Today we celebrate one of history’s greatest, the largely unheralded misogynist douchebag T.M. Zink, who managed to stick it to the ladies even after he died. As Time magazine reported shortly after his death in 1930:
At Le Mars, Iowa, the probated will of T. M. Zink, deceased attorney, revealed:1) His $100,000 estate is to be placed in trust for 75 years; 2) In A. D. 2005 the accumulated principal is to be used to establish, equip and maintain a library on whose shelves will be no woman author, on whose catalogs will be no woman’s name, over whose portal will blaze: “No Women Admitted”; 3) To his daughter went $5; 4) To his widow not 1¢.
As he explained in his will:
My intense hatred of women is not of recent origin or development nor based upon any personal differences I ever had with them but is the result of my experiences with women, observations of them and study of all literatures and philosophical works.
2005 has come and gone and sadly, at least from the point of view of misogynist bibliophiles, the Zink Womanless Library was never built. As a piece in The Guardian noted, his family successfully challenged the will, I’m guessing on the grounds of Quando podeces te regi eorum fecerunt? (“When did you become king of the assholes?“)
Cap’n B is quoting Gertrude Stein. She was talking about Oakland, California.
There’s definitely now a there in Oakland, though I doubt Slavey and his ilk would find it congenial.
What exactly is a “universal theme” anyway?
The love between members of families? The devotion to duty? The nature of being?
The “I am a pretentious dolt who needs to show off how ‘deep’ I am by writing something impossible to understand?”
Ion: Have you read James Tiptree, Jr.’s work?
Pecunium: my cunning plan has been thwarted! (I asked Ion if he’d read Tiptree).
Damn good list of women authors you posted though *takes notes*
As I recall last time we did thiss with a Troll (was it NWO or another), we were accused of just googling.
Oh, and P.S.: re universal themes.
We haven’t even gotten out of the solar system yet; we have no idea what a UNIVERSAL theme might be. Nobody in professional English circles talks about universal themes any more because it’s always just shorthand for “straight cis white privileged men who speak English are GODS”
In other words, there’s no such thing.
There’s a webpage called “Derailing for Dummies” that you all might appreciate.
I love it when MRAs try to show how unbiased they are, and that their ideas are totally the result of critical thought and careful analysis.
Zink studied all the literatures and philosophical works. All of them! That’s a lot of literatures! Credentials- he has them!
And he didn’t hate women because he had personal differences with any of them – after all his personal experiences with women and observations of them, during which he never argued with any women, he decided he hated them. Scienctificness, your name is Zink.
Ah, “men write about important stuff, women’s writing is boring” – brought to you by the ‘There are no Great Women’ division of Misogyny Inc. How many decades ago was that idea discredited, along with “Dickens/Lawrence/Joyce/Sartre etc were major writers, Gaskell/Woolf/Collette/De Beauvoir etc were minor ones” ?
de Beauvoir! Now that is a universal author.
ithiliana: Sorry.
And yes, it’s a pretty good list. Comes of an interest in history, and political theory, and philosophy and religion.
Someday, perhaps, I ought to take a class in gender studies, but as yet it’s all independent studies. I think, all in all, you’d like my most recent english prof; didn’t matter what course he was teaching (I took two, and the second had some students from a third), argument mattered. Stake a claim, and defend it.
I completely reconsidered Milton’s, “On his blindness” in the first course, and was confirmed in my opinion that Socrates was a jerk. He did really like my compare/contrast paper on Gorgia v. Analects (that was the terminal paper), even if I did bury the thesis (which he said worked).
I didn’t realise I’d done it.
I should, I suppose, read some Tiptree.
I think one of the things that may confuse people who think “women only write about women stuff” is that there’s two kinds of women’s books in a bookstore:
1) Shiny pink books about boys and periods
2) Books about space travel or botany or bicycling or works of literary or genre fiction–which are not pink and not loudly labeled as “women’s literature.” They’re just literature that happens to be by a woman–if only her last name is on the spine, it may not be obvious at all from a glance.
