And Yet
what was, what is, and what might be
March is women’s history month, in which we dig to find, in private archives, examples of women who have changed and helped society, atoning for the eons of history devalued in textbooks and all the ways in which women have not participated in public life, invention, and art.
And when you’re a woman who thinks of this loss, regularly, it’s hard not to look at human history, woman’s place in human history as a cyanotype of what might’ve been. The fading outline of 50% of the human population, story-less and blue with regret. What might’ve been had their presence been felt in public spaces? The possibility of a different history and therefore a different present is always there, niggling.
But women were always there, influencing and supporting great men, they say. Yes, some of their faint outlines are visible in how they supported those textbooked men, silently, behind closed doors, a light etch of their being in the palimpsest of their husband’s, brother’s, father’s, son’s work and the stories of that work. But helping others is only one part of realizing one’s own potential.
We know the problem is double of course: women were neither leading characters in the stories of adventure, agency, and impact, and nor were they the chroniclers of those stories.
While March is a celebration of women’s history, in all its pencil sketches, June is a celebration of women’s present, at least it feels so here in London. Created in 1996, the Women’s Prize for Fiction is awarded in mid-June each year. The shortlist nominees are often also up for Booker prizes. And while the Booker Prize evening attracts all genders, the Women’s Prize is a sea of women. Man is like a crested ibis, a rare and arresting sight in Bedford Square Gardens.
Over the course of the Women’s Prize night, I feel equal amounts of joy at being in such a female space in the heart of London under fairy lights and a June moon, and utter frustration at the apparent lack of male interest in books authored by women. Even without the men, the Women’s Fiction Prize shortlist reading feels like such a promise to our barren history of women’s achievements and stories. And yet, there are some alarming statistics emerging here in the UK when it comes to women writers.
Of all non-fiction reviews in national newspapers, only 26% addressed books by female writers and only 35% of nonfiction prizes have gone to women over the last decade. The gender pay gap for writers has increased from 33 to 36% in the last five years, female non-fiction authors’ earnings falling by 17%.
It’s not just editors and reviewers overlooking women, perhaps more egregiously, readers ignore them too. Kate Mosse, the founding director of the Women’s Prize, shared at a recent event1: “Just 19% of men said they had ever read a book by a woman in a survey last year.” While women are regularly (still) reading men. To give you more of a sense of recent numbers: the 10 bestselling women authors have 19% male readers and 81% female readers, whereas the 10 bestselling men authors have 55% male readers and 45% female readers.2 And the most-read-by-men female author goes by initials, not a typically feminine name. It seems we’re still holding onto the idea that men write for all and women write for women.
And while women are allowed in academic libraries today which were a century ago femina-non-grata, the struggle to be recognized as experts is ongoing. So it’s no real surprise that women’s nonfiction writing would continue to be absent from our private libraries. But this year, for the first time, in an attempt to call attention to and right these inequities, a Women’s Prize for Nonfiction will also be awarded. (The long list for the women’s nonfiction prize was announced this week.)
If I’m honest, I am prone to seeking signs and interpreting patterns, which one might argue is a factor of conspiracy, a need for religion, or a desperate desire to find my gender in history and in the future. “And yet” is one of those signs; it feels to me like a particular kind of code. I associate it with female authors writing to their female readers.
Of course “and yet” is not singular to women writers: Czeslaw Milosz begins a poem “And yet the books will be there on the shelves”; Hemingway chronicles Brett’s anticipation of the night to come in The Sun Also Rises with “and yet”; Orwell describes the double-think of Winston with “and yet”; Tolkien gives the forbidden treasure’s allure an “and yet”.
And yet, I read this combination of contrasting conjunctions as female. In its adverb form, “yet” emphasizes that we expect something will happen soon. “We haven’t closed the pay gap yet.” It is a small but mighty word pregnant with expectation. It’s similarly laden in its conjunction form. Of all the FANBOYS conjunctions (to use the handy acronym for “for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so”), yet is the most emotionally complex. Unlike its supposed synonym “but”, yet is filled with emotions: expectation, wonderment, hope, guilt, mystery. Consider the following sentences:
We knew they had stories, but we did nothing.
We knew they had stories, yet we did nothing.
The but is concrete, decisive, unemotional. It is what it is; we are what we are; boys will be boys; you get the idea. But “yet” is filled with consternation, regret, recrimination. Why and how didn’t we do anything about it?
