Should we consider a writer’s gender when choosing a book to read? Of course not, most people would probably say. And yet literary works by women are less often published, reviewed, and given prizes. This has to end. Nicole Seifert delivers the book for the debate – smart, informed, and inspiring.
Banal, cheesy, trivial – three adjectives that have been used for centuries to devalue the literary work of women. While male authors fill thousands of pages with descriptions of everyday life and are celebrated for it, female writers who do the same are accused to write overly subjective, touchy-feely chick lit.
Nicole Seifert has set out to expose the misogynistic structures of the literary world. We never even hear about many books written by women because newspaper, radio, and television editors – and book publishers before them – preselect titles. From German lessons to German studies, the proportion of women authors is still vanishingly small, so that we learn from the very beginning that what has literary value comes from men. After spending three years reading exclusively literature by women – classic and contemporary, well-known and unknown – it is clear to Nicole Seifert that the much-vaunted “quality” is not the problem. On the contrary, we’ll keep missing out on the best if we don’t finally introduce a quota for women on our bookshelves.
“The female work is despised. All the great creations of culture come from men. Every now and then we take a small mummy with female characteristics out of its coffin, let it say a few words, and then, after some time, it is buried again and forgotten. If you want to know more, you have to read Nicole Seifert’s book.” - Elfriede Jelinek
