Nobel Prize Winner Says Women Writers Are Inferior; NCRW President Responds

In response to this week's Wall Street Journal blog post, "Nobel Prize Winner Says Women Writers Are Inferior," NCRW President Linda Basch left the following comment:

It is difficult to fathom that in the year 2011 there can still be a debate over the writing abilities of women versus men. How many prize-winning authors, Nobel prize recipients included, will it take to convince V.S. Naipaul and others that the works of women are as powerful, creative, and praiseworthy as those of men?

The quality, style, and imaginations of men and women writers are as complex and varied as the individual writers themselves.

As comedian Tina Fey recently said regarding the suggestion that women lacked a sense of humor: “It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.”

Mr. Naipaul would be wise to reflect on the words of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison: “I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither…. So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.”