Citation Justice

Currer, Ellis, Acton Bell; clapper silenced by Adam’s knell Her names obscured, inky power to dispel Not quelled forever by Adam’s apple, Be to none their bounden chattel Rise, O Eve give names a voice That half of heaven may rejoice Cathy was an extraordinary woman, tall, genteel, generous, reserved, of incisive wit and possessed of an extraordinary ability to write. Her stories of working as one of the first female contract writers for Warner Brothers Studios, of ‘breaking the back of a novel’ to write a film script, and of the joy of writing, mesmerized my normally blasé undergrad students. During the war years, when male actors went to war, Cathy, Catherine Turney, wrote for female megastars including Bette Davis, Eve Arden, Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind Russel, Ann Sheridan and Ida Lupino. Cathy wrote exceptional stage plays, film scripts, novels and scholarly works. The students, however, did not hear that darker side of her story, of being denied credit for her writing, solely because she was female. In her late 80s, during the early 1990s, she struggled day by day to produce yet another novel in order to eke out a subsistence living. Theft, plagiarism, denial of credit, male pseudonyms and style guides have all denied women their rightful credit. Jocelyn Bell Burnell's male colleagues received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974 for her discovery of radio pulsars. Rosalind Franklin discovered the DNA double-helix formation, not Watson and Crick. Hedy Lamarr collaborated with composer George Antheil to create a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes; it was not created by the US Navy. Margaret Keane's paintings of big-eyed children were stolen by her husband Walter, and sold under his name, famously resulting in a ‘paint-off’ in the divorce courtroom to establish her claim as the painter (Gelt, 2015). Science (Hargittai, 2015), inventions (Stanley, 1995), music (Dunbar, 2011; Giullett, 2000) and the visual arts (Adler & Viéville, 2019)—women have long been denied acknowledgement of their own work. I recognize a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home (Petry, 1989, p. 20). Indeed, plagiarism, or even wholesale theft of authorship, can begin at home. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, a remarkable French woman of letters, was a prolific and brilliant novelist. Unfortunately, her spendthrift and profligate husband published her novels under his own name and retained the copyright and its earnings. Later, when she wanted credit for her work, he was known to have locked her in a room until she produced new pages for him (Gilmour, 2013). For women, credit for authorship has been historically complicated, in part by their sometime embrace of cultural norms that hindered their accepting credit and authorized ceding authorship to a male, or by succumbing to an abusive domestic relationship. The 2017 film, The Wife, in which Glenn Close plays the eponymous protagonist, painfully captures many of the issues that women writers face: cultural bias against women writers, gender-based publisher rejections, plagiarism beginning in the home, theft of recognition and awards, and women's conditioning to accept these injustices (IMDb, 2018). The pseudonyms all the Brontës chose for their joint volume of poems and for their novels were, Charlotte reported, deliberately selected to admit of ambiguous interpretation. They did not wish to choose names avowedly masculine; they would not call themselves, for example, Charles, Edward, and Alfred. On the other hand, as Charlotte wrote afterwards, ‘We did not like to declare ourselves women, because--without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called “feminine”--we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise’. (Ohmann, 1971, p. 906) As Charlotte makes clear, the biases women writers faced were not simply that of becoming published. Cultural biases also coloured the interpretation and the social valuing of their works, and fostered female stereotyping. Gender bias could also determine whether or not they would remain in print after initial publication. As others have noted, there is an historical treasure trove of unpublished women's writings that have only begun to be recovered and analysed (Lewalski, 1991). It was safer, then, for women authors to become men: the Bell Brothers, Lester Rowntree, George Eliot, George Sand, James Tiptree Jr., Andre Norton, Isak Dinesen, Vernon Lee, Murray Constantine and more. Some did not go so far and simply obscured their gender by using initials: Louisa May Alcott as AM Branard and Joanne Rowling as JK Rowling. Rowling's adoption of initials (she has no middle name!) was at the behest of her publisher who believed that young males would not read a book written by a woman (Waville, 2000). Incidentally, initials do have a statistical and gendered distribution pattern. Rowling is, of course, contemporary; the bias remains alive and virulent. Academic women do not escape this bias (Hengel, 2019; Krawczyk, Smyk, 2016; Pells, 2018; West, Jacquet, King, Correll, & Bergstrom, 2013). It persists in publishing style guides that require author citations to include only a surname and initials. Some style guides now call for surname plus given names (e.g. MLA, Chicago and ASA). Other styles, in mostly male predominant disciplines (APA, Vancouver, AMA, NLM, AIP, ACS, CSE, IEEE), continue to specify surname and initials only. Where a publishing house adopts a general style (usually APA, Chicago or MLA) they may (and often do), amend the style, including dropping of given names.123 The most recent manuscripts that I have submitted for publication (three articles and one chapter) have all specified citations with surname and initials only. In each case, I requested a waiver to include first names and the waiver was granted, though not without some haggling. When writing in feminist ethics, it seems counterproductive to then obscure female authorship in the citations. However, it ought not to be the case that a special style guide exemption needs to be requested to make women's authorship visible, where the author so chooses. Citations are a rhetorical device; they say something. Initials are gender-obscuring, but they are not gender-neutral; their use is intended to hide women's authorship and imply that the author is male. This practice never addresses the underlying injustice and effectively condones gender discrimination allowing it to persist unimpeded. There is considerable chatter online among young female authors questioning whether to use initials, and they are being encouraged to do so to evade gender discrimination. In the current guidelines, authors are free to choose to use initials, but not free in some style guides to choose a given name. Publishers should not determine how authors self-identify. The right to choose how one is visible to the public is a question of respect for persons. The time is past due, for nursing authors, editors, organizations and publishers to call for full and equal recognition of women's authorship. It is a question of social justice. 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