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I can't see how a website which does not list certain authors because of their sex does anything to remedy the discrimination suffered by people who are long dead. If someone who might have written a great book a hundred years ago never got the opportunity to do so, rejecting books by people who were able to write and publish at the time will not dig her up out of her grave and put a pen in her hand. She's dead. The book was never written. Nothing is going to change that.
I don't care, as a reader, whether someone wrote a good book because he or she was naturally talented, or because that person had a good education, or had the opportunity to practice the skills of a writer. I care if the book is good or not. If it's a good book, I don't care if it was written by a man or a woman or a particularly talented kangaroo. And if it's not a good book, I don't care why it's not; it's just not a good book. Reading bad books because their authors labored under some sort of handicap does nothing to benefit those authors -- they're dead! -- and wastes my time. I just want to read the best books (that fit my interests, anyway), no matter who wrote them. I don't care if the author was male or female, left-handed or right-handed, black or white or green. If it's a good book, I want to read it; if it isn't, I don't, and I don't care in the slightest whose name is on the cover. Remember, we're talking about books that were written by people who died before we were born. They're not collecting royalties, and I doubt if they're reading their fan mail, so it doesn't help them if I read their books, or someone else's books, or no books at all. Reading someone's books does not give them some kind of
I feel that singling out books by women sends the message "women need special treatment because they can't compete on their own" -- in this case, that books written by women aren't as good as books written by men, so they have to have a special, protected category where they're only competing with each other. Is that really the best image to perpetuate? Isn't that exactly why J.K. Rowling (and C.J. Cherry[h] before her, and C.L. Moore before her) had to publish under her initials?
It's possible that buying books by "disadvantaged" living writers might help them in some way, as sort of a literary welfare (can't I just send them a check for the royalties they'd get, and then go read a good book with a clear conscience?), but you can't argue the same for dead ones. If a cosmic hand came down tomorrow and erased the books of every author but Jane Austen, it would not change the facts of her life one iota. And we can't change the future if we treat female authors as if they are inherently second-rate, needing to be kept in special hothouses, with their books unable to succeed on their own merits. Nor can we change the future for women in any field if we continue treating sex as one's defining -- perhaps only -- characteristic. We've tried that, remember? That's why women had it so hard as authors for so long.
Present discrimination does not reverse past discrimination; it validates it. It tells people "discrimination is okay if you use these criteria, and it's a very short step from "these" to "those". Either it's right to decide which books should be in a library because of the sex of the authors, or it isn't. It can't be wrong only some of the time.
Maggie, with regard to PG, you'll note that I said "that's one of the things it's there for." That doesn't mean that claiming other people's work as your own, and asking for donations for your "work", is an honorable thing to do.
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