This kerfuffle is a sign of the times—or rather of Time Magazine. In a post on February 25, Time gave a list of 100 female authors—their phrase; don’t go after me for not saying “women authors”—read most often in U.S. colleges. (Time‘s list was apparently culled from the list of the Open Syllabus Project.) Kate Turabian and Diana Hacker, who wrote style manuals much used for writing papers, were the most popular, but the real writers then followed: Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, and so on. (I can’t believe they left off Carson McCullers!)
But the item of interest to internet pedants, and curmudgeons like myself, was that #97 on the list was Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). You don’t have to be very literate to know that in fact Evelyn Waugh had a Y chromosome:
Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited, was, despite his Catholicism, admired by Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, and by Richard Dawkins, who called him “one of my favorite novelists.” And although I haven’t read Waugh (I suspect I wouldn’t be a fan, for writers like P. G. Wodehouse and Anthony Powell, who describe or satirize the lives of British toffs, leave me cold), I do know that he was a man. Shame on Time for not knowing that, too! Who’s editing their articles, and do they know anything about literature?
For a scathing critique of Time‘s faux pas, coupled with a lament about the ignorance of today’s youth—and, better still, an appreciation of Waugh’s literary merits—read Stefan Kanfer’s short piece “An ignorant Time” in City Journal. (As a former editor of Time, Kanfer has credibility about this.) I’m not so wild about Kanfer’s accusation that the younger generation is going to Ignorance Hell: such complaints have been issued by every older generations since ancient Egypt. But there is one difference between this younger generation and all those that went before: the Internet:
When once-formidable newspapers like the New York Times print regular, lengthy columns of misattributions and misinformation, and when a newsmagazine cannot identify the sex of an author, much less his/her significance, Americans can no longer depend on periodicals to set things straight. That job, ironically, has been ceded to the freewheeling and often irresponsible Internet.
I can’t hold the Internet responsible for Time’s gaffe, but it is good that corrections can come so quickly, thanks to bloggers and to Twi**er. On balance the Internet is a very good thing, even if it does reduce the attention span of people, making them less able to read real books.
I note that in the update of its piece, Time has issued a correction:
h/t Hardy
This sounds particularly appropriate.
http://www.sadtrombone.com/
Just imagine the excitement of the person putting together that initial list. “OMG what a find! She’s not on ANY of the other lists I looked at!!”
🙂
Who would be your 100th?
I heard about this & the discussion over the confusion of gender regarding certain names that swap as they cross the Atlantic – eg Hilary in GB can be male/female
Marion in US can be male (John Wayne was Marion Morison)- in Britain female… etc
Sort of related: I’ve got some great great-grandmothers named Christian and Nicholas.
i bet they think george eliot was a man too?
Nah, they got that one right, at least 🙂
His first wife was called Evelyn, so his friends called them He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn. Would have been helpful if he had stuck with He-Evelyn to help future list compilers at Time.
I used to know a couple named Aaron and Erin.
The first name of the first wife of Evelyn Waugh was… Evelyn.
Dislike the man but his novels are fine. Try reading “Brideshead Revisited” or his World War Two trilogy, “Swor of Honour”
Dislike the man but his novels are fine. Try reading “Brideshead Revisited” or his World War Two trilogy, “Sword of Honour”
I tried to read Sword of Honour but simply bogged down in the training camp time …
I had just finished Brideshead Revisited about ten days ago. I thought it was quite good, but rambling. And I’m still not sure of what to make of the relationship between the narrator and Sebastian.
I will definitely read other works by Ms Waugh.
The 1981 British TV serial of “Brideshead” is good. Even if you don’t like the movie, the voice of Jeremy Irons will soothe you.
I would recommend Waugh’s earlier, more comedic novels–they’re more accessible. Those would include Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and A Handful of Dust.
Wholly agree with revelator60’s revelation; if one wants to read Waugh, the early ones are better – the later ones are pervaded by what I can only describe as a prurient and furtive fascination with Roman Catholicism. I tried the Sword of Honour trilogy not so long ago and got fed up with the mixture of Catholic prurience and giggling public-school japes in which there was at times an admixture of good old-fashioned racism. Pace Jerry, I have some time for Anthony Powell, but the best novelist of (roughly) that English generation is Henry Green, to my mind. But, in general, I much prefer European writers like Joseph Roth, whose The Radetzky March I hugely recommend… but I’ll not go on.
Who’s editing their articles, and do they know anything about literature? Probably the same people at PLoS ONE!!
