china has already stopped beating the we did a year ago. it's going to several years before it is noticed. so there's a process in the same with the chinese economy grows the enthusiasm for the chinese economy grows but it is no longer universal. there's any number of economists now who are writing about the double in china, but businesses also have a very -- you know, wal-mart, the wage response beginning to source in countries outside of china because china has become expensive. they are not particularly sentimental and they don't really have a position takers. they are simply changing the sourcing and this is the challenge. the alana is a challenge and so is the philippines and pakistan and other countries. but the point i am making is it

is natural and normal for a country after 40 years, exponential growth, to slow down dramatically. it is doing that. the consequences the economy could handily if only it didn't have 1 billion poor people. it could manage it like the japanese did, but china has a problem. >> host: so just to go back for a second to the big picture. we are almost out of time here. many analysts look up the 21st century and talk about this as the sort of specific decade, the region indicate to come or century to come, the waning of europe. i don't really see that in your work, and using to be much more in a way of reminding us of the religious europe to the strategic thinking. >> guest: it's going to be american decade and century. will, the collapse of the european system including of the

soviet union left the denied states standing as a continental power with the resources in the command of the season delete cozies with a quarter of the economy with the bases in 27 countries and salon. there's nothing even close. we talk about the brick countries. the brick countries have to go altogether by 75%, so all 40. >> host: ten years from now is the united states still going to be spending 50% of the world's military spending? >> guest: sure. i think so. but here's the point. the united states will go through extreme trouble and instability. it will be constantly reminding myself that it's on the verge of collapse and very much like britain and rome. look at the roman speeches just before the empire bursts out.

you see absolute predictions and catastrophe that happen. >> host: ten years from now we will come back and have this conversation and see what worked out. >> guest: it will be different but the same conversation. >> host: thank you very much. it's been a great conversation today. >> guest: i enjoyed it. that was "after words," booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policy makers, legislators and others familiar with the material. "after words" errors every weekend on book tv at 10 p.m. on saturday, 12 and 9 p.m. on sunday and 12 a.m. on monday. you can also watch online. go to b ooktv.org and click on "after words" on topics list in the upper right side of the page. elaina showalter, professor of english princeton university

profiles american female writers from the 17th century to today. ms. showalter recounts the writing career of edith wharton, harriet beecher stowe, zora hurston and others describing the obstacles they have had to face throughout history. this program is a little wonder in our. back when i was a new ph.d. in 1970 on the edited my first anthology. this is it, this war now little red covered book called women's liberation and literature and was published by hard-core brace, and i think it was the first textbook for feminist criticism that had never been published. i got to do it. i was a new ph.d. in my first assistant professor shook job and i felt the tremendous sense of responsibility to be in this book to my projected leaders. when i did it, putting together

the list of text was and very hard especially because in those days i didn't even know of that many but i got a shock when i sat down to copyright for permission to reprint the author's work. i wanted to include sylvia plath's celebrated poem daddy, you probably all know that poem, and i wanted to include it to others. i was really going for. but when i wrote to the editor and also the sister of her strained husband who was rumored to be somewhat of a ferocious person, he responded that to reprint daddy would cost me $100. now i was paying for the permission fees out of the permit lagat for doing the book, and at the beginning of the assistant professor with two kids, i hadn't very much money if i owned, and it was said the

other poems i asked for were $50 each. [laughter] the was the beginning of my literary career. and i will tell you that i settled for a 50-dollar poem. [laughter] i struck a bargain and bought a poem called lesboth which is a long poem, magnificent, about md between two women in spite of the title, which was a cheaper poem and daddy for the reasons that we can speculate about. well, that was my introduction to the business of the literary anthology and an idealistic young scholar it never occurred the poems could be rated by the ticket price as well as by their quality. but the experience changed my perceptions of the literature for ever. and from then on, i really understood. i think that literature has always been a business that

poems, stories, essays and novels are products as well as act of creative imagination and that professional writers depend on the market value as well as the critical reception. in this new collection of two poems by sylvia plath and i have to tell you i still can't afford daddy. [laughter] for those at $100, the way that was an unbelievable bargain now i mean it has escalated so i still can't pay for it and i have chosen to of her other poems, very powerful written in the last few months before her suicide and i realized that sometimes financial constraints forced to look beyond the conventional and find something really wonderful. not all the time, but in this case. so fast forward to the present. in 203i signed a contract with

