You can see pictures of all literature prize laureates on the Nobel Prize site here, with head shots of each author and the summary of what merited their award. These are the 11 women:
2007-Doris Lessing, American
2004-Elfriede Jelinek, Austrian
1993-Toni Morrison, American
1991-Nadine Gordimer, South African
1966-Nelly Sachs (1/2 prize), Swedish
1945-Gabriela Mistral, Spanish
1938-Pearl Buck, American
1928-Sigrid Undset, Norwegian
1926-Grazia Deledda, Italian
1909-Selma Lagerlof, Swedish
Such a strange demographic: more Americans than any other country; a few men-only decades--1980s, 1970s, 1950s, and 1910s. What does this say Sweden's academic climate and world view? Since half of them were given in the past 20 years, maybe the efforts of de-canonization in literature course curriculum has paid off? Maybe those second wave feminists have finally gotten old enough to gain some recognition at having withstood the test of time? Maybe. The results are still disturbing.
One common retort to the protest of traditionally male-dominated book awards is that there just aren't as many woman writers as there are men. This, gentle reader, amounts to nothing more than a pile of ill-informed bull-honky. Despite having odds stacked against them due to second-class citizenship, disenfranchisement, relegation to the domestic sphere, and intensely gendered upbringings, women have been finding ways to write throughout history. They have been published under male pseudonyms, as mere women's writing, stuck in genre ghettos, looked down upon as being of lesser value, edged out of public discourse, but they've been there nevertheless and are there, whether we see them in Norton's anthology or not, like ghosts wandering the corridors of Hemingway Hall, looking for A Room of One's Own, or screeching what sounds like hysterical nonsense to the Academy like the Madwoman in the Attic.
After all that, I must say that touting Doris Lessing as a feminist or really even as a science fiction writer are dubious claims at best. Although Lessing has openly admired sf and has attended a con or two as guest of honor, she called her sf pieces, like Canopus, "space fiction," which gives you an idea of the goings on in the books. More importantly, Lessing herself has denied affiliation with the term "feminist," being from an older generation than the second wavers. From the scathing review that Ursula LeGuin (all hail the mistress of fem/sf) gave Lessing's last novel, The Cleft, it seems that the simple presence of strong, realistic female characters, which was the major element that made Lessing's early work so revolutionary, has been overshadowed by a third wave feminist expectation of deeper philosophical human equality regardless of gender. Still, I need to scold myself one more time in this entry for never having read The Golden Notebook.
An interesting factoid I didn't know until today is that Lessing was raised in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). This is one of those weird synchronicity things that seems to happen whenever I learn something new. Just two weeks ago I learned about Rhodesia for the very first time when I picked up a book called Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller. This skillfully written autobiography describes Fuller's life growing up in Rhodesia. It's just the way of the ether that a defunct country name will continue to pop up in random places for the rest of the month now that it is in my consciousness. Or maybe it's just another kind of voodoo since it turns out that though Fuller was raised in Rhodesia, she is white, British by birth, and now lives in America--just like Doris Lessing! (That calls for queuing the Kids: "Don't Tell Me That!!")
