Women have it better now than in the 19th century, but not in Englishlanguage fiction
Gender roles might have blurred in Englishlanguage fiction over two centuries, but there has been an “eye-opening, underdiscussed decline in the proportion of fiction actually written by women”, suggests a study by scholars from the universities of Illinois and California.
It’s an analysis of authors and characters of 1,04,000 novels from the period 1780 to 2007, which indicates a decline in female characters “from the 19th century through the early 1960s” and a drop in the number of books by women in the first half of 20th century.
According to the data analysis, “the proportion of fiction written by women drops by half (from roughly 50% of titles to roughly 25%) as we move from 1850 to 1950,” reports The Guardian.
“The number of female characters also drops. We are confronted with a paradoxical pattern. While gender roles were becoming more flexible, the space allotted to women on the shelves of libraries was contracting sharply,” says the study.
The academics believe this could partly be due to the respect the novel form — initially seen as a non-serious genre — gained later. “As the novel becomes more and more respectable, it becomes less associated with female authorship,” noted Claire Jarvis, a professor of English at Stanford University. It could also be due to the fact that over the decades, women took to writing in others genres such as non-fiction.
However, the decline in women authors was part of the reason for the drop in women characters, say the academics. According to the study, “In books by men, women occupy about a quarter to a third of the character-space”, but in books by women, “the division is closer to equal.”
The study also looked at the gendered use of language in fiction, which declined over time. The algorithm revealed that words like “heart”, “tears”, “sighs”, “smiles” were gendered feminine in the 19th century, with only a few subjective nouns ascribed more often to men; the primary one is passion, which is sometimes a 19th-century euphemism for lust.
By the mid-20th century, words for mirth such as “smile” and “laugh” were more likely to be used for female characters, while “midcentury men, apparently, can only grin and chuckle”.
The authors note that the study does not cover all novels written during the selected time period and is “missing representation from genre fiction such as romance novels and detective fiction, which grew popular in the 20th century.”