knopf which as many women writers but it's a literary history more of an anthology, and my editor at knopf suggested to me that would be a good idea to put together an anthology to go with it and to be published in paperwork and that is the book i'm talking about that was extremely well good suggestion. i know that many of the work i talk about are all of print, they were very hard to find and the reader said where can i get ahold of these texts now plan interested in curious about them, where can i read them? and i knew from the beginning was a given that i couldn't possibly include all the important work by the american women writers in a single volume that i knew from the start. on the other hand, before this, they're has never been a single volume anthology of the american women's writing from the beginning what seemed to be the kind of staggering omission, and

i knew that i wanted to make an anthology and put together a book that was portable that was economical that wasn't weighted down by all of the apparatus of the textbook that brought together stories and poems and essays by american women writers as many as possible the would reflect their diversity of subject and style of our beautiful or tragic or funny satiric or inspiring or all of the above and the intel the juvenile was intended to offer a kind of many cannons, a partial list couldn't be a full list of a partial list with the guerrilla most significant writers in the american literature the great tradition and to provide a map of the relationship to each other and american literature and general so those are my aims. all of us know i think that today the anthology is a genre very much dominated by a few

large and wealthy publishers who can afford to hire the knowledgeable editors and researchers required to put a good book together and have a bottomless pockets to pay the staggering permission fees for reprinting work of copyright. most important and wide ranging anthologies are aimed of course at the textbook market mostly the college textbook market. the multivolume work of over 5,000 pages. they have vast budgets. they have vast sales and something of a kid student captive market and we can talk about the discussion recently about the price of the textbooks for college and university students and over the past 15 years they've been getting bigger. they have been getting more elaborate and more expensive. they are packaged now with maps, pictures, teaching manuals, and in some cases audio and video

supplements though you were bodying and untie your experience when you buy one of these anthologies. that is not what i was trying to do or had done. i wanted to put together a book for a general reader as well as the undergraduate and to do it without the enormous kennedy to the consultations of the big text, so i started out by making a list of all of the work that i would like to include in a utopian publishing world, and then with the help of a grant from the mellon foundation, i was able for drug year to pay three graduate assistants from princeton and harvard to help me go through the library to see if there were works and recurs i had overlooked. then did tisch established a rough guideline i'm going to let you in on all of them. there goes my hearing. i was going to let you in on all of the statistics financial statistics of putting the anthology together and then to

try to establish the bi foynes 800 pages -- of 800 pages. they were willing to pay about eight falls of dollars in permission fees which is about one-tenth or less of with a big textbook publisher has available. this is a huge business of the textbook market. now those are my parameters. the copyright law some of you may know is different in every country. the guidelines in the united states about my publisher were to get permission for everything published after 1922. they figured that would cover everything. the canadian law is different and i had to get some canadian rights as well. british law is also very different, but no british publisher was willing to put up the money to produce an anthology of american women writers and i think that that is a shame. so that gives you a bit of background however even with my

realistic and cynical view of the commercial and financial aspect of it with the encouragement and the back up for my very patient and endlessly optimistic editor at vintage i was really on prepared for the nightmare of getting permission. i cut my list to 100 writers and i had to write for permission, copyright permission for 48 of them whose work was still under copyright protection. i started a year before the publication date and the year that followed, a year ago in other words, was an education for me and the new bureaucracy, agreed, control freak greed, and efficiency, an outright longing and the blindness of the copyright holders to the circumstances of their

leadership in the 21st century. i thought, naively, that many executives and copyright holders would be happy to have some long forgotten story or poem by the writer that nobody talked about and 30 years, 40 years, 50 years. i would say i am going to reprint this that's wonderful. they didn't see this as an opportunity to find the new audiences for the writers. there was a tiny number of exceptions in fact there were two exceptions. [laughter] peter davis, the son of test slash center whose wonderful story, mrs. flanders, is in the book, a fabulous story that i recommend. was happy to have his mother's work made available and was exceptionally generous in his terms. but overall, the copyright holders need it as hard as possible for me to an falters and reprint the work. permission editors lost my

letters until prodded by their bosses or by the author when they were located the letters in a matter of minutes. at one press the commission's editor was quite annoyed with me for continuing to custer heard about the work because she had many other responsibilities. true, in short, because we know the publishers like every other business are being cut back. you have to handle the persian, and i would think that in these days the permission fees could be centralized and standardized and handled online. they are not. on the website, publishers say they will respond to the written or e-mail queries and two to six weeks and they warn you not to telephone them to follow-up. in fact, several of the largest publishers to cut to five months reply to the simple queries.