Good grief! What a foolish mistake! And the people putting this together were presumably supposed to be expert on literature (why else would they be doing the choosing?)! Wow!
I think the people putting the Time piece together just went through the Syllabus Project’s list of popular authors (not sorted by gender) and picked out the 100 top ones with names that sounded like women.
The decline of a responsible and accurate media the Times or CBS does not hold much respect these days. It tends to mirror the politics if you think about it a few minutes.
Is there a respected media company or person today who could put an end to this campaign circus called Donald Trump? There once was such a thing in the U.S. and it took place around 1954, when a guy named Ed Morrow took down Joseph McCarthy in less than three minutes on television.
To be fair, the contemporary non-STEM university curriculum is pretty heavy, what with being offended, no-platforming speakers, scurrying from safe space to safe space, finding comfortable intersectional sofas to make the place more of a home, and so on.
Dead cis white guy who wrote some books? Bah, patriarchy! Although, perhaps if the “Evelyn” thing was played up as a symbolic, perhaps vaguely trans, step onto the regressive ladder of symbolic victimhood…
LOL! 🙂
And don’t forget policing cultural appropriation, being on guard for micro-aggressions, and the time required for punching-up training!
It’s a wonder they have any time left for beer (which was the prime non-study occupation in my student days).
The irate academic cowardice on “triggering” has reached the point where I’m morally certain that, some unfortunate day, one or more members of the “I’ve-been-triggered-WAAAAHHH!-now-give-me-an-A-for-cutting-your-nasty-ol’-painful-class” crowd will pack a gun to class and shoot a professor, maybe more than one, and likely massacre some fellow students too, as vengeance for the High Crime And Misdemeanor Of Being Triggering:
“Help! This class assignment days that Evelyn Waugh was a man! It hurts to have an author removed from my mental list of woman authors, because it diminishes women through patriarchy! It’s — it’s not woman-affirming, THAT’S what it is! I am triggered! BLAM!”
“Ooh, horrors! I’ve sat next to a person whose political or other beliefs I now learn — and find painful! And I’ve even borrowed her notes! I’m triggered! BLAM! BLAM!”
“Oh, no! This history book I found in the library uses the word ‘slave’! — and this other one uses the phrase droit de seigneur! And the professor even told us what that means! I am triggered! Triggered! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!”
“Ouch! The professor told us that feelings are not a tool for reasoning! That hurts! Triggered! BLAM! BLAM!
“Gracious me! The professor told us he didn’t vote for the candidate that my friends and I voted for! And then he told us why! Triggering! And then — and THEN, just this morning, he said that the speed of light IS NOT a construct of male chauvinist privileged rapist opinion that favors hard, inflexible mathematically calculated abstractions over REAL speeds, such as the speed of a mother chasing a runaway toddler!”
[note: this is a real-life example:
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray
for a professor who uses this as her “proof” that science is for rapists.] Triggering, triggering, I am triggered!! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!”
It WILL happen, I think. And you have read it here first. And when it does … it’ll be immediately blamed on the Nasty Old Profs with their Nasty Old Textbooks And Sources, full of Nasty Old Facts And Sciences and so on: expect something like the medieval “town-and-gown”‘riots, if for different reasons.
The problem may be as simple as a deficiency in the education suffered or perhaps not suffered by so many millennials.
Things have reached the point where those who’ve just noticed that they’ve been wrong all their lives on some small or large point of fact (such as the spelling of a name or common word, or the death-year of some public figure) are, increasingly, deciding that they themselves were right after all, and that the rest of the universe is wrong.
Google “Mandela Effect” (another title for the claim is “Berenstein Bears spelling effect”) to learn about the belief (claimed, predictably, as “quantum science” by its believers) that if you had always thought some celebrity died in the 1980s but he was in fact still alive years later — or if you had always been taught to spell “dilemma” with an “n” (“dilemna”), or had been wrong about the exact surname, or possibly now the exact sex, of some well-known author — why, you were never wrong at all, because this simply proves that you originated in some alternate universe that was just like this one except for being the place where your lifelong mistakes had actually been correct.
There is a whole network of web-sores devoted to taking this very seriously: visit “mandelaeffect.com” to start with, then visit “dilemna.org” (misspelled this, and dedicated to the proposition that the people who misspell “dilemma” come from some other Earth where it REALLY IS “dilemna”!) — then, if you’ve the stomach for more, Google “Berenstain Bears”+”spelling conspiracy” for one common version of the claim, again VERY seriously believed and defended.
