A week ago Monday, I was invited to join a new Facebook group called Binders Full of Women Writers. This is a secret group, invisible to men and other outsiders, the name a nod to that hilariously appalling phrase thought up by Mitt Romney in a presidential debate. The members quickly took to addressing each other with it. “Binders!” they open—bugle, hark! The women in the group include many writers I know, at least by name, women whose writing I’ve envied and admired. “I do such-and-such,” posts one woman after another. “I work here-and-there, I write for so-and-so, I feel heartened by all of you.” The sense of empowerment spread so fast that, by Thursday, the founders decided to cap membership, at least temporarily. Binders Full of Women Writers today has close to 22,000 members.
The woman who started the group is a Toronto-based writer and bookseller named Anna Fitzpatrick. Earlier this month, Fitzpatrick tweeted, “Hey, women who write: if I started a group on facebook to network & share info & gossip about One Direction, would you want to join?” Then start it she did.
In a précis in the About section, Fitzpatrick sets a few ground rules, stressing a “laid-back” and “no pressure” environment. All women, genderqueer, and nonbinary identifying writers are welcome, as is self-promotion, pal-promotion, open conversation, and other methods and means intended to “take down the patriarchy.” Things not welcome: negativity, disrespect, lack of discretion, and trend pieces. (I solemnly swear I’m trying to stick to her rules. I sent Fitzpatrick an email, but she did not reply.) She built a Rolodex and lists an impressive roster of resources: job listings, places to pitch, Twitter accounts to follow (“#binders” is trending), mentor-mentee opportunities, and forums on freelancing and the never-yielding pressure to be “easy to work with.” This is a venue where women writers can lift each other up.
For me, Facebook has been more a source of self-loathing and comparison than of comfort—to say nothing of career development. And growing up, I found something almost icky about rooms for women only, my mind jumping to red tape and dividing walls in houses of worship—the many separate-but-not-equal spaces to which we have been relegated. I never attended an all-girls school. Had my parents ever given me the option, I’m sure I would have stuck with co-ed. But I think the shame I feel at speaking in public is less familiar to friends who grew up in single-sex classrooms. Binders, with its tongue-in-cheek name and too-big-to-clique size, offers something of this safer space, where voicing opinions is okay. On Facebook, of all places, and from women whose bylines I venerate, disarming positivity rushes in.
As anyone who pays attention to the VIDA statistics knows, the amplification of women writers is, shall we say, in demand. That literary organization was founded in 2009 to “manually, painstakingly tally the gender disparity in major literary publications and book reviews.” In a profession where righteous truth-telling is supposedly prized above all else, it ain’t easy news to stomach: women, in stark numbers, don’t get bylines at rates men do. But numbers are only one metric. As Miriam Markowitz wrote last year in The Nation, “Counting is crucial, but it is not a conversation; it’s arithmetic.”
Perhaps with this in mind, n+1, that knowingly hip New York literary magazine, last fall published a pamphlet called No Regrets, which did start a conversation. The colloquium was similar to one the publication had organized for writers six years before; the 2007 symposium invited the mostly male participants to “talk frankly about regrets they have (or don’t have) about college,” and was published as What We Should Have Known. No Regrets posed a similar question, but was markedly more defiant in tone—the “should” means something different when the “we” is comprised of women only. Dayna Tortorici, who edited the book, dives in here. “Should,” she writes, “has a special place in the lives of women, as it’s been a tool of their subjection through social strictures (‘women should be X’) and their emancipation through feminism (‘women should reject the authority of anyone who says they should be X, or Y, or Z, or anything else’).” The dialog in No Regrets focuses on canonical books taught in high school that tend to treat the male experience, but not the female experience, as universal. At the end, the n+1 pamphlet offers a syllabus, but one so dense with highfalutin titles it is unlikely to bring in a critical mass of readers.
One of the most arresting voices in No Regrets was filmmaker and writer Astra Taylor. Reached by phone, Taylor told me that, when she was younger, she, too, would have rejected anything classed as “women only.” “It would have been anathema to my identity,” she said. “My belief was just focus on your own work.” But as she started to take part in film festivals, to see how few women were included, she wondered: Who is it good for, to represent so little of the realities of so many?
Websites filed under “ladyblogs” have made their agendas clear, with explicit taglines: Jezebel (“Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing.”); The Hairpin (“Ladies First”); The Toast (“A willing foe, and sea room.”). An online magazine for female writers called Vela sprouted up in 2011 “in response to the byline gender gap,” as its website explains. And a number of newer projects, like Shebooks and Emily Books, are building subscription and serial e-book models specifically for women, to represent their experience. It’s good business, by the way—women make up 71 percent of all e-book buyers—but ideally, of course, they wouldn’t have to.
Not long ago, I read about a group of women outside Paris trying to claim space in the bar cafés so basic to French routine and basically dominated by men. Their “collective” began when a retired schoolteacher named Monique went out for a coffee in the working-class suburb of Aubervilliers and got looks that made her feel like she was doing something wrong. “I found this intolerable,” she said. It dawned on her that all the cafés along her metro route were crowded only with men. She sent word to friends, and one April day they arrived, two by two, middle-aged or older “forming a group that took up a good half of the space.” They number 60-odd now and, donning polka-dot scarves, have “taken” around 30 cafés to date. The spot where it all began, Le Roi du Café (the King of Coffee) now bears a yellow sign: “HERE, WOMEN feel at home, TOO.”
Binders Full of Women Writers seems to provide something of this French café kinship in a digital space. Part of me says I should approach Facebook hubs with disdain and feel annoyed at such spilling, earnest enthusiasm. But why? Joining a Facebook group is freer than union dues, and there’s a seed of solidarity all the same. So far, the group’s a good-hearted place, where women by the thousands feel roused to help each other out. The very least I can do, as a woman of the Binders, is focus less on “shoulds.”
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