in one case and never could get a reply from the copyright holder and gave up. when you read the reviews to see why isn't so and so in the book, i want you to know these are some of the reasons why the writer doesn't make it into these books. backend 1996 s and settled on hundred dollars was a lot for a great poem, but the stories have become a lot more costly like everything else. the price is set by the copyright holder. there's absolutely no standard, no convention. you charge of the market can be or what you think you can get away with. there is no correlation to the length or even to the fame of the writer or the classic nature of the work. in other words, you might expect to pay money for a story that has been reprinted, the classic story. you could be charged as much for the time line poem by a poet that no one has ever heard of all and they're seems to be no sense among executives that there is a difference here or that there might be some kind of a discussion to these people if

they ever get together and talk to each other about what they are selling. so they ask for exorbitant sums for the lesser works. radical authors which i have a number of representatives whether they were politically left-wing or feminist or authors were just as demanding and uncompromising as those with a commercial and mainstream. in fact, there is a scholar named kerry nelson who was a left-wing academics at the turn himself to edited american poultry and has written that trying to reprint work by radical writers is the source of the expression in the red. [laughter] now carry nelson who i know and whose experience with the process that she is described in a funny article was very similar to mine. she actually enjoyed bargaining with publishers. he liked making offers they

could not refuse. this publisher at oxford university press hit all the correspondence. in my case i did myself and carry checked into the good cop bad cop routine threatening to drop the writers altogether if the publishers didn't come through. i did a little bit of bargaining. i don't enjoy it all that much but i didn't. i womaned up and did it. many publishers took so long to reply that the book had actually gone to the press before i even heard back from them. and the two negotiations were concluded on the final day of the last possible minute before the book was set in print. evin an important writer cannot always control the copyright permission. i wanted to include and i did include joyce carol oates short-story golden gloves and i wanted to include it in part because it is like a woman writer about a boxer. i wanted the anthology to

include counter intuitive examples. if women right about everything they are not limited to the feminine subjects. and i wrote a way and to find out who had the copyright and after many months of silence i appealed to joyce results and in the women's writing in general. she was very glad i wanted to reprint the story. it's never been anthologized before. but it turns out the copyright on the golden gloves was told by a former publisher she had left many years ago and their rights never reverted to her. she appealed to them to be merciful which is to say charge me a very low sum for the story, but of course they didn't. they charged a whopping fee which we paid, and in many cases i had this experience myself as an academic writer and i husband and other people and a lot of literary writers and i know the writers themselves never get

paid on these copyright royalties from the publisher. so there's a kind of limbo land and in some cases with of the royalties who is in control of the rights. in addition to the financial tackle, many of these agent secretaries and other representatives of the writers insisted they should look at my head notes to the selection of the writer and wanted to critique it and make sure that it was all okay. several of them wanted to know and wanted a xerox copy of the right her that would come before them and who would come after them in the book. it is derived by the date of birth and i didn't have a lot of flexibility on that. there were writers in the ages who demanded revisions of my head note who objected to the critical statement i made about

them. in one case they complained i hadn't given sufficient space and detail to the author's political causes and that they would like included. finally, i had to drop 20 of my original 100 riders because they were too expensive or too demanding or controlling in their requests. none of you will be surprised to hear that once i had agreed to the fi and signed a contract these same publishers and executives wasted no time at all in sending other bill that they were very speedy about. so putting together a literary anthology demands a lot of tough and painful editorial decisions. i made a decision i wouldn't include excerpts published after 1900 and some of the american novels published the very long, they are not that readable by the modern authors and yet you want to have a sense of them

represented the 20th century is appropriate. but i did want to include some of our major women novelists. toni morrison someone sit in the earlier book why isn't toni morrison and the book? toni morrison has published one short story. it is called [inaudible] and came out in 1983. if there's any anthology of american women's writing that story will be in it because it is the short story by toni morrison and it's a pretty good story, but its long. it's very expensive as you can imagine and i had to choose between including that including maybe five other pieces by other women writers. marilyn robinson, another contemporary woman novelist whom i admired tremendously also published short story in the paris review and didn't want to have it reprinted.

