16 - Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Contemporary Women Essayists and Their Golden Moment

Summary

’ Is this a golden age for women essayists?’ Cheryl Strayed and Ben Moser addressed that question in a 2014 column for the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Pointing to the commercial success of writers like Leslie Jamison and Roxane Gay, Strayed agreed that ‘[e]ssayists who happen to be women are having a banner year’. But, Strayed offered, ‘as long as we still have reason to wedge “women” as a qualifier before “essayist,” the age is not exactly golden’. Strayed and Moser’s conversation subsequently became a reference point for others attempting to corral the twenty-first-century explosion of women essayists, predominantly but not entirely North American, into something critically comprehensible. The Times was not the first publication to put ‘women essayist’ and ‘golden age’ in the same sentence. In an interview with Jamison and Gay earlier that year, Salon writer Michele Filgate asked the two essayists whether this is ‘a great time to be a female essayist’. Yes, they both agreed, but, as with Strayed, not without caveats. Gay’s reply:

women essayists still aren’t taken as seriously as men. I think that you can look at all of the major, all the publications that publish essays that we all want to get into … their mastheads feel very male. And so I think we’re in a golden age of women essayists, but in what publications?

When we survey the landscape of women’s essay writing in the twenty-first century, we find a nearly unprecedented season in the history of the essay, a veritable and broad bloom of women essayists springing forth. But while it may be intoxicating to imagine a future in which essayists write and are celebrated without the weight of gender qualifiers, gender has always mattered in the essay tradition, heretofore dominated by male writers and critics – and it continues to matter, as Gay points out. Strayed said as much herself in a 2013 interview in Creative Nonfiction magazine where she acknowledged the ‘discreet and ingrained’ gender bias that women writers continue to face. Recent attempts to interrogate restrictive binary framings and recast the essay genre as queer, as David Lazar does in ‘Queering the Essay’, mark an important turning point in essay criticism, but new theoretical approaches do not change the essayist’s lived or textual experience along the gender spectrum, which so often drives the very subject of the essay.