I don't know if any of you have been following the fight over the Hugo Awards in science fiction and fantasy—I wrote about it last week in
Freeping the Hugos. In a nutshell, there are a few reactionary conservative writers/editors/publishers who feel that there are too many literate writers of diversity winning the Hugo Awards and that as a result, none of the conservative writers are being recognized for their quality. They are sure that there is some sort of back channel selection process that is shutting them out. So, in order to make clear that the Hugo process can be rigged, they are rigging it, and perhaps even destroying it in their fit of pique.
Lord, the entitlement of conservative, straight, white males. It is a wonder to behold.
As a woman of a certain age, who has suffered under a society once held firmly in the grasp of like-minded men, I have a bit of advice for them: If you don't like the way things are being done, do them yourself. If you don't like the way existing literary prizes are being awarded, create your own. If you do not feel that an organization is filling your needs, build one that does. In other words, stop whining, get off your lazy asses and start your own awards program. Start your own professional organization.
Just like the women of Sisters in Crime (SinC) and Malice Domestic did in the 1980s.
Please join me below the fold to learn how it is done.
By 1986, mystery and suspense novels were selling in record numbers, giving a second wind to long-time writers who had been sidelined while the industry had been in the doldrums and fresh hope to those new to the trade. The opportunities were exciting.
Especially if you were a man.
Between 1945 and 1986, the
Mystery Writers of America (MWA) awarded an Edgar for best mystery novel every year. Of those 41 awards, only seven went to women, the last one in 1971, when Maj Sjöwall shared the award with her co-author Per Wahlöö for
The Laughing Policeman.
It was clear by the mid 80s, that the MWA was either intentionally or inadvertently ignoring its female membership, and their work, choosing to recognize instead novels of the noir or of the hard-boiled sub-genre, written mostly by men.
In January of 1986, the organization was called on this behavior by past president Phyllis Whitney who wrote a letter to the MWA asking if perhaps there was a sexual bias in the selection process, since, at that point, the last woman to take home an Edgar had done so fifteen years earlier. In retrospect, it does seem that since 30 to 40 percent of crime novels were written by women that they were seriously under-represented in the MWA awards.
That spring also featured an address by Sara Paretsky to the first conference on Women in the Mystery, held at Hunter College.
Sara Paretsky spoke about the growing use of graphic sadism against women in mysteries. "Remarks I made at the conference set off a firestorm around the mystery world," [...] Sara recalls. "Women began calling me from all over the country with their personal histories of treatment/mistreatment."
At the fall
Bouchercon, held in Baltimore that year, Sara Paretsky met with other women who were also concerned with the lack of review space that their work was getting in the major media outlets.
By the spring of 1987, during Edgars' Week in New York, the nascent Sisters in Crime held its first meeting in the SoHo loft of author Sandra Scoppettone.
Initial steering committee members were Charlotte MacLeod, Kate Mattes, Betty Francis, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Sara Paretsky, Nancy Pickard and Susan Dunlap. A newsletter was in the works. Information on publicizing books was being put together. The review project was under consideration. And the mission statement had been formalized: "Sisters in Crime is committed to helping women who write, review, buy, or sell crime fiction. Our ultimate goal is to become a service organization to address issues of concern to everyone involved in the mystery field."
"The first two years of Sisters I ran everything out of my eight by ten office, with stamps sent by Margaret Maron and a generous contribution from Jane Langton," Sara says. "Dorothy Salisbury Davis' support proved crucial—she was so respected by MWA members that she persuaded women like Mary Higgins Clark to join and she damped down some of the hostile fire we were getting from the mystery press (Nancy Pickard and I used to be routinely attacked in the 'zines for crimes too numerous to iterate.)"
Oh yes, the Puppies of sci-fi aren't getting anywhere near the heat these women were for daring to say that something was wrong and then having the audacity to actually do something constructive about it.
Margaret Maron recalls, "After Phyllis Whitney's letter to MWA and what many considered their dismissive response, Sara Paretsky sent a letter to every mystery writing woman she could find, asking if we were interested in forming a networking group. I thought it was great for someone of her caliber to take this on for all women; and although she hadn't asked for money, I sent her a roll of stamps to help with mailing costs."
SinC wanted to draw attention to the problems inherent in a society whose entertainment relied so heavily on violence against women. And during the 1970s and 1980s feminists across the country were fighting back against what, at the time, was known as domestic violence. It is important to remember that the Violence Against Women Act wouldn't be passed until 1994. (See
'The Burning Bed,' 30 years later. And Ray Rice, now.)
