was merely making a slightly ironic and superficial comment on the article.
If the great John Donne wrote “Hope not for mind in women,” then obviously you and your list are mindless!
As I was being ironic by saying that by Mansplaining that Women wrote some good stuff, and then listing them, you are being patronizing. Such is the PC level nowadays.
Don’t forget William Dunbar.
One nice thing about being old is I don’t have to read anything because it is worthy-so apart from the classics the female authors I prefer are from the golden age of crime , Josephine Tey ,Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L Sayers et al.I make an exception for Molly Keane.
Well, of course. Eventually, the mob comes for you. Because that’s what mobs do. And there has been an ongoing effort to erase the concept of womanhood, whether it’s something idiotic like “birthing people” or “chest feeding,” or something more sinister like having biological males compete against females.
The feminist silence in this has been defeaning. By the way, the women to be targeted will be white women because they’re, well, white. You didn’t white was only bad when applied to men, did you? Every year, academia is creating fewer people who know anything beyond grievance. “People.” If only someone had warned where this nonsense leads.
“The feminist silence in this has been deafening” (I’m assuming defeating was a typo)
Some have tried speaking out, only to find themselves labelled trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, and treated as pariahs for their efforts, banned from appearing at various venues and so on.
yes, typo..now fixed. Thanks for that.
Where is the feminist contingent coming to JK Rowling or Martina Navratilova’s defense? Where is the defense of females who say “only women get pregnant”? Where is the opposition to such inane terms as “birthing people” and “chest feeding”?
The irony is that the attacks are led by other women. They are active participants in their own erasure.
If they work in academia or media, they risk their careers by speaking out. And I’m not sure about this, but don’t the likes of Facebook censor them for so-called hate speech?
Where are we? Getting banned from Twitter and Reddit, deplatformed by universities, banned from local politics, losing our jobs. We’re on mumsnet, on wpuk, on spinster and ovarit, in the women’s liberation front, in fair play for women, the LGB alliance, FiLiA, the whrc. We’re crowdfunding legal cases, publishing books and scientific studies, writing blogs.
So you’re preaching to the choir. How’s that working out? Oddly, you’re excluding a large chunk of half the population that has found all of this ridiculous from the start. And just as oddly, a fair amount of the deplatforming and banning is coming from other women.
You want to read that again, and maybe lookup some of the sites and organisations I mention? You might notice that while some are female only, all can be read by anyone and many are campaigning groups aimed at challenging unjust laws, affirming women’s rights in law, or lobbying mainstream political parties.
Or you could just reiterate your own assumptions, yet again.That is your right.
Who is Artemesia excluding, and how? She seems to be saying that women who don’t go along with wokeist culture are being excluded from the mainstream, and consequently, if you want to know where they are, the mainstream is not the place to look.
.So where is Agatha Christi? The biggest seller of all time, I have at least 30 of her paperbacks on my 250 foot of book shelves, the most of any one writer.
In the same shelf as Carter Dickson/John Dickson Carr, Ngaio Marsh and others who have produced entertaining ‘green penguin’ literature that doesn’t really merit greater study.
Correct. Christie wrote books, not literature.
No, not so easily dismissed. Collectively they established a sort of picture of the zeitgeist of Britain between the wars and just after, a setting in the time period, like Dickens did for the Victorian. I believe there is a quality of literature which is when it captures the popular imagination to such a huge degree, she did something with her words to strike such a cord in people that her books out sold any other writer in history – there is more to her stuff than you believe.
!!! Di* kens!!! Awaiting for Approval!!!!
My reply “Awaiting for approval”, somewhat ironically in a thread that deals with the English language.
Perhaps because I quoted names that contain a syllable that is an oft-used vulgarism for the male member. How utterly juvenile.
This started for me when I mentioned Mr Turpin & even when I put dots etc still not happy.
“In an ideal world, female writers would have enough representation on the curriculum to not need our own “special” category”. Hmm. Right away this give me the willies. “Ideal world”? “Representation”. These are woke buzz words. In my “ideal world”, people would not care one iota about whether the author was female, male, black, white, short, tall, thin, trans, … They would only care about the quality of the work. Here in Canada, all national and provincial grant programs and awards have turned into vehicles to “create equity”. ie: if you’re a white straight male, frig right off!! If you are a transgender two-spirited indigenous disabled person, you can write drivel and people will be forced to read it in university classes. It’s truly horrible, and you can read some funny stories about the “literature” this has resulted in. Read the Gwen Benaway story, then try to read one of her “poems”…
“Women’s art, literature, and contribution to history have been ignored, lost and disregarded for centuries.”
Yep.We’ve all just found out about Elizabeth Browning. Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Bronte sisters etc.etc this morning!
Scandalous.
George Elliott was a man, one supposes, as ‘they’ appear to be identifying as male. The Trans lobby would come down on you very heavy indeed for your post.
I think that you are aware of the reason for authors hiding their sex. It’s so that you can’t have preconceived ideas about the book before reading it. In the past women would take a man’s name in order to be taken seriously. These days a male author needs to mask his identity.
I wonder if it might be better to frame the content in terms of genres and then select a range of writers from each genre to include a variety of genders/origins. Science Fiction as a genre has a very rich history of male, female and trans writers. Within particular genres one might give options concerning the issues raised in such genres. I think this would be an interesting exercise.
