Publisher's Weekly 2009 10 Best Books List Has Zero Women Authors On It!

Today’s Lady News: 2009 Best Books List Has Zero Women Authors On It

Posted by: Jessica Wakeman Filed in: news
5:40PM, Thursday November 5th 2009

The magazine Publisher’s Weekly compiled its annual list of the year’s best books and it has zero women on it. Zilch! WTF? Tell us the names of incredible books written by women in 2009 that you’ve read in the comments. [New York Times]
Meet Margarita Vargas, an 18-year-old girl and the one decent human being who thought to call the police when a 15-year-old girl was being gang-raped outside a high school homecoming dance in California while as many as 20 people watched. “I’m like ‘We should call the cops because that’s the right thing to do.’ I didn’t think about it twice,” Vargas said. “I think people are scared, especially in a community like this where ‘snitching’ is a big thing to people.” [CBS]
A dozen anti-abortion activists were arrested at Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office in D.C., some for disorderly conduct and others for unlawful entry. Pelosi’s staff said the protesters were upset about the wording regarding abortion in Obama’s health care reform bill. [AP]

In the U.K., a parent’s right to pull a child out of sex ed classes at school is now forbidden after age 15. [BBC]—Sounds sensible to me, but I’d prefer everyone be forced to attend sex ed like they’re forced to attend gym!
Massachusetts’ Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner program, which helps console rape victims and direct them to law enforcement at 44 different health care centers in the state, will receive a 40 percent budget cut from the state budget. [Boston Globe]
Anti-choice activists in Colorado are working to put an item on the 2010 ballot, called Initiative 25, which would define a person as an egg, and would, thus, grant a zygote or fetus rights. Colorado Right to Life and Personhood USA are going forward with their campaign, despite the fact that Colorado defeated a similar ballot initiative in 2008. [Colorado Independent]
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has rejected a legal challenge to the state’s domestic partnerships law by gay rights opponents. Opponents say the law gives gay couples too many rights, thus violating Wisconsin’s 2005 constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and civil unions. Gay rights advocates, though, argue that the domestic partnerships law gives gay couples less than one-fourth the legal rights afforded to straight married couples. [Pink News UK]
South Africa’s Olympic governing body has suspended Leonard Chuene, president of Athletics South Africa, for how he handled intersex runner Caster Semenya‘s gender testing earlier this year. Chuene knew about the gender tests which were performed on Semenya without her knowledge, but lied publicly about it. [BBC]
Why do some women get breast cancer but not their sisters? The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences will try to find out in their Sister Study. [Chicago Tribune]

comments

topshopwoman
wrote on November 5 2009 @ 07:47 pm: [report]

What happened?

tigerstripe
wrote on November 5 2009 @ 09:36 pm: [report]

An egg is a person? Does that mean I’ve killed my baby every time I get my period?

hlnbabe
wrote on November 6 2009 @ 08:45 am: [report]

@tigerstrip: yup. and if you’ve ever given fellatio, by the zygote definition, you’ve eaten a few too…

spatula
wrote on November 6 2009 @ 08:50 am: [report]

I also think the UK sex ed law sounds sensible, as well as j=gym class sex ed! That’s what we had here (if you could call it that, living in VA we definitely only got “abstinence education”), and I live in a really small, really conservative town, but I don’t really recall any commotion about kids being pulled out. I mean, it literally was like the move Mean Girls…“If you have sex, you’ll get pregnant. And die. So just don’t do it”

Also, I think it’s interesting that you used both ant-aboriton and anti-choice in your article. I’ve always wondered what exactly the difference is. I think the abortion debate is absolutely at its core a debate about a woman’s right to choose/decide. I also think it’s interesting that the (commonly used) opposite of pro-choice is pro-life, associating ‘pro-choice’ with ‘anti-life’.

MuchoMacho
wrote on November 6 2009 @ 09:52 am: [report]

apparently i murdered 3 million babies this morning before work.

sillygrrl
wrote on November 6 2009 @ 10:07 am: [report]

I can’t believe there are no women authors on the Publishers Weekly list. Last year I read nothing but women authors and I looks like I’m going to have to do that again.

Lynn
wrote on November 6 2009 @ 10:52 am: [report]

Um guys, the article she linked to said that it is for a FERTILIZED egg. Sperm and period eggs are not zygotes.

Also, I don’t think anyone who is creating a list of the year’s best books needs to look at the gender of the authors. They shouldn’t take into account anything but the book itself when coming up with a list of best books.

MuchoMacho
wrote on November 6 2009 @ 10:56 am: [report]

thank god*... i dont know how i could have lived with myself.