Move over, men – the future of literary history belongs to women
Author and co-founder of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, Kate Mosse, explains why now is a golden age for female writers
Last year, when researching my book Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World, I came across something known as “the Matilda Effect”. A phrase coined in 1993 by Prof Margaret W Rossiter, referencing the great 19th-century American science writer, abolitionist and suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, it’s a phenomenon whereby the work of female scientists is routinely attributed to their male counterparts, diminished or ignored altogether.
Take Eunice Newton Foote who, as far back as 1856, discovered how too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could cause the Earth to warm – what we now call “greenhouse gases” – but had to sit in the audience at an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting and listen as the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution presented her research as if it were his own. Or how, when the British chemist Dorothy Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964, the newspaper headline read: “Oxford housewife wins prize.” As I spent time in the company of nearly a thousand women from every period and in every field, the picture was clear: men have long been considered experts, active and purposeful, whereas women’s achievements have been underestimated and, in some cases, erased altogether.
This is one of several reasons we’re launching the Women’s
Non-fiction authors to watch: 1) Tara Westover 2) Helen Macdonald 3) Claire Tomalin 4) Natasha Walter 5) Reni Eddo-Lodge 6) Bettany Hughes 7) Eisa Davis 8) Shola Lynch 9) Angela Davis 10) Katherine Rundell 11) Suzannah Lipscomb. Right, Kate Mosse
Prize for Non-Fiction, a sister prize to the Women’s Prize for Fiction (and are now seeking sponsors). In some ways, this is a golden age for women writing non-fiction, from history to science, nature writing to smart thinking, politics to faith; the issue is less about what is published than what happens to a book after that. In 2022, over 70 per cent of non-fiction books reviewed in the British media were written by men; in last
December’s “best of ” lists, two-thirds of the recommended titles were by men. In July 2022, a leading newspaper asked five of its journalists to nominate essential reading for the next prime minister of the UK – either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak – and not a single book by a woman was suggested.
So far, so gloomy. It’s what we found when launching the Women’s Prize for Fiction back in 1996: that although women’s work was being published, it was still not being taken seriously. When I worked in publishing back in the 1980s, non-fiction was often referred to as “B and B”: “biography and battles”. It was
taken as read that the primary market for non-fiction was male readers, and the market adjusted itself accordingly. As a young editor, I was interested in politics, feminism, social history and faith, but was “encouraged” instead to commission health, lifestyle and diet – none of which suited my skill set or my interests. There was an assumption – often spoken aloud in acquisitions meetings – that books by men were for everyone (universal themes, “expert”, neutral) but books by women were for women.
When the Women’s Prize published a major research project in 2003, we revealed that the folklore was borne out by fact: men tended to read men, and chose men for their own “best of ” selections, whereas women chose both women and men. In 2022, our “Men Reading Women” campaign threw up the alarming statistic that only 19 per cent of men had ever
Research revealed that men tended to read men, but women chose both women and men
read a book by a woman. (Jane Austen, take a bow.)
Yet women have always been strong in (for instance) the field of biography. Today we have Claire Tomalin and Hermione Lee, but the trend dates to works by women such as Hrotsvitha in 10th-century Germany, Margery Kempe and Anne Locke in medieval England, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1857 biography of her close friend, Charlotte Brontë. It’s a reminder of how important it is not only that women be allowed to write and publish, but that their work be kept on the shelves for future generations to find. There are always one or two who will say that a new prize for women reinforces a two-tier system, but if there is a problem – and the figures tell us that, yes, there is a difference in how men’s and women’s work is valued – then you have two choices: to moan about it, or to do something. In the great suffragette motto: “Deeds, not words”.
There is a whole generation of exceptional female historians writing at the moment, from classical civilisations to contemporary American politics, such as Bettany Hughes, Sarah Churchwell, Kate Williams and Suzannah Lipscomb; writers on feminism and social theory and race, from Laura Bates and Reni Eddo-Lodge to Natasha Walter and Angela Y Davis; exquisite nature writing, such as Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path; and a new generation of biographers and memoirists, from Rachel Holmes, Kit de Waal and Katherine Rundell to Tara Westover, Debora Harding and Leah Broad.
These are just a handful of some of the extraordinary works of non-fiction that have been – or are about to be – published. The aim of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction is to press such exceptional books into the hands of readers, both male and female, who’ll appreciate them. It’s a virtuous circle: the more review coverage a book receives, the better its sales. When a book is shortlisted or wins a prize, that is another opportunity for readers to hear about it, which, in turn, means it’s more likely that the author will receive a higher advance for her or his next book. Author incomes are falling and, according to recent ALCS figures, the gender pay gap between women and men is widening too: median earnings for female authors in fiction and non-fiction have fallen by 17 per cent over the past five years, whereas male median authors’ earnings have fallen less sharply, by 14 per cent. What’s even more startling is that median author earnings across the board is now a paltry £7,000 per annum.
Literary prizes matter, because they keep works of quality on the shelf. There are some 180,000 titles published annually in the UK, so a little curation doesn’t go amiss. The new prize will shine a spotlight on the best of narrative non-fiction written in English globally, and inspire new generations of diarists, sociologists, psychologists, music theorists, political scientists, theologians, business writers and sports writers to take up their pens. More than anything, it will put in the spotlight exceptional writing by women – to be enjoyed by male and female readers alike.
The inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction will be awarded in 2024; womensprizeforfiction.co.uk. ‘Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries – The Stage Show’ runs from February 28–April 12; katemosse.co.uk