And the winner goes to....

"A Jury of Her Peers" cover

Recognizing women for excellence in literature and the arts is not exactly popular, to put it mildly.

• No woman has ever won Best Director at the Academy Awards. In fact, not even one was nominated this year. In FACT only THREE have been nominated EVER. Men beat that number in 2008 alone. I'm not making this up.
• The Guerrilla Girls also lamented with a recent poster: "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female."

Laura Miller writes about Elaine Showalter's new book A Jury of Her Peers: Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx in Salon and the prejudices surrounding women in writing:

Every few years, someone counts up the titles covered in the New York Times Book Review and the short fiction published in the New Yorker, as well as the bylines and literary works reviewed in such highbrow journals as Harper's and the New York Review of Books, and observes that the male names outnumber the female by about 2 to 1. This situation is lamentable, as everyone but a handful of embittered cranks seems to agree, but it's not clear that anyone ever does anything about it. The bestseller lists, though less intellectually exalted, tend to break down more evenly along gender lines; between J.K. Rowling & Stephanie Meyer alone, the distaff side is more than holding its own in terms of revenue. But when it comes to respect, are women writers getting short shrift?

Read the whole article:
Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?