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it’s worth quoting extensively from Germaine Greer vis a vis the so-called “arbitrary” nature of coincidences - Eva Salzman
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Anthos are rarely assembled by anonymous submission. When submissions
are anonymous (some mags and most competitions), I think I read that the M/F ratios are more equal. As others have pointed out, there are extra factors at play in older anthos. As Jed Rasula pointed out in "Syncopations", "Age is important because it takes a generation (at least) to overcome a dominant paradigm" - pioneers (of writing, editing, admin, life-style) become role-models and pave the way for a later generation's change en masse. And UK anthos might be rather different from UK ones in this regard - UK changes happened at different times and the links between women's poetry, feminism and avant-garde poetry were rather different here, I think. So the antho stats can be sliced and diced in various ways. I don't think the trends are so disappointing, nor is history so surprising.
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When I read collections of forgotten and "neglected" poems by women, I rarely encounter poems I am sad to have missed - Richard Epstein
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You're not alone. Here's the ever-quotable Germaine Greer again (from "Slip-shod Sibyls")
- "The dilemma of the student of poetry who is also passionately interested in women is that she has to find value in a mass of work that she knows to be inferior"
- "This is not to say that we should not work at reclaiming women's work but simply that we should be aware that we are more likely to find heroines than poets"