A Year of Reading Women: an experiment

Last February, in response to online pushes (for Women’s History Month) to “read more women”, I went looking at my bookshelf (which I had…

A Year of Reading Women: an experiment

Last February, in response to online pushes (for Women’s History Month) to “read more women”, I went looking at my bookshelf (which I had previously thought relatively diverse) and discovered that only a small fraction of the books I owned were by women; I read some that month, and mostly forgot about the issue. This past February, I was reminded of it again — after a year spent mostly reading male authors — and decided to try to make a more serious change. After all, women are half the population, not one twelfth of it — why spend one twelfth of just a handful of years (and probably substantially less in the twenty-five or so other years I have been reading) on female authors? I decided to try to read only women for a year (with some caveats).

This is also, in a sense, a kind of ‘soft-ball’ challenge. One might be tempted to do the same with, say, black authors, or indigenous authors, or asian authors, or trans authors. I might try to do one of these things later. Some of these challenges felt too difficult (literature by indigenous people, from what I understand from media coverage, is extremely thin on the ground), and some seemed too straightforward (I already read a substantial amount of Japanese literature in translation, for instance, so a project to ‘read more asian authors’ seemed beside the point, though a more specific project along those lines might be interesting; some large proportion of my online contacts are trans, though now that I come to think of it, probably less than 40%).

There are a couple problems that prevent me from doing a more serious and extreme version of this experiment, as well: I am part of several book clubs, and will continue to do the assigned reading for those; I am partway through several books by male authors that I intend to finish this year. So, I had to massage the rules. Nevertheless, this will still be a big change from my regular reading habits.

The Setup:

From February 2021 to February 2022, when deciding to start a new book for pleasure, I will choose a book written by a woman. I will prioritize authors whose books I have not read before, in order to get a more diverse experience, and where possible, I will vary genre and subject matter. In February of 2022, I will write a follow-up to this post.

This really is an experiment, because I have no idea whether or not it will be worthwhile. My experience thus far has been mixed: I am working my way through Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ The Women who Run With Wolves, which has been both difficult and rewarding because it has a very alien mindset and is, specifically and explicitly, not intended for a male audience; at the same time, while I loved Wendy Liu’s Abolish Silicon Valley, she basically describes experiences similar to mine and makes claims similar to claims I have also made, so there isn’t much psychic distance between us. Obviously, I don’t expect to do something cliched like “understand the feminine psyche”, but this experiment will be a success if I get out of my head a bit and learn something about experiences and attitudes that are much rarer in men than women.

If this kind of experiment seems interesting to you, I encourage you to try it with me! If you’re already a heavy reader with a tsundoku problem, you may (like me) find that reading only female authors for a year is simply a matter of reorganizing your existing ‘to read’ pile so that the top fifty or so books are all by women.