This is true. And other excerpt:
"Many women poets disagree with the separatist ideology to which anthologies like this are assumed to subscribe. Some distance themselves from what Germaine Greer calls “the spirit that produced anthologies such as Diane Scott's Bread and Roses and Louise Bernikow's The World Split Open…” and “the reinvention of poetry as a propaganda tool of the women's movement [that] must have galled independent women poets who had been toiling away for most of a lifetime, only to see their small market overwhelmed by a froth of publishing on the part of literature co-operatives and writers' workshops.” Irritatingly, anthologies sometimes do perpetuate the very stereotypes about women’s subjects we aim to disarm in this volume. An anthology compiled to prove a point would be top-heavy with its own agenda. Nevertheless, my own internal, and heated, debate on this subject - and some poets’ ambivalent feelings about women’s anthologies - impelled me to address not only what is a routine gender bias, but also our problematical relationship with efforts to redress it."
However, too often this becomes the justification for not addressing a a real problem. In fact, it is a convenient and insulting way of reiterating status quo. There are plenty of mediocre male poets in anthologies, nevertheless deemed superior for no particular reason I can see. When one presses the point, one finds that many people, including many editors simply don't KNOW the leading women poets, hence this anthology, and often have a dismissive idea of them based on received ideas. If there is only room for these poets in women's anthologies, which men/editors don't read,thinking these anthologies are setting the separatist agenda when in fact it's the other way around, then the problem is conveniently insoluble.
By the way, in reply to things slowly getting better, some of the figures for recent anthologies are as bad as any from many years back.
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