i think it is quite good but she didn't want it to come to light again. another of my favorite were stories that were both very long and expensive, and i certainly have been aware for a long time if you look at the anthology especially the deal in the contemporary period they have a great deal of poetry may be one poem per poet and that is because it is cheaper and can get a lot more riders if you just use a poem. it isn't always cheaper but it's sometimes cheaper. i didn't want to have a lot of short sections if i could come and i would mention by the way that i had been cut from an anthology myself as a critic around 2,000 the norton anthology criticism fury came out and the editors had to cut 300 pages of the last minute. and "the new york times" wrote this up. this is what happens when you are working with norton.

they rode up and getting published on the front page and they noted along with russo in the george eliot elaina had been dropped from the book. [laughter] one of my proudest moments. i pose from the elite eating club they were most distressed and felt that it was a shameful experience to be exposed in that way. anyway, an anthology is about the art of a possible politics and other things in washington. nonetheless i'm happy at the way the book turned out and i am excited to think that the readers will be able to find astonishing work, moving work, funny work by the writers who will be new to them and i feel should be recognized as important figures in the american literary history and i hope they will be a able to recognize some of the genre of

the styles that are characteristic in their riding. fred sable, the table or the allegory used by the american women writers from the 18th-century to the 18th-century as catherine cedric, sarah, alice, mary austin, shirley jackson, i could go on and on and i want to conclude by reading one of these it's quite short called xi'an names them by ursula. how many of you know this one? my daughter. okay. otherwise this will be new to you and i hope you like to. it is set in the garden of eden and it is told by a very rebellious and reflects its time the concern, the fascination of feminists in the 1980's with to

peacekeeping from the patriarchal language, the idea that our language is the language invented by man and therefore control what we can express and creating a new way of speaking and writing. so she on names them. most of them accepted the aimlessness the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names, whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular grace and alacrity sliding into anonymity as into their element. a faction of yaks however protested. they said yak sounds right and almost everyone who knew they existed calls them that. unlike the ubiquitous creature such as rats and fleas who had been called by hundreds of thousands of different names, thus the to yak could say they have a name.

they discussed the matter all summer. the council of the elderly females agreed that though the name might be useful to others it was so redundant from the yak's point of view that they never spoke of themselves and might just as well dispense with it. after they presented the argument, the full consensus was delayed only by the onset of the early blizzard. soon after the beginning of the fall, the agreement was reached and the designation yak was returned to the donor. among the domestic animals, few horses cared what anybody called them. cattle, sheep, swine, mule and a goat with chickens, geese and turkey agreed enthusiastically to give their names back to the people to whom as they put it they belonged. i assume they mean the names come of the animal. a couple of problems did come up. the cats of course steadfastly

denied ever having had the name of your damn those self given, of misspoken personal names which as the poet said they spend long hours contemplating. it was with the dogs and parrots, birds, ravens the trouble arose. these talented individuals insisted that their names were important to them and flatly refused to part with them but as soon as the under study the issue was precisely one of individual choice and that anybody that wanted to be called rover or paul e. for birdie and the personal sense was perfectly free to do so. not one of them have the least objection to parting with of the lowercase work with regards to german creatures upper case generic appellations, pool, paris, bald or bird and although the qualifiers that trailed along behind them for 200 years

like tin cans tied to a tale. the insects parted with their names in vast clouds and swarms of ephemeral signals to the to symbols humming and swimming and crawling and tunnelling away. as for the fish of the sea, their names dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans like faint bark blurs and drifted off on the current without a trace. none were left now to on name, yet how close i felt to them when i saw one of them swim or fly or trot or crawled across my way over my skin dhaka me in the night or go along beside me for awhile in the day. they seemed closer than when their names stood between myself and them like a barrier. so close my fear of them and their fear of me became the same