I think a lot of people don’t scan group 2 as “books by women” at all; they just see them as “books” and possibly assume that every botany/bicycling book is by a man unless otherwise specified.
It’s not. I’m taking a writing class right now and my professor is a woman who’s written about Massachusetts history, about the ecology of the Harbor Islands, and about firefighting. Real lady business, that.
By the way, my favorite lady authors are probably Margaret Atwood (who writes, yes, about ladybusiness and ladyissues–but these are real business and real issues goddammit) and Mary Roach (who writes about dead bodies, ghosts, sex, and spaceships).
My issue w/ Atwood is that she’s a moon landing skeptic/hoaxer >_>
But she’s also somebody I bring up a lot about Canadian culture and Canadian fiction w/ an essay she wrote about how a lot of traditional Canadian fiction boils down to “nature will kill you” or Americans will xD and that’s ttlly how so much of our identity is (outside of hockey) xD
Holly: I can confirm that my students often refer to any assigned author as “he,” even when taking a women’s writers course taught by a woman assigning only women authors!
That’s what we mean when we say the male is the default!
Also for your thing about how ppl scan women’s authors SO THAT xD
what’s interesting is also for non-gendered names (or no picture) how ppl assume.. like the female authors who hide being female.. or like J.A. Pitts, whom I like to bring up a lot, b/c of his (awesome) fantasy novel Black Blade Blues, which has a butchy lesbian heroine.. and a lot of critical guys in customer reviews online seem to assume that he’s a woman and there’s like “typical female ideas…” stuff xD
Ami – I did not know Atwood was a moon landing skeptic! That gives me and Buzz Aldrin a sad face. 🙁
Pecunium: You SHOULD read Tiptree!! (WHom, I would consider a feminist writer, in the sense of the stories being part of a feminist canon, and serving as the inspiration for the only sf prize on gender speculation–the Tiptree has been won by men, not just women!). But I can also highly recommend Julie Phillips’ biography of Tiptree: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon
http://www.julie-phillips.com/
What threw people is that when Tiptree in his letters talked about traveling in Afria and working for the CIA, he was talking about things Alice Sheldon DID (as a child, and as an adult). Tiptree also published under the pseud of Racoona Sheldon. Sheldon was definitely someone who did not fit into the traditional gender roles.
I had been reading Tiptree from the start, and was fascinated when I read Silveberg’s claim about his ineluctable masculine style quoted above; the same week I picked up Tiptree’s first novel with the picture of a woman in her 50s on the back (see, the other thing–Tiptree was not just a woman, but a woman with a professional career or two when she started publishing). I recommend “The Women Men Don’t See or “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” as good places to start.
For years I thought Charles de Lint was a female author.
I adore Charles de Lint’s work–buy immediately in hardback. Was it because of the female protagonists, or his writing style, or both?
Had you heard that apparently Dick Francis’ wife used to write the ‘relationship’ parts of his books while he wrote the jockey parts? I learned that after I quit buying them because thought they went downhill, and then heard that his wife had died, and that was why.
http://i749.photobucket.com/albums/xx134/ami_angelwings/Magyc%20Cards/WomanlessLibraryofZink.jpg
(do ppl like it better w/ or w/o the “Womanless”?)
It’s definitely better with the “Womanless.”
My favorite Tiptree is “Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death,” followed by “The Screwfly Solution.”
Love is the plan, etc – http://web.archive.org/web/20051205182711/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/tiptree/tiptree1.html
Screwfly Solution –
http://web.archive.org/web/20021022174200/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/sheldon/sheldon1.html
Universal themes:
1) Zombies
2) Apocalypse
3) Zombie apocalypse
Does that about cover it? I can’t really think of any others.
Works for me…Any book can be improved with zombies.
It was a bit of, “all”. I started with Yarrow,and it reminded me (in tenor) of Emma Bull’s “War for the Oaks”. It’s not that he has female protagonists, but that I believed them, and the first I read was with a late adolescent female.