Yeah – just go for F&SF and dump the rest.
I have a much better idea:
“Women’s art, literature, and contribution to history have been ignored, lost and disregarded for centuries.”
Lets have ‘Second Class Literature‘ as a subject in A levels, and Schools, and University, and the chapters can be White Women, Minority Women, Minority Men, Youth, and Other. Then every one gets a Prize.
There’s a confusion here between including writers who happen to be women (or gay or trans) and analysing how genders are represented in literature by writers of any sex or gender. I’m surprised that more women are not currently included in the curricula since feminists since Woolf have urged that writing by women be taken seriously. The current focus on trans rights has turned attention away from what women care and write about – the struggles between professional aspirations and child care, equality in relationships as well as in work etc etc. For women writers such as Woolf and Austen the tension was between ascribed gender roles and their inhibiting effects on womens’ lives.
They could do worse than assign Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which says most of what needs to be said.
I’m surprised that more women are not currently included in the curricula since feminists since Woolf have urged that writing by women be taken seriously.
Why are you surprised? Womanhood itself isn’t taken seriously. From “birthing people” to “chest feeding,” it’s being erased. The few women who have dared to notice later found themselves being targeted.
Where is Stella Gibbons in all this? Her book ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ is credited by some to be the best comedy ever written, and it is a masterpiece in how it deals with every stereotype, gender, class, period pieces, education… (it is a spoof of the great Edwardian Novel) and actual human qualities as well – that is why the ‘I saw something nasty in the wood shed’ is so effective.
I am always delighted by Simone Weil, amazing writing, her quote “Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.” has always stuck in my head.
What’s the point? Say what things are.
Women in literature means just that. If you want to, have a category for transgender people in literature.
This is yet another sly way to do away with the concept of the biological female.
All down a handful of absolutely bat-shit crazy men who need the entire world to pretend that a trans woman is the same as an actual woman.
“All down a handful of absolutely bat-shit crazy men….”
Do you mean a small handful of absolutely bat-shit crazy ex-men who are claiming to be women? I do not know any men (i.e. born male and identifying as male gender) who give a rat’s arse about trans people demanding anything – particularly the right to compete on an uneven paying field with real women (though all the men I know take a ‘live and let live’ approach to trans people generally.). Perhaps I do not mix in sufficiently woke circles.
I say trans people because I find the terminology very confusing. I would have thought that a man who transitions to woman is a trans man, because whatever he/she/they/it might be, they are not a woman – where they ended up is unclear; the only certainty is where they started. (However, I understand that this is not how these people want to be described, and I would not wish consciously to upset them, because they have troubles enough. Goodness knows life is difficult enough for normal people.)
I read Enid Blyton when I was growing up and it never did me much harm!
Totally agree. And a couple of weeks ago I found in a book shop for 50p a copy of her “Mr Pink-Whistle” stories. For some reason, everyone in my family sniggers when they see it – even though I point out that a whistle is not an oboe……….
You can’t study everyone. To accommodate ‘diversity’ are you going to drop Shakespeare and Hardy for some box ticking author of inferior quality? Why on earth would you do that??
Two reasons, I’d say.
First, because women have won a privileged position for themselves through activism, and men haven’t. So the faction to be attacked by other factions because it has privileges those other factions want given up to themselves is, obviously, women.
Second, women are a majority and most women in the UK are white. So white women are an oppressor majority which is an additional reason for cranks to hate them.
Welcome to what it feels like to be male, by the way.
This article presumably addresses foreign language A Levels, since English’s treatment of gender is too trivial to admit of study at this level. Without introduction or explanation, it then starts to discuss English literature. I don’t understand why the authoress is complaining at the statistical over-representation of female writers in the syllabus, though. Surely it’s a good thing to make it clear to young adults that women are equally capable of producing great literature as men, and that it is only historical social differences that have caused female writers to be relatively marginalised in the annals of great, classic literature?
You have a logical phalicy stated as fact – because by sheer numbers it is clear women do not write as much great literature as men. Tautologically, just list the names and total them up.
I don’t see anything fallacious in the comment. I admit that I have suggested, without proof, that women’s potential capacity for literary greatness perhaps equals men’s: you may consider this to be too generous and beg to differ with me, but I deny that I labour under a fallacy.
Who cares?
us who are not ignorant, or unable to feel aesthetics, and can enjoy reading of universal truths written exquisitely well.
It’s depressing enough that fewer students are taking English at A-level, but it’s even worse that women are so under-represented. Perhaps Germaine Greer’s excellent book,’Slip-shod sybils should be considered by exam boards before they impose such deadly limitations.
“but it’s even worse that women are so under-represented” – do you want 50% women authors in the A level syllabus? In that case, what percentage of gay authors, what percentage of black authors, what percentage of gay black disabled authors?
OR, how about just include stuff that’s good?
If Ms. Murkett is worried about “prioritising identity over quality”, then why is she concerned about the small numbers of female writers in the curriculum? Basically, she seems to be saying to respect MY quota system, but to hell with yours!
I thought gender was a social construct in which case does it matter what plumbing the author has?
“Now women’s literature is cancelled…”
Ah, so now you speak up. You might familiarise yourself with this:
First they came … – Wikipedia