Some Thoughts on Literary History and Gender Segregation

“Mr. Davis says it is as useful to educate a woman as to educate a female cat.”

                                Amy March in “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott

Male and female literature has nearly always been divided.  You aren’t likely to see many girls reading the latest Halo novel, nor are there likely to be numerous guys reading Twilight.  The distinction between gender-appropriate books, however, was once far more ridged than it is now.  If I were to go out today, purchase a copy of the Brooks Brothers manual How to be a Gentleman, and read it in a public place, I might get some funny looks.  Someone might even make a pointed remark.  Serious retribution, however, would not be likely to occur.

At one time that wasn’t the case.  At one time a woman could get into serious trouble– sometimes even prison– just for reading a book that was deemed to be too masculine.

Than isn’t news to most people, and in fact most could probably name at least one nation where such literary rules are still firmly enforced today, but we tend to think of such notions as being problems found only in far away places.  In Medieval Japan, for example, where privileged court women, living lives of excruciating boredom, were only allowed to read things that were deemed to be safely trivial.  Or in ancient Greece, where woman weren’t allowed to read for themselves at all, and had to content themselves not only with mundane reading material, but also with the literary services of educated slaves.  But that sort of thing couldn’t be part of Western history, right?

Wrong.  The history of   Don’t forget that Mary Wollstonecraft rocked Britain when she argued, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that women should be educated.  Don’t forget that Jane Austen had to be educated by proxy through her brothers and father.  Later she had to publish her works anonymously because women were not permitted to publish books– especially books in which well-read female characters often outwitted male characters.  In Victorian America, dime novels aimed at middle-class women were viewed as inappropriate and even dangerous.  Believe it or not, some of our female ancestors wouldn't have been allowed to walk into a bookshop and purchase any tome they wanted.

That thought makes you feel very privileged, doesn’t it?  It kind of makes you want to go read something just because you can.