I gave up on Time magazine a few years ago when a ‘science’ piece in the ‘Science’ section of their print edition carried a line that went something like this: “The problem was a 10-degree C (50-degree F) change in temperature destroyed its chemical properties.”
It was a glaring and stupid statement showing a lack of common sense and a lack of editorial oversight. Their helpful parenthetical statement (10 C change = 50 F change) was childishly wrong. If it is 10 C outside, then, yes, it is 50 F. But if the temperature changes by 10 C, say from 10 C to 20 C outside, then it’s 68 F outside – a ten-degree Celsius change is an 18-degree Fahrenheit change.
I can’t imagine how such an error went to ink. Until my subscription expired (and I didn’t renew it), I noticed more and more similar gaffs, not just in its Science section, but throughout the magazine. (I know what you’re thinking: ‘Who would read Time for its science?’ Well, unfortunately, thousands probably did.)
When my son was little he subscribed to some wildlife series that would send out monthly pamphlets on half a dozen animals, each with pictures and facts about the species, so that one eventually accrued a sort of animal encyclopedia.
One month’s installment had the Duck-billed Platypus, of which it informed us that its normal body temperature was 32°F. We got a kick out of imagining these little monotreme freezers swimming around.
Seems that was a misprint for 32C. They do run cooler than hoomanz do. But, sadly for our Oz mates, not cold enough to properly chill the stubbies.
cr
Yeah, we figured that out right away. Probably trying to hard to sound science-y. 🙂
Well, it might have been a misprint for 97F (or even 87F)
I’ll admit I had to google it
cr
Well, at least they didn’t go with 90° C!
Jerry’s comment:
reminded me of this quote, from Ken MacLeod’s novel Learning the World: “I’m aware of the problems,” she said. “‘You can’t tell the boys from the girls, they have no respect for their elders, their user interfaces are garish and unwieldy, everybody is writing a book, and their music is just noise.’ Found scratched on a potsherd in Sumer.”
Looks like a close italics fail, after the title of the book, “Learning the World”.
“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
Update to “…sending tweets” and it sounds about right
The quote is fake, you know.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/22/world-end/
“Most internet quotations are complete fabrications.” — Abraham Lincoln
When TIME corrected their “100 Female Authors” story by removing Waugh, which actually female author did they add in his place to keep the number 100?
Marion Hargrove.
😀
A Y chromosome no longer counts for anything in our make up your own gender world. So what’s the point of lists?
What’s wrong with “female authors”? We wouldn’t say “men authors” so why would we say “women authors”?
I want to know too. I’ve heard some people demanding that others use “women” rather than “female” in this kind of context, but I haven’t heard a reason why. I don’t recognize “women” as an adjective. Except for these demands, I’ve only heard it used as a noun! I imagine it has something to do with transsexuals.
“I’ve heard some people demanding that others use “women” rather than “female” in this kind of context, but I haven’t heard a reason why.”
It’s funny seeing this mentioned. I noticed something the other day while watching The Mythbusters final episode. The subtitles replaced female with woman every time.
And females with women.
I don’t know; all I know is that I’ve been chastised for saying “female” instead of “woman”. I’m sure there are ideological reasons for this, but I can’t be bothered to look into them now.
The argument against using “female” as a noun (when referring to people) is articulated here:
http://jezebel.com/the-problem-with-calling-women-females-1683808274
Basically, usage of “female” as a noun has become so associated with genuine misogyny online that many people feel the word has been permanently soiled.
I wasn’t aware that the objection had extended to using it as an adjective too, though. “Women” and “men” as nouns and “female” and “male” as adjectives seems like a reasonable usage convention to me.
That’s because you are sane.
🙂
AFAIK ‘women’ is a noun, not an adjective.
Only derived adjectives I can think of are ‘womanly’ and ‘womanising’ which don’t quite mean the same thing.
cr
As with other words–“liberal,” “feminism,”, etc.–that have supposedly been lost due to euphemism creep, I favor sticking with the original senses of the words and defying the PC prescriptionists.
‘euphemism creep’ – I like that term!
And I strongly agree with you in resisting its malign influence.
(Toilet – lavatory – bathroom – washroom – convenience – restroom – etc. being the most obvious example, which has impaired the meaning of perfectly good and used-to-be-unambiguous words like ‘bathroom’ and ‘washroom’)
cr
Oh, absolutely.
(Reminds me of a recent joke I heard–guy says he’s gonna start calling his John the Jim, instead. That way people are really impressed when he tells them he gets up in the morning and goes to the Jim.)
