Gender Equality Through the Lens of Millay

You could say it started with her nickname.

Millay with her husband Eugen Boissevain in about 1927

When she was a child, Edna St. Vincent Millay was called Vincent by her family and friends. In fact, in some ways she considered herself "the boy in the family." This was in part because she was the caretaker when her mother was out of town on a nursing job. But it is also true that she was a bit of a tomboy as a child.

As she grew older she realized she was attracted to men and women. When she started at Vassar College, then a women's college, she often was attracted to partners who were taller, more boyish in appearance or who had deep voices. Yet with certain women she played the aggressor, seducing many over the course of her four years there.

Then, as now, women were paid less for their work in white, pink and blue collar jobs--including the arts. The theory wasn't only that men needed to be paid more so they could afford a family. There was a notion that women weren't as qualified or talented. After all, the sexists cried, no woman had ever painted a great painting, composed a wonderful symphony, or authored an important book.

In poetry, there was a little more leeway, but not much. Millay once said, "they compare women's poetry to that one men poets and say condescendingly, 'well, that's pretty good for a woman poet.' What I want to know is, is it a good sonnet or a bad sonnet? That is all I'm interested in." In the suffragist era poets like Millay, Marianne Moore, H. D., Amy Lowell, Sara Teasdale and others found they had to fight for recognition in one way or another to be taken seriously. Marianne Moore wrote about science and baseball in part because male editors took her voice more seriously. H. D. made her gender irrelevant by using initials instead of her given name, Hilda Doolittle. While Millay fought hard for recognition based on merit, she found that when her husband called demanding better payment publishers were more receptive. She often spoke in the male voice in her verse to challenge the notions of hers being "just women's verse."

Compared to artists and writers, women composers have always had the most difficult time of all, despite there being many wonderful musicians available. Likewise, for women who seek to sell fine art. This is still true.

Yet if it weren't for best sellers like Agatha Christie, Margaret Atwood, Patricia Highsmith, and Danielle Steel women would have remained in the shadow of their male counterparts in publishing. Oddly, women still lag behind men when it comes to getting films made of their work.

"What I want to know is, is it a good sonnet or a bad sonnet? That is all I'm interested in."

In short, even in the 21st Century gender equity in the arts lags still behind because the publishers, gallery owners, film makers, and orchestras fail to fully accept women as creative equals to men. I suspect "Vincent" Millay would be extremely frustrated with how little progress there has been.