Aside “and”, yet becomes more slippery. It negates the and, in a way, unless it's read as an adverb (think: and still) instead of a conjunction (and but). In “and yet”, yet proves itself a shape-shifter, not only playing the line of conjunction and adverb but also bringing the emotion to and’s abundance. There’s a grammatical wrongness about these two bedfellows, “and yet”: they’re an idiomatic rule breaker, a conjunction set of opposites attract, the quickest of oxymorons. And it’s a pleasure pulse when I come across them while reading. Like a spell.
The contradiction in its terms feels like a wink, an acknowledgment of the contradictions extant in living, especially as a woman. Those strange contradictory demands and labels: sexless mother, fragile bitch, passive heroine, selfish giver, simple mystery, conniving idiot.
And the cognitive dissonance of the words matches the cognitive dissonance of being a woman—at any time, yes—but perhaps especially so in the aftermath of Me Too and the duringmath of Andrew Tate et al misogyny. One step forward, two steps back.
And while the double conjunction that contradicts disguises itself as a throat clear at a sentence’s beginning or midpoint, I read it as a subtle nod to my kind: this one’s for you, ladies, read the subtext. “And yet” is a hinge, a shoulder, like our month of March, a month of shitty gray but also daffodils laughing, promises of better times ahead. A sly smile saying “I’m going to open the door and show you what is and what might be.” When I read it, I feel suddenly in a heavy brocaded room, some dirty wonderful truth about to be dealt to my ears. “And yet” is a gift.
I’ve been gathering and yets—they say I come by gathering biologically—cataloguing them, as I read them. And here, in this month of women’s history, are women writers chronicling the women before them in their quest for equality, their lessons distilled to their and yets.
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft pens a tribute to the first female historian in English, Catharine Macaulay, and simultaneously a censure of her society’s treatment of intelligent women:
The very word respect brings Mrs. Macaulay to my remembrance. The woman of the greatest abilities, undoubtedly, that this country has ever produced. And yet this woman has been suffered to die without sufficient respect being paid to her memory.
That “and yet” seethes with frustration: even the most knowledgeable among us tossed aside. Wollstonecraft herself suffered an early death in 1797 after giving birth to her daughter, Mary Shelley. The doctor tending her did so with bacteria-smeared, unwashed hands. That same year, Sojourner Truth was born (her exact birthdate undocumented). In her most famous speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” in which she acknowledges the double axes thrown her way, the abolitionist describes sexism in its simplest terms, as a repeated lack of generosity: “Man is so selfish that he has got women’s rights and his own too, and yet he won’t give women their rights. He keeps them all to himself.” I can hear Truth’s shock and fury, and I imagine a pause between her ”and” and her “yet”, that final alveolar t sharp with tongue tip and spit.
Among my favorite “and yet’s”, are two from Emmeline Pankhurst’s 1913 “Freedom or Death” speech. When she addressed the Connecticut crowd, the arsonist suffragettes were at their height, one had thrown herself to her death under a horse at the Epsom Derby: “I dare say, in the minds of many of you - you will perhaps forgive me this personal touch - that I do not look either very like a soldier or very like a convict, and yet I am both.”
Here is an invitation. That “and yet I am both” speaks to me now, 111 years later: the impossibility of being more than a narrow convention, something wide and unexpected, a thunderclap and a river. Later in the speech, Pankhurst honors and laments another woman her senior:
It was thirty years ago in England that a splendid woman named Josephine Butler fought to establish an equal moral code for both sexes. She fought all her life; she was stoned; she was hooted; her meetings were broken up; her life was made absolutely dangerous; and yet that woman persisted and she secured the repeal of certain laws relating to prostitution which disgraced the statute books of our country. In those days the doctors were against her; practically everybody was against her.
We’ll recognize that “and yet”, too, eerily transformed with its more formal cousin in 2017, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rebuked Senator Elizabeth Warren’s speech during the debate over Jeff Sessions’s nomination for Attorney General: “Nevertheless, she persisted.” Gifting so many of us a moment to laugh, to point to the irony, to sell a t-shirt.
Virginia Woolf was a year old when Truth died, painfully ill and cared for by two of her daughters in her final years. (Frederick Douglass offered her eulogy.) And, like Pankhurst, Woolf delivered her own treatise on feminism to a group of women the year after Pankhurst’s final campaign for Parliament was rejected because of the scandal of Pankhurst’s daughter Sylvia having a child out of wedlock. Pankhurst died that same year.
Woolf starts the entire lecture with “But you may say,” as if recognizing we’ve always been in debate, women’s very beings in public spaces a defiance of what is acceptable. In chapter four, she chronicles the great female British novelists and the constant interruptions women endure in their work because it is never considered as serious as a man’s work. The chapter’s list of women is short compared to a previous chapter’s description of the British Library’s yawning stacks of male writers.
