The idea of women's anthologies as "own-goals" - - self-defeating - was precisely what I felt needed addressing in Introduction I wrote for anthology Women's Work.
Apart from compiling the figures proving an ongoing imbalance, certainly shocking in the UK, I also began to realise how "women's writing", rather than being one of a number of specialties under a literary umbrella, was viewed as a special case.
Furthermore, in critical writing it is often assumed that women's issues are women's only subject. Notably, one book of criticism, in attempting a balance, includes a section about women writers...writing only about feminism, but never the wide range of subjects they do in fact write about. Of course there is never likewise chapter headings about men writing about men in the same way. Those chapters engage with men's writing about politics, the world, etc.
I could go on about this. In fact, I did, in this Introduction! Often, to raise these issues is to attract unbelievable vitriol (telling, of course) and the conversations often becomes more one about the legitimacy of the topic, and of course the legitimacy of those who find the topic important, in a neat invalidation of their experience. Not that this is happening here.
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