[Shaun J. Russell]

I think the better measuring stick, Eva, is going off of anthologies that have been created in the last twenty-five years or so. I think most men would concede that women have been badly subjugated throughout history...but isn't the point that it has gotten better over the decades? I'm not saying it's even yet...but it is evening, is it not? If you want to determine if there has been a gradual shrinking of the poetic gender gap, perhaps you can pick a thorough, new (as opposed to "updated") anthology from each of the last six or seven decades and do a count of how many women appear within their pages. You can't change the fact that there were woefully few women published in the middle of the last millennium (the wonderful Aphra Behn being one of the first -- she is a true hero of mine, prompting me to write a sonnet about her a few years ago). You CAN notice the shift in sensibilities as you get closer to present day, however.

I just took a look at my favorite anthology, A Treasury Of Great Poems, English And American by Louis Untermeyer, and even though it was written in 1942, you notice that there are only two female poets cited up until the nineteenth century (essentially 400 years of poetry), but from then on, you have another seventeen over the next 140 years.

The bottom line is that it has been bad, and in many respects still is bad, but it is certainly getting better. Like I mentioned to another Eratospherean in an email yesterday, I'd like to believe that my grandchildren won't have to question the validity of another's thoughts or objectives on the basis of skin colour or gender. I'd like to say "children", but it takes time for those deep-rooted cultural memes to get weeded out. I know that my children will be taught the values of acceptance and inclusiveness. I am quite hopeful that most others of my generation will do the same.