Why Don’t More Women Write ‘Big Books’?

Let’s try a thought experiment.

In 10 seconds, try to think of as many big, popular works of history as you can. I mean those kinds of high-profile books about empires and civilizations rising and falling; battles and ideas that shaped that world; lives of rulers and statesmen.

Now, how many books like that were you able to name — by women? How many, that is, besides Mary Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (which last year spent 18 weeks on best-seller lists)? When I first tried the game with a (senior, male, historian) colleague, both of us spent those seconds struggling.

The kinds of books I have in mind are what Beard herself has called "big books by blokes about battles." These books are "big" not because they’re long, but because they tend to be about big subjects — battles, wars, the ancient world (say, last year’s Ancient Worlds: A Global History of Antiquity by Michael Scott) or even the Course of Human History (this year’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel).

A 2016 article on Slate gave this sort of book a different label: "uncle books," that is, "tomes that you give an older male relative, to take up residence by his wingback armchair." The authors of that piece, Andrew Kahn and Rebecca Onion, set out to investigate a hunch that women are relatively scarce in the land of uncle-book writers. They calculated gender distribution statistics for the previous year’s "popular history" books. Of 614 titles published by 80 publishing houses, 76 percent were by men. (I’d also be curious to see the disparity between male and female authors working with literary agents, which in the U.S. are all but required for trade nonfiction.) 

The smaller supply of women writing popular history books is a problem. That problem doesn’t exist because we’re missing some sort of particularly "female viewpoint," or books on "women’s issues" in history. The issue is that public conversation is lacking a diversity of opinions and perspectives not only on the usual big-book topics — "the invention of the West," "how X civilization rose and fell," etc. — but also on what kind of topics deserve having big books written about them. If more kinds of people wrote these books, we’d surely see big books about more kinds of things. The Harvard historian Jill Lepore used the history of Wonder Woman to tell the big story of the struggle for women’s rights in the 20th-century United States. How many male academics would ever have thought to do that?  ...