Wikipedia editors have started quietly moving female authors out of the \u201cAmerican novelists\u201d category and into a newly-created sub-category for \u201cAmerican women novelists,\u201d with the intention, it seems, of creating an\u201dAmerican novelists\u201d page comprised entirely of men. There is currently no corollary sub-category for \u201cAmerican men novelists.\u201d<\/p>\n
As American (woman) novelist Amanda Filipacchi explained in the New York Times on Wednesday, the process has so far affected women writers whose last names begin with A or B, but others have been moved as well:<\/p>\n
I looked up a few female novelists. You can see the categories they\u2019re in at the bottom of their pages. It appears that many female novelists, like Harper Lee, Anne Rice, Amy Tan, Donna Tartt and some 300 others, have been relegated to the ranks of \u201cAmerican Women Novelists\u201d only, and no longer appear in the category \u201cAmerican Novelists.\u201d If you look back in the \u201chistory\u201d of these women\u2019s pages, you can see that they used to appear in the category \u201cAmerican Novelists,\u201d but that they were recently bumped down. Male novelists on Wikipedia, however \u2014 no matter how small or obscure they are \u2014 all get to be in the category \u201cAmerican Novelists.\u201d It seems as though no one noticed.<\/p>\n
I did more investigating and found other familiar names that had been switched from the \u201cAmerican Novelists\u201d to the \u201cAmerican Women Novelists\u201d category: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ayn Rand, Ann Beattie, Djuna Barnes, Emily Barton, Jennifer Belle, Aimee Bender, Amy Bloom, Judy Blume, Alice Adams, Louisa May Alcott, V. C. Andrews, Mary Higgins Clark \u2014 and, upsetting to me: myself.<\/p>\n
Filipacchi isn\u2019t the only person to have noticed this strange gender migration. Vanity Fair contributing editor Elissa Schnappel observed that as a result of the move, when one searches \u201cAmerican novelists\u201d the entry is comprised almost exclusively of men (3,387, to be exact), delivering a troubling commentary on the perceived value of women writers.<\/p>\n