fear. .. but it doesn't exactly seem to fit very well lately, but, but tank is very much. it really has been very useful. it is hard to give back a gift without sounding peevish or an grateful and i didn't want to leave him with that impression of me. he was not paying much attention as it happened and said only put

it down over there, okay? and went on with what he was doing. one of my reasons for doing what i did was the top was getting us nowhere but all the same i felt a little wet down. i've been prepared to defend my decision and i thought perhaps when he did notice he might be upset and want to talk. i put some things away and fiddled around a little, but he continued to do what he was doing and to take no notice of anything else so at least i said goodbye deere. i hope the garden key turns up. he was sitting parts together and without looking around said okay dear, when his dinner? i am not sure i said. i'm going now. i hesitated and finally said, with them you know and went on out. i had only just been realized how hard it would have been to explain myself. i could not chatter away as i used to do, taking it all for granted.

my words now must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps i took going down the path away from the house between the dark ranch, tall dancers, motionless against the winter shining. so i want to leave you with a question about this. does the speaker give back the name of evil or the name lemon? and what difference would it make if it was either one? and now if you up any questions or comments i would be very happy to hear them. [applause] >> i have a question. the people who have the copyrights, where they mostly men? >> no. no, no. as i they said, you know, the

most politically radical writers were just as bad as the other ones. the ones who were going to develop a product of late capitalism but whether you are against capitalism or not when it came time to ask for it you didn't matter what your the police where you try to get whatever you could. and a number of the people who work in publishing, maybe all of the editors with one exception where women. so i think it is something -- the presses had them. they don't pay them very well. they give them lots of other jobs to do in this kind of calls calls -- falls by the wayside. and a buddy list on an anthology like this will tell you what a nightmare it is to try to get these permissions and it seems to me something that the internet is made for. why can't these be handled on line? why can it be standardized? why can't there be some kind of commission that gets together and settles on a fee and make it

easy to get this done? but it is very old-fashioned out >> i want to start my whole teaching career over again. i want to -- i think this is a wonderful book. the second thing is emily dickinson, i found it so galling to have to pay harvard university. to print emily dixon -- dickinson. i noticed that you have three. >> they are all out of copyright. i mean i think all of emily dickinson's are wonderful. this is really what it comes down to and they think it is fascinating because of the reader. this is not what you think about. you don't realize, when you are looking at a budget, and you are faced with spending several thousand dollars for these works, if and you get a chance to get some of it for free or for less, this is what you have to do.

it is a fact to me, a fascinating case study in this nexus of commerce and art. or production and education however you want to look at it and these are hard decisions to me, but it is a system and it is a system that has really become entrenched. >> the latest tradition about poems, you don't get the one in the newberry arms. >> i got the latest. but some of them they think she wrote earlier and others have not been renewed. harbored for the people who wrote to me and said very kindly you can have these wants for nothing. >> that is terrible. in the third question is, you said there were two people who were very generous. you named one. who is the other one? >> cynthia o. zook was incredibly generous. she was very kind and indeed, she wrote kind of an addendum to

it that i quoted in the book. cynthia has always struggled in her literary career with whether she is a woman writer. she doesn't like to be called a woman writer. she has him like to be called a woman writer because as she was growing up in this is what her essay suggests, being a woman writer was accepting a inferiority. i think she is got over that now and she was incredibly kind and efficient and helpful and supportive. but i was just baggert. i am obviously not going to name names, but i was just amazed at the people who i thought would be helpful in understanding and happy to have this. it is not the writers fault in most cases. it is the people who control the rights and literatures a complicated series of strata and once you get into that realm you get into the legal and financial aspect of it. it is out of control as a writer. >> thank you for all the work he

you did on this wonderful book. >> i don't mean to criticize but i'm just wondering -- if a book is different if it is written by a female author? >> it is an interesting question because even a very short time ago it was assumed that it was. whether it was assumed that this was so because it wasn't as good as the book via man, which is what many male critics and scholars believed in which many women came to believe themselves even as they wrote or whether after the feminist movement that it was assumed that women have a totally different nature. they have a different way of looking at the world and their books deal with different topics and have a different style and even as ursula le guin speculated, different language. i think we are past that now in the 21st century. women writers are writers. they are women like they are

