Mimi–who has a fabulous blog about cooking and eating in Israel–wrote a particularly good response to my post about women and “big idea” books:

The first name that springs to mind is that of Freya Stark, a British explorer who traveled extensively in the Middle East during the late 1920s and 30s. She wrote over 24 books that opened windows to the history, cartography, and archeology of areas that Western MEN had never attempted to access. I love her writing, too. She made no apology for being a woman with a woman’s interests - in getting harem wives to talk, she’d fall back on “the thrice-blessed subject of clothes” (National Geographic Magazine would love an article on harem wives today, I’ll bet). Yet she was so strong in her self as to identify her emotion on realizing that she was the only “white” person within hundreds of kilometers: happiness.

. . .

While Freya Stark was an exceptional person, women are living lives dedicated to big ideas, and writing about them, all the time. Philosopher/essayist Susan Sontag, naturalist Diane Fossey, historian Barbara Tuchman in our times - Virginia Woolfe, whose quiet voice advocating a woman’s right to personal space magnified over time into a seminal call for women’s right to an identity of our own - and earlier, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose work seems incredibly old-fashioned now, but whose “Uncle Tom” helped change the fate of Black people in the U.S.

. . . I think it’s women’s style of writing that seems less legitimate to publishers, and that’s why we hear less of women with big ideas. Here’s another link, to an article titled “Can Women Writers Survive the Creative Writing Workshop?”

The article that Mimi linked to points out that only a third of the writers in the then most recent (the article was written in 1999) Norton Anthology of American Literature are women?! I don’t read as much literary fiction as many other bibliophiles, but that breakdown doesn’t sound right to me.

Update — As I was clicking through my feedreader, I came across this post about a travel lit book written by a woman: Along the Inca Road: A Woman’s Journey into an Ancient Empire. Amazon describes the book as follows, “What’s an American woman doing shaking a pink cape at a bull on a hillside in Peru? Ask Karin Muller, a self-described vagabond who is game for anything, especially if it’s a traditionally male task in strictly sex role-divided South America. After years of contemplating the thin red line of the Inca Road on her map of the world, Muller takes off with a grant from the National Geographic Society (which also supplied a cameraman) for a six-month jaunt through Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, and Chile.”