IIANM, Pinker coined “euphemism creep.”
If I want a rest, the last place I would go to is a shithouse!
The Otorohanga town council obviously agree with you:
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/42374394
cr
When I was at university in the 1980s getting a Bachelor of Education degree (at one of Australia’s more non-prestigious universities), there were murmurs and and uneasy shuffling in seats whenever our literature lecturer quoted Dr Johnson. They couldn’t figure out why a lecturer in English literature would be so keen on quoting our sociology lecturer, a certain Dr Gerald Johnson.
And one student in 4th year of Philosophy of Education could not recall ever having heard the name Plato before (and laughing at it for being such a funny name).
I look forward to seeing Vivian Herzog on their list of great Israeli women, and Meredith Wilson on their list of great female, American composers.
To say nothing of the great British female rocker, Vivian Stanshall.
Mention of which brings to mind ‘Vyvyan Basterd’, the psychopathic punk metal medical student from The Young Ones.
cr
And G. Evelyn Hutchinson on the list of great female ecologists.
Glad to see someone mentioned G. E. Hutchinson, one of the most gifted scientific writers I’ve ever read, as well as one of the founders of theoretical ecology. Who else who title their articles & books “The Ecological Theater and the Evolutionary Play,” “Homage to Santa Rosalia, or Why There are So Many Kinds of Animals,” and–of course–“The Naturalist as Art Critic.”
[Sorry for the late posting.]
“I can’t believe they left off Carson McCullers!”
Maybe the compilers thought Carson McCullers was a man.
It might be worth your while to give Waugh a try; he does much more than deride toffs. Scoop is a savage takedown of headline-hungry journalists, and the Sword of Honour trilogy is strongly anti-war, with a sub-plot of problems with Catholicism. After a very good BBC dramatisation of the latter, I had been on the lookout for the book for some while, when I found my copy in Longmont, Colorado of all places.
In England, both the names Evelyn and Vivian are bigendered. (There’s even a Sir Vivian Fuchs, explorer of the Antarctic.)
In America almost a century ago, Jean and Lynn were bi-gendered. Jean Shepherd, author of the source-novel for the film “A Christmas Story” is a fellow.
About 10 years ago, I was in the San Francisco public library, and an elderly African American male custodian exited the elevator with a name-tag labeled “Lynn”. I pointed to it and said “Lynn, that’s my middle name” (currently, BTW, THE most frequent middle name for women. Lots of well-known actresses have it as a middle name. The only fellow in Hollywood I know with it is Jeff Lynn Goldblum.) The custodian said to me, “Yes, sir. We gotta show these ladies who that name really belongs to.”
The *string* “Jean” is still gender ambiguous here – it can be the English name (usually female now) or the French name (usually male).
Oh, and the story told by my cousin Heather when she was first in Montreal as a medical student or the like – calling out “Michel(le)” aloud and getting looks from half the room, of both sexes. (So an (almost) ambiguous *sound*.)
Names frequently change from male to female, but seldom change back. Parents start giving “male” names to their daughters and if one becomes common enough, then it’s considered too girly to give to boys anymore.
Examples–Kimberly, Stacy, Leslie, Sydney, Tracy, Dana…
I’m a Leslie, which can be male, female, or in my case, my grandfather’s last name.
I have a sister named Leslie and another sister named Terry and I am a Randy. Guess the parents didn’t know which way to go.
In Britain, “Lesley” is the feminine spelling, and “Leslie” only masculine.
A U.S. colleague and I are only months apart in our birthdays and wedding anniversaries and have wives who share that name, apart from the spelling.
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Robin and Kim are both respectable boys’ names in England, but seem to be girls’ names here.
I started reading Brideshead Revisited once, but never really got into it. However I loved the PBS mini-series, it was outstanding.
Disappoint to see Joyce Cary missing out.
Disappointed to see Joyce Cary missing out.
Additionally, it is my understanding that the pronunciation of Evelyn Waugh’s first name is different from the common pronuciation of the name as used in the U.S. The first syllable of Waugh’s name rhymed with “Steve”, rather than “rev” or “Bev”.
The ”Steve” (or “Eve”!) pronunciation is used for the woman’s name in at least some parts of the UK.
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Easy to see why Carson McCullers didn’t make it. Carson’s a man’s name, right?
Surprised no-one yet has mentioned Waugh’s The Loved One. Waugh might have been religious but he certainly wasn’t kind to the American funeral industry.
cr
Relevant clip:
“Despite his Catholicism”… wow