americans and american anthology. sometimes you might recognize as saying that you think is american but a lot of other times you won't. and, think that is really a good thing. it is a step towards creative freedom. i'm all in favor of that. on the other hand when women writers are in another level of the nexus of this literary writer when women are reviewed those stereotypes still come into play. and you see it every week. the post i think is very good about that and very aware. "the new york times," not so good. a lot of other places not so good. as georgia carolus once said, when i sit down to write than just a writer but when i'm published and reviewed by my woman writer. and i think that sums it up pretty effectively. whatever people think a woman writer might be. [inaudible]

>> as i said come, think it was the male view to begin with that women internalize this and there had been earlier anthologies of women's writing, not by american women writing but anthologies of women's writing collectively. and it every addition there were always women writers who refuse to be in the book. you try to compare this. imagine an anthology of black writing or american writing. can you imagine anybody saying i won't be in that, you know? is because women writers felt that it was a stigma that they were women and they would appear in the context of other women writers. and i will say that in this anthology nobody told me they wouldn't be in it because it was women which i think is kind of their progress and i hope the kind of a progress. rachel. >> i think we are still struggling with the marginality of it. women and blacks and whites.

i think this thing about i identify with it and it is part of my nature. but at the same time it is a free-market society. i think there is a still a lagged. >> i think -- [inaudible] >> yeah, asked whether they are still a of -- whether there is still a sense of marginality for women writers and other minority writers, not that women are a minority specifically speaking but they feel they are not quite representative of the whole. that the the that theirs is the marginal view, sob is somehow and they can't speak for the entire culture. >> i think -- i think that most

women like the idea of being identified now as women. i think there is up right now but there wasn't before. but i think that what we haven't achieved is a balance, you know. i am a woman but i'm also part of this society, and sort of that balance and i think that the critics, there is a lag with the critics that they are even further behind. >> i think you are absolutely right and it is particularly problematic for american writers because we have this fantasy called the great american novel. the great american novel, and it has always been assumed that the great american novel must be about male experience. so that women are just somehow excluded from that category and in the past decade, we have had a number, and famous writer who died salinger bellow and so on, and every time the great

american male writer dies there are whole state of articles saying who is going to take bellow's place? who is writing the great american novel now and there will be a list of 20 young male writers are middle-aged male writers, sometimes even elderly male writers and maybe one woman stuck on at the end. it is very frustrating, because the assumption is somehow that the female experience is not the american experience and it is certainly not the great american experience that is going to be reflected in the novel. and it is really hard i think for women writers to contest without. there was a tremendous flak recently about jonathan franzen whose novel was picked up by a number of critics, mostly male critics but not entirely and just typed. this was another great american novel. it is really about a lot of the

things that women write about. is about families. is about domestic life and some women writers said you know, women just don't get this kind of attention. they don't get this kind of focus and it hasn't really happened yet. it is usually that exclusion is usually attributed to the subject matter. it clearly isn't. is really about gender. when it is a man writing about a family, that is in 10. when it is a woman writing about the family, it is --. >> you talked about how it is perceived in america and how they say the book is american authors. is it different in different countries? are women authors treated differently in europe or asia then they would be here? >> absolutely. it is different country by country and i won't try to go through it one by one, but in england where he started to do my scholarly work on the english novel and where i lived part of

the time, had for many years spent part of the year in england, there's a difference. is not that englishwomen are totally happy with it either but it is not the same tradition or hope to of the great novel, the great english novel and in addition, if you look at the literary tradition in great britain there are a number of women who helped formed it. jane austen, and so on so it is extremely hard to come at this point and say women aren't capable of producing it when they created it. and i think the expectations are different. if you look at 19th century 19th century literature in the united states, most people when i ask this question, can identify two american women writers in the 19th century, emily dickinson and harriet beecher stowe. dickinson is definitely accepted although i once taught a course at rutgers and with them they'll

