Women Read. Women Write. Women Vote.
One of the more extraordinary end-of-2019 retrospective/resolution columns was Leonard Pitts’s announcement of his decision to read only female authors in 2020. Pitts, a self-proclaimed avid reader, realized, a couple years back, that he’d read 48 books that year—and only one of them was written by a woman.
What made the piece memorable was not Pitts’s determination to read more women writers; it was his utter surprise, having done the math, at his gendered reading habits. I am a huge fan of Leonard Pitts and his writing—and reading this passage made me admire him and his work even more:
Without realizing it, I had been filtering female authors out of my reading list. It was a jolting discovery for an avowed feminist, but it reminded me how insidious biases can be. And that, for as much as people love to proclaim their absolute lack of prejudice, what they usually mean is that they do not go around thinking mean thoughts about racial, religious or gender Others. Which is well and fine, except that our most powerful and consequential prejudices tend to be the ones we carry without even knowing we do. They lead us to assumptions we make without realizing we’ve made them, actions we CONTINUE READING: Women Read. Women Write. Women Vote. | Teacher in a strange land