When they do, it’s often because they’re writing about being women. “How often,” I not-so-rhetorically asked the folks I was working with, “do women writing non-fiction books make the best-seller list?” The draft text for the jacket referred to “one woman’s eye-opening story.” I changed it to “one American’s eye-opening story.” Taken out over the course of edits were several accounts of my breaking into tears (something I think we have nothing to be ashamed of), references to being a wife and mother, and quite a few lines that if I were a man would get me labeled “bold,” but as a woman would only get me labeled “shrill.”Įven when we reached the point of the book jacket, I found myself editing out my gender. So I guess it is no surprise that I found myself, in dealing with Galileo’s Middle Finger, feeling like I had to de-feminize my voice over and over. Most women who succeed in America know these unwritten rules. I knew this even before this research came out.
This happens even at the level of the Senate floor. Sandberg and Grant reviewed Grant’s research findings as well as a new study by Yale University psychologist Victoria Brescoll-all of it arriving at the same conclusion: women get dinged for speaking up, while men get rewarded. Reading a recent essay in the New York Times by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant validated that fear. Because the reality is people would judge what I was saying not just by the words, but by the fact that my first name is “Alice.” That’s why my agent, my editors, and I worried about it. So why worry about the question of what women are “allowed” to say? Really ironic so much of the book deals with struggles over who gets to say what gender means-and the whole book is written from the perspective of an unashamed feminist. That’s a question I wrestled with a lot while I was writing and revising my new book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science.
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