Member-only story
Fear of Failing…
RWA in the middle of a brouhaha
Back in 1973 when Erica Jong’s feminist-raising novel, Fear of Flying, came out, I read it and was amazed that a woman could “get this stuff published.”
Even at 26, I was a bit naive. But that was the whole idea, right, Erica? Men could write about their sexuality and had been for millennia but woman? Well, there was Sappho.
In 1855 Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his publisher:
America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash–and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the ‘Lamplighter,’ and other books neither better nor worse?–worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000.
Today it’s completely different and Fear of Flying and its “zipless fuck” seems a bit…well…naive itself. But it was published at a time when the gatekeepers of publishing were mostly male.
And as a new decade evolved after “Fear…,” publishing began to realize that women bought and read books in greater numbers than men. And a big chunk of those books were…gasp!…Romance books with Happily Ever After endings.