call again when it came to dickinson he just said i can't read that little bitty poem. i don't want to bother with that. [laughter] so there are still a few throwbacks. but harriet teacher still entered american liberation history is a bestseller, as a kind of pole position writer, somebody who wrote very important fiction and had a huge historical impact but not as an artist. one of the things i have tried to do in my book is to contest that attitude. we don't have an american jane austen. we can have a 19th century woman novelist to have the same status and so i think that has to be challenged and we have to say look there are all these women writers producing artistically significant work you just never got the attention that they deserve and need to dismantle that. so i think if you read reviews in england now, they won't be quite the same in balance that

there is an american reviewing and there are a lot more venues for book reviewing in great britain then there are in the united states and you get a lot more different forces on each publication. here they are dwindling. thanks. >> high. i have two questions, both related to what you mentioned when you are addressing the lady's question. the first one is, when you said if it is written by a female author -- [inaudible] can that be attributable to gender discrimination? that is my first question. the second is, male writers versus female writers. is it 50/50, 60/40?

and also the critics and reviewers, 50/50, 60/40? >> i can't answer very precisely your questions about how many. it depends on what you are looking at. "the new york times" was -- there have been studies, "new york times" book review which is now still the dominant reviewing form in the united states. all the other ones get close down, you know. and very recently there was a study done at "the new york times" and the reviewers were predominantly male. that times have gotten a bit touchy about that in my opinion because the last several issues on the cover they have had to reviews by women. i don't know what it will be this week but they started make up for that as hard as they could. in other places, you know there will be equal. i don't think it is really standardized. also, could really answer about her portions of male and female writers because it was my view

that they are roughly equal. and what i do know, and i know barbara would confirm this for me, is that women are the majority of the consumers of fiction in this country whether it is by men or women. women by the vast majority of novels, poems by any writer, male or female. and when the great carla cohn was with us, she said about politics and prose, the people come in the front door and it is like coming to a waiting. the bride on the grim side and an intern towards the fiction. garrett and lots been lots of studies that show that. whether the difference about what they are writing as discrimination i don't like the word discrimination as such. i think stereotypes have received opinions. i don't think this day and age, people feel uncomfortable if they thought they were

discriminating. they are expressing attitudes that they have, that are very ingrained and very hard to eliminate. and they have to be made aware of that. every now and then you will get a woman writer who will publish under a male pseudonym. that was very common in europe and you asked about other traditions. american women writers had very rarely used male pseudonyms whereas in europe, this was common to get equal treatment from the critics and from the readers. it happens very rarely hear. when it does happen, people are just compounded. they just can't believe it. i mean, they start reading it works and they think it is by a man. they react to it in a particular way and when it is unveiled as written by a woman they don't know what to say about it. they are stunned. one of the cases i talk about in jury of her peers, her work is represented in the anthology as well, a wonderful woman named

allison sheldon who lived in the washington area road under the names of james dupree jr.. we are not talking about the dark ages here. she wanted to write science fiction. à la sheldon had been in the army. she was one of the women who joined the army corps. she had a ph.d. in biochemistry. she had worked for the cia. she was also the daughter of a safari traveler, so she had been all over the world and hunted wild animals and so on. when the science fiction charts came out by a james dupree jr., who is this macho heroic wonderful writer? she or he, james won all the awards you can get in the science section. everybody was saying this is just the best and there was all the speculation. this is somebody who clearly had been a spy, clearly was assigned

tests, clearly a military man, clearly an adventurous man and then eventually james dupree jr. was outed as a woman. she said that as a relief i don't have to do that anymore she kept writing. nobody wanted to read the work. it is melodramatic to say she eventually committed suicide which he did record don't want to say this was a cause-and-effect. so i think there is a very persistent attitude about what kind of work men produce and the signature is really what we are talking about here. not creativity and not imagination, not skills, signature whether a man's name or a woman's name. that is in europe still, a lot of writers publish under their initials. pd james, mystery writers particularly.

