Hello, I don't speak much on here but this issue interests me greatly, & I
have spent a lot of time thinking about & observing things related to it.

I'll preface all this by stating that most of my experience & observation
have been in Australia (I have only been in Britain 3 years).

First point: It was tempting, before I was ever involved in putting
together anthologies or issues of journals, to believe in conspiracy
theories about all men deliberately excluding women -- but I then found it
wasn't so easy, even as a woman working with other women editors -- to get
material from women. (This doesn't mean there ISN'T a conspiracy, but it
starts to make the theory look shaky! NB I was once hissed at, at a
festival talk, for speaking like this. It is much easier to believe in
conspiracies, but not very helpful.) Given we KNEW plenty of women we could
(& did) ask, why could we not get material? Possibly material circumstances
of some women's lives that made it difficult for them to "network" &
contribute to the same degree as many men. These circumstances should,
then, be overcome or factored in. Possibly our own "filters" that said
"this isn't good enough" as a result of applying (male-taught?) criteria.

Second point (arising from first): it may have something to do with
"shifting the goal posts". Some of my students have found it hard to see
the specifically colonial dimension of particular novels because they read
them as "British" novels and the noise of their reading practice drowns out
certain elements. Some white Australian critics have found black Australian
poetry to be "not poetry at all" because they do not understand it is NOT
DRAWING ON THEIR MODELS, it is not even TRYING to be englit, so the white
critic "failing" it is missing the point. (It was a revelation to me to
start listening to black Aust. critics talking about black Aust. writing.)
I am not suggesting all these examples can be conflated (nationality is not
race is not gender). However, I am leading up to this: is it possible that
many editors do not "see" a good woman-authored poem because their template
automatically excludes it? The Australian critic-novelist-poet David Brooks
has written about his own experience of coming to terms with this.

How do we shift the goal posts (see our own blind spots?) if this is in
fact what's needed?

One answer (in Australia) was the publication in 1975 of a book called
"Mother I'm Rooted", edited by Kate Jennings, an anthology that has been
called "deliberately unedited" in that it printed what came in from women.
"But is it good?" you may ask, and the point is, that wasn't the point. The
idea was to get stuff out there and throw the doors open a bit. A later
women's anthology says of it, "In mainstream literary circles, it was
generally thought to be embarrassing. It was meant to be." As a woman
educated in a "mainstream" literary tradition I know what's seen as
embarrassing; as a feminist I also often "know" what a woman writer is
doing even when the other part of me knows I will be pushing shit uphill to
defend it. I am not suggesting that we should thus publish everything that
embarrasses us and is written by a woman. I am suggesting that much of what
could justifiably and proudly be included in anthologies gets missed
because we are missing the point.

I'll wind up with some bits of poetry, one a quote from the beginning of a
poem in "Mother I'm Rooted", by Barbara Creed:

"I think there's a man in my head
A man-made man in my head
I think a myth has exploded
Yet I know there's a man in my head..."

and just to contradict her, a much earlier poem from Lesbia Harford
(1891-1927):

FATHERLESS

I've had no man
To guard and shelter me,
Guide and instruct me
>From mine infancy.

No lord of earth
To show me day by day
What things a girl should do
And what she should say.

I have gone free
Of manly excellence
And hold their wisdom
More than half pretence.

For since no male
Has ruled me or has fed,
I think my own thoughts
In my woman's head.

-------------------------

Cheers
Tracy Ryan.




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