Women, Men and Book Clubs - It's a Problem

WE NEED TO ADDRESS THIS

When my editor suggested we study all the book club recommendations over the last 10-15 years and publish any trends we find, I was game. She sent over the research and I spent hours reading article after article and comparing recommendations but not much stood out. That is, until we looked at the obvious:

All of the influential book clubs are run by women.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

It wasn’t really a big deal at first. We knew going in that that was the case, yet never considered what that meant or if it meant anything at all. But once I got to studying the history of book clubs, the importance of women being the exclusive face of this industry today took on an entirely different meaning. All I could think was “Oh how the tables have turned,” but have they turned too far?

Let me explain.

We can date book clubs back to the 1600s. On a ship from England to Massachusetts Bay Colony, Anne Hutchinson gathered the women on board to dissect religious texts. The crew, all men, scolded Hutchinson but she continued on. Even when she arrived in Massachusetts, Hutchinson didn’t stop. Her Bible study group got more popular than the church service itself, and what happened to her was what happened to every woman back in the day when their shine got too bright - she was exiled from the colony.

We can debate whether that was an actual book club, but this moment is important to note because it points to a larger historical issue that has been completely transformed in current times.

In the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, women were largely excluded from intellectual pursuits and conversations. Those privileges were reserved for men because obviously only men had brains and could use them. How silly of us to think otherwise.

Despite this exclusion, women in the eighteenth century started rebelling. Between the living rooms or backrooms in bookshops, women barred from formal educational institutions and conversations but who loved reading and learning all the same, started gathering on their own. They spoke about the topics of the day, got lost in conversations about the literature they enjoyed reading and did it all while building communal bonds.

During this century, Europe counted at least a thousand book clubs, reserved almost exclusively for upper-class citizens. This was when the French Salons were established. Upper-class women organized gatherings of the creative thinkers of the day, with literature certainly a prominent part of these conversations.

What we know now as book clubs didn’t start taking its current shape till the nineteenth century. Women — still not allowed to participate in formal education — started reading groups to facilitate literary conversations independently. These reading groups were rebellious in nature. Sorosis, for example, was formed when women were not allowed to attend an event with Charles Dickens. Margaret Fuller’s Conversations was another group that was established in response to women not being allowed formal education.

Okay, where am I going with this? Let me tell you.

As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, book clubs today, at least the most influential ones, are exclusively run by women. After centuries of exclusion, they are the ones who dictate much of the reading habits of today’s generation. Women today are the ones largely responsible for dictating bestsellers. Those backroom conversations from centuries past have transformed into a persuasive power that expands throughout literary and popular culture.

Read my novel: And Then There Was Us

And I don’t just mean that superfluously. Statistics from BookNet Canada show that books chosen by Reese Witherspoon, Read With Jenna, and even Dua Lipa have anywhere from a casual to a significant impact on book sales and book borrowing. Model and actress Kaia Gerber — who runs a book club called Library Science — and musician Florence Welch who runs Between Two Books, don’t have the same broad impact as the other clubs we researched but have an outsized impact on their fans. In Welch’s case, her fans actually started the book club prior to Welch becoming involved. Their passion for her music organically led them in a direction to want more. Now they read what she suggests they read.

This is all great and quite the turnaround, but my question is: at what cost?

Intentionally or not, men either seem to be excluded from these clubs or have chosen to exclude themselves from these clubs. Not in the same way that women were excluded centuries ago; men are allowed to start or join any club they want and men certainly aren’t left out of any cultural conversations. However, the research is clear that for whatever reason, young boys and men are not connecting to literature in the same way they did even half a century ago.

But why? And here is the question I really want us to consider: is it somehow not okay for boys to be reading books by female authors or with women as the lead characters? And what role does a woman recommending a book have on the psyche of a potential male reader?

Women, particularly young women, seem to have no problem reading books by men and even with men as lead characters. But when the perspective is reversed, the statistics clearly prove that both young boys and adult men struggle to connect with female-authored stories or stories with female leads.

We’ve actually touched on this topic before (from a different lens) and here are some of the current statistics: Romance is the most popular genre of literature right now (Romantasy is having a moment) and that readership skews 80% female. For literary fiction, the next most popular genre of fiction, only 20% of males are picking up those books. Overall, 80% of books sold are sold to women.

The hypocrisy of Wicked

Female authorship has risen from 20% in 1970 to about 50% by 2020. That’s a significant increase in stories from the female perspective, which was absolutely necessary. If we look at the top 5 NYT bestsellers as of writing this post (hardcover fiction), Percival Everett is the only male on that list.

But again, should that matter?

Should we not encourage boys to appreciate all types of stories? Even the stories that don’t directly reflect their gender in lead roles? And I don’t want to be misunderstood here; it is extremely important to feel seen in books. I don’t need to recite any stats to prove that point — we know it’s true. But when boys in North America are performing worse than girls in every significant literary statistic, don’t we need to ring some alarm bells? Should we be trying harder to find male-driven books to appeal to young boys or should we be finding creative ways to help open up their aperture for diverse stories?

When we analyzed the recommendations from these book clubs, other than Reese Witherspoon, all of the book clubs suggested an impressively diverse list of authors and books, ranging from fiction to non-fiction, dramatic stories to adventurous ones. I will say that fantasy wasn’t represented much, but as far as the diversity of genders and stories that could and should appeal to boys and men, they’re all present in these book club recs.

So are we saying, as a culture, that because women are recommending these books that they automatically have less appeal to men? That can’t be it, right? Canadian statistics show that 63% of book club members are women and 37% identify as men. How do those figures play into the broader consumption patterns mentioned previously?

And yes, 70-80% of teachers are female, and yes, 80% of publishing is also female. But it’s not like they’re only promoting or putting out feminist books. There’s a deeper issue at play that we need to acknowledge. In a world that has become more inclusive in many ways, boys seem to be on the periphery of literature.

How do we address this problem? Or what do you see as the core issue here?