Unwilling to call for any type of censorship, SinC restricted itself to forcing discussions of the issue with publishers, reviewers and male mystery writers. In 1989, Sara Paretsky was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune:
"We have seen a lot of graphic sadism towards women-and to some extent toward children-in books that are getting mainstream publishing and review attention," said Paretsky, whose sixth mystery, "Burn Marks," is due out in February. "You can look at violence from a lot of different ways. I think to an extent that people get inured to violence-that authors resort to more graphic violence to get past the indifference that readers or moviegoers now have toward violence.
...
Paretsky said she didn't think the mayhem directed toward females in male authored crime novels was a direct cause of the problem in society, but had to be addressed as a reflection of and contributor to brutal attitudes toward women in real life.
One measure of their very real success is in the difference they have made in gaining review space for crime novels written by women. In 1988 the
Christian Science Monitor reported:
Although women publish 30 to 40 percent of crime fiction, Sisters in Crime has found that they are reviewed only 6 to 20 percent of the time. Reviews in such national publications as Publishers Weekly, the New York Times Book Review, and Kirkus are crucial.
"Libraries make their buying decision based on reviews in national publications,'' she [Paretsky] says. "If it hadn't been for libraries wanting to buy my book, I would have disappeared off the face of the earth,'' she says.
According to the
2014 SinC Monitoring Project:
National newspapers all saw an increase in the percentage of women authors reviewed, ranging from 44 percent of the mystery reviews in The New York Times (up from 36 percent in 2013) to 30 percent of reviews in the Wall Street Journal (up from 27 percent). The only decrease from recent years was in the Washington Post, which gave 45 percent of its mystery review space to women authors in 2013 but only 35 percent in 2014. In local newspapers, women authors also gained slightly, with an overall increase from 41 percent to 42 percent of all mystery reviews.
And that, gentlemen of the puppy persuasion, is how you get it done. You work for it and you earn it.
But that is only half the story. While the women were busy organizing and working to heighten the visibility of their contribution to the mystery genre, some made time to also get busy on developing an award that would recognize a sub-genre that had long been ignored.
According to author Lia Matera, reminiscing about those earlier days:
Cozy writers Carolyn Hart, Margaret Maron, Barbara Mertz (aka Elizabeth Peters), Joan Hess, Dorothy Cannell, Nancy Pickard and others decided it was time to do something about the fact that cozies were rarely reviewed, and when they were, they got treated as lesser. Edgar nominations rarely went to them, though noir and hard-boiled nominees were just as "formulaic." They decided enough was enough. They discussed it with other cozy writers, and some editors and agents, and decided it was time to create their own con with its own awards. Of course, there was a backlash against that, too. Detractors said there were too many awards already, and this would cheapen them all, and so on. But it was always tinged with the prejudice that cozies aren't "real" books, they're just what bored women read for fun, like magazines.
And as recently as 2005, Otto Penzler, the highly influential owner of Mysterious Books in New York City,
was quoted as saying:
"The women who write [cozies] stop the action to go shopping, create a recipe, or take care of cats," he says. "Cozies are not serious literature. They don’t deserve to win. Men take [writing] more seriously as art. Men labor over a book to make it literature. There are wonderful exceptions, of course—P.D. James, Ruth Rendell."
(I'd hate to be the one to tell him that hard-boiled mysteries are hardly the stuff of serious literature, but someone should.)
To which Margaret Maron, past president of the MWA, Edgar winner and author of the popular Deborah Knott mysteries responded:
"Wit, humor, and domesticity haven’t been considered as significant as blood and violence. Charlotte MacLeod was never nominated," Maron says, recalling the late author of a series of cozies. “She wrote some very funny mysteries, but they were considered ‘soft.’ She didn’t use the ‘F’ word. She wasn’t walking those mean streets.’ ”
In a little more than ten days, Malice Domestic will be celebrating its 27th anniversary in Bethesda, MD, and awarding its coveted Agathas. When readers pick up an Agatha winner they know they will be reading a traditional cozy mystery, one that allows the graphic violence and sex to take place off the page. That does not mean, however, that it will be lacking in suspense-filled plotting with realistic, finely drawn characters in settings as genuine as any that can be found in a hard-boiled detective novel.
Did the formations of these two groups cause upsets within the mystery community? Of course they did. Old friendships were strained as opinions differed, but somehow they all came through it, mostly on speaking terms. Women now enjoy greater visibility as crime fiction writers. And today the field is deeper, richer and far more diverse, as is the work being produced, than it ever was before 1986.
If the privileged males of the Mad and Sad Puppies were sincere in their claims that they are not being fairly judged by the fans who select the Hugo award winners, they could have networked with other like-minded writers and fans and accomplished what the women of the mystery genre did. Instead of trying to destroy an existing, well-loved icon of science fiction, they could have done the hard work of forming a complimentary organization that could have brought them the attention that they feel they are lacking. They could have created a fan convention that could include all of the science fiction fans that they feel are not being welcomed into the existing Worldcons.
And the science fiction and fantasy world would have been richer for it.
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