The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be. Again, the nerves that feed the brain would seem to differ in men and women, and if you are going to make them work their best and hardest, you must find out what treatment suits them [...] And yet, I continued, approaching the bookcase again, where shall I find that elaborate study of the psychology of women by a woman?
There are so many promises in this essay from Woolf to her female audience about their future. And here, in this “and yet”, is one of them: she will continue to go back to those shelves, again and again and again, looking for women’s expertise. Looking to accompany Milosz’s “And yet the books will be there on the shelves.” Woolf also quotes a line from Life and Letters, a literary magazine of her day: “female novelists should only aspire to excellence by courageously acknowledging the limitations of their sex”. And this belief, I suppose, is the reason for the lack of male turnout at the Women’s Prize readings each year. But perhaps I’m misinterpreting their absence as indifference. I’d like to be proven wrong.
Analysis of Zora Neale Hurston is chock full of “and yets” because everything she did and was was at odds with what had been deemed possible before she did it and was it. Mary Helen Washington compares Hurston’s circumstances to those of Woolf’s: two women, one Black and one white, on either side of the pond, breaking all the rules of the novelists that came before them:
And yet, she did work. In poverty and ill health, dogged by an undeserved scandal, and without the support of any academic or intellectual community, Zora Neale Hurston worked as writer and scholar for thirty years. She worked without the freedom and peace, without the time to contemplate, that Virginia Woolf insisted were essential for any woman to write. She worked consistently without the necessary five hundred pounds a year, without a room of her own with lock and key. Indeed, she worked most of the time without a door of her own on which to put a lock. What she left us is only a fraction of what she might have accomplished. We should be grateful for the work she did.
Hurston died, alone and penniless, and was buried in an unmarked grave, a far worse death than Wollstonecraft lamented for Catharine Macaulay. Years later, after trekking through Florida to find and mark and honor Hurston’s grave, Alice Walker documented “Looking for Zora” in her collection In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. In it, she introduces her theory of womanism, acknowledging where the first waves of feminism excluded and discriminated against women of color. Walker offers a tenacious “and yet” in the collection’s title essay: “To be an artist and a black woman, even today, lowers our status in many respects, rather than raises it; and yet, artists we will be.” Again, that promise in a future tense.
Anne Sexton was born the year Woolf wrote “A Room of One’s Own” and Hurston wrote “How to Be Colored Me”, a jaunty celebration of Hurston’s race and womanhood. A decade before her own suicide, Sexton wrote “Wanting to Die”, a poem for a friend who wanted to understand Sexton’s suicidal feelings:
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,
and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.
Sexton personifies death, not only as a she, but as a bruised she, a sad Bone of a she, and yet even as death is sadness, she is also waiting, tenderly so, for Sexton, offering her relief from the prison of her body. Sexton’s poetry is filled with images of what it is to be a creative woman in a patriarchal world, the ongoing fight of it. And Kate Baer seems to speak to Sexton, half a century on, in her own poem “And Yet” which concludes:
It is depressing to know a war is coming.
Worse to know the war will always be in you.
Little cauldron, little tender loon.
Take comfort in your bold heart
where hope and fear are mingling.
My female students speak of this hope and fear and boldness when they write about the heroic feat of getting home in the dark alone with their almost-woman bodies.
Even in their failings, the women writers before me and the students in front of me astound me with their triumphs in the face of all that death-in-life and life-in-death. And I wonder at the tenderness I feel for them, and how that tenderness, that so often womanly tenderness, might reshape history and reassure a future.
There’s not triumph in “and yet”, but there’s acknowledgment, there’s hope, there’s tenacity and there’s momentary survival in those monosyllables. No one survives beyond the present moment, as soon as we enter tomorrow, it is now. It is now, in March, that we dig to uncover and remember, as Walker did Hurston, Wollstonecraft did Macaulay, Pankhurst did Butler, Woolf did Austen, Eliot, Brontë, Brontë, and Brontë. And it is June that we celebrate now, the women writers of today, so that in tomorrow, when we are gone, our children will hear not just “girls can do anything boys can do”, but also “boys can do anything girls can do.” So they will know women in history not in deficit, but in tender and bold abundance.
This month’s Letters Live at the Royal Albert Hall on 6th March was in aid of the Women’s Prize Trust.
It’s worth noting that according to surveys, women also read more than men: 22% of men report not reading at all compared to 12% of women.
Alissa, all I can say is wow. The numbers don’t shock me anymore, but the stark reality still shakes me every time I read these stories. So many brave women, so many lost men who couldn’t see past their own self-importance.
Thank you for sharing. This was wonderful to read, and important that it be seen and read.