women writers will tell us under initials. they are gender-neutral and people don't necessarily know whether it is a man or woman they are reading and by the time they finish it is too late to change their mind or to say they changed their mind. i think all of these things take a big difference. >> we have got time for one more quick question. >> this is my last question. [laughter] if most of the fiction readers are women, then i don't know if you are to conduct a poll and ask a woman, okay, or your writers men or women, what do you think it would be? via don't think it would be very conclusive because women are willing to read looks by male writers and i will ask the women in this room, i think most of you were like me when you were little girl did you read oaks about loyce?

how many did? read oaks about boys when you were a little girl? you didn't? you didn't? you didn't read the hardy boys or huck finn or anything like that? and then if you ask the boys, the men, how many when you were a little what did you read books about girls? not many. even the great american girls book of all times, "little women" which is it book that every year they will ask the governors and probably as sarah palin has read it. well-wisher favorite children's book and all that women will say "little women." men don't read little men either. are there any men in this room who have read little men? no way. no way. they are not going to do it in the thing is to read about the

female experiences feminizing and therefore stigmatizing for a man to read about male experience is expanding and positive for a woman. so women will read but happiness work by both men and women. >> it is so interesting because she did write under a pseudonym for so many years, and you think it was contraband the one you got in here? >> yes. >> exactly in some of those are pretty racy. >> they were very racy and they were read by men. they didn't know. and there are some things in the book, put in some early things by women that are quite violent, not at all what you would expect in 19th century women. as an indication, they are very interesting but as an indication women could write anything but they were expected to write in a certain way.

the scorn, contempt of male writers towards their female competitors, which is what they were well into the 20th century was just extraordinary. i mean we are talking hawthorne to hemingway. absolute contempt. and that is because often the women were selling better. what do they say? look for the money. you can't neglect that is a factor but there and many other factors as well. well, thank you so much offer coming. it was very kind for you to come out on the stormy night and i really appreciated very much. [applause] author elaine showalter discussing her book "the vintage book of american women writers" at politics and prose bookstore here in washington d.c.. is there a nonfiction author of book you would like to see

featured on booktv? e-mail us at booktv at c-span.org or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. in saudi i break i did take five and half years to write this. my wife or minded me repeatedly. and it was really a labor of love. it is about an organization called the epidemic intelligence service, and a friend of mine went through this and told me about it. first he sent me an e-mail and he said he was to write it. i wrote back and said, thanks sandy, what is the eyes? i don't know what it is. when he told me it was the epidemic intelligence service i thought wow, this is nonfiction. there really is such a thing as this? it is part of the cdc. it began in 1951 in the middle and i will show you the guy who

started it. let me see. alexander lang muir was the head epidemiologist at the centers for disease control at the time it was the communicable disease center. it has always been the cdc. he had this idea that he wanted to get young doctors out into the field immediately within 24 hours of being notified that there was an epidemic. they would have their bags packed and be ready to go and that was exciting and it was exciting to guess what? nobody wanted to go onto the field of public health. nobody realize that this was an interesting area because at that time it appeared that the new antibiotics were going to wipe out all the bacterial diseases and we were getting more and more vaccines and people said alex, you are going into a dying field. forget it. he said no, i think you are wrong. as you know we haven't exactly

vanquished all of the microbes in the row but he couldn't get anybody to be interested in joining this group, because it was considered a dead-end. fortunately we were in the middle of the korean war and there was a doctor draft so the doctors didn't want to go into the army and when they joined the eyes, he gave them an out. they spent two years in this program rather than two years in the military. by the time that doctor draft ended with the vietnam war, it had become a well-known organizations and they didn't need be doctors after all. anyway langmuir was a bigger than life character. if you read the book you will see that he sort of -- his daughter said that when he walked into the room, that you could feel the room tip towards him. he was arrogant. he was intimidating. the eyes officers were very afraid of him.

i called mrs. silverback pose. and he was also brilliant and a visionary and he led the eyes not only into dealing with microbes and infectious diseases but into many other areas as well which i will be talking about. >> daniel rasmussen recalls the largest slave revolt in history. 500 slaves adorned in military uniforms and equipped with assorted weapons embarked on taking new orleans. the other reports on the march upon the city and the outcome. he discusses his book a garden district up shop in new orleans. this is about an hour. [applause] >> thank you so much for coming tonight. before i start i want to thanks special members of the audience, my aunt judy who is here and a group of people who are chu heroes of mine, and he