MODERN FEMALE WRITERS ARE BORING

So I have to decide on a topic for a Women's Writing Anthology.

I don't know if this is something I could ever express eloquently in a proper journal or essay, but I feel like women's writing was more on a par with that of men before feminism. Basically, if you look at modern writing, men's writing has exploded in the postmodern era to give us the biggest heavyweights yet, critiquing consumerism and the military industrial complex, probing existentialist questions, as well as ones about ontology and epistemology. Their writing has looked at the self and the psyche, nationhood, portraits of crumbling cities, I could go on. Women's writing seems to be trapped in relationships and motherhood, and the journey into the modern era, which now includes working class stories and readers who have travelled extensively, has only sapped those topics of elegance, drama and mystique. There is no female Don DeLillo, no female David Foster Wallace and there is no point denying it. And no, I don't like Margaret Atwood, she is the prime example of someone who writes well for a woman in her era but would sit towards the bottom of the category "science fiction" purely because she doesn't know anything about science. She writes about sciency-type-things and is not a bona fide nerd.

Then, if the book in question is really edgy at all, it is queer and therefore not something I should write about.

Sappho: as good as any man

Obviously, before the 19th Century there were relatively few women writers at all, just the big names everyone has heard of like Mary Wollstonecraft and Sappho. Then, in the Victorian era, they were always fewer in number than the men, but at least Jane Austen and Modernist Virginia Woolfe were leaders in their field. What happened in the modern era? Did all that identity politics just elevate less talented people into the public domain, who published before they were ready to a stream of complimentary "feminist" criticism?

Everyone will come back and say this book, that book - please do, I'm stuck for topics. I'm not saying there hasn't been a single good book written by a modern woman, actually a few of my favourites have been, but they were just unexpected sweet tales, they didn't define how I thought about the modern world. Why is this?

Post script: someone suggested The Ice Age, a road trip tale in the vein of Salinger and Kerouac. I'll try it, but this is precisely what I mean, isn't this novel just banking on the fact that women won't read those other two, and need a weaker version?