So much for "post feminism"

I am sorry to say that I've never heard of Deborah Copaken Kogan before, but I'm glad I saw this excellent post of hers on thenation.com. It's heartbreaking and brilliant. Here's a short sample:

It's 2013, the day I sit down, with trepidation, to write this. The Times's obituary for Yvonne Brill, renowned rocket scientist, winner of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, leads with, "She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. 'The world's best mom,' her son Matthew said."

The past is not gone. Or as Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Until it is, we should not be expected to get over it.

I'm proud of my nomination for a prestigious if controversial British literary prize given only to women. I'm honored to be mentioned in the same breath as my fellow nominees, whose books I've been tearing through of late with relish and awe. Past winners—Helen Dunmore, Anne Michaels, Carol Shields, Suzanne Berne, Linda Grant, Kate Grenville, Ann Patchett, Valerie Martin, Andrea Levy, Lionel Shriver, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rose Tremain, Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Téa Obreht and Madeline Miller—include authors whose novels I know well or not at all, but it is for the latter, as a reader, I am most grateful.

The Women's Prize for Fiction—and three cheers for the transparency of its new name—is not a "sexist con-trick" by any definition of sexism that I know. To the contrary, it redresses centuries of literary sexism, exclusion, cultural bias, invisibility. There's a reason J.K. Rowling's publishers demanded that she use initials instead of "Joanne": it's the same reason Mary Anne Evans used the pen name George Eliot; the same reason Robert Southey, then England's poet laureate, wrote to Charlotte Brontë: "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be." In fact, I'm thinking about starting a women's prize here in the United States, to be given out once a year, every year, until gender parity in the arts is achieved.

I figure that should take me from now until my obituary.

Don't you want to read the rest of it now? You can do that right here.