As I began reading and familiarising myself with a wide array of women’s literature,
ranging from the unsettling dystopian worlds of The Gracekeepers and The Natural Way
of Things,to the American Frontier in The Last Runaway, I refined my selection criteria in order to classify and rate texts on their completion. In this segment I will briefly outline the four key criteria I used to create a short list of suitable literature. These included
Badaracco’s test of ‘careful reading,’ the ‘Bechdel Test,’ identifiable ‘moments’ of women
engaging in and experiencing leadership, and the presence of provocative and discussable gender themes.
Inevitably, some of the books I found using my basic criteria didn’t fulfil my subjective
‘good story’ requirements, these included The House Girl by Tara Conklin, The
Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, and Calling Invisible Women by Jeanne Ray. Why? While these stories did have the potential to trigger brief socio-political critiques of gender and power, for the purpose of developing understandings of and encouraging engagement with complex questions on women and leadership, they lacked the requisite depth and
complexity. To counter this problem, each short listed story was required to pass a more
rigorous version of Badaracco’s ‘test of careful reading and rereading’: Does the story
have depth and richness beyond popular social stereotypes? Does it critically and creatively engage the reader? Is the prose style elegant, expressive, and grammatically
correct? Examples of possible ‘rich’ texts included The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara
Kingsolver and Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks.
In addition to ‘careful reading’, I also added the Bechdel Test. This short feminist test,
proposed by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in 1985, “calls attention to gender inequality” in
the media (Bechdel, 2014, para. 5) and, unfortunately, is still just as relevant in 2016 as it was in 1985 (Swanson, 2016). Although primarily used to evaluate movies, the test can easily be applied to literature using a three-pronged question: Does the story have at least two women in it? Who talk to each other? About something other than a man? Examples
of stories which not only pass the test of careful reading, but also fulfil Bechdel’s
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Rogan, and Top Girls by Caryl Churchill. While not a definitive benchmark, I applied this
test to those books which had made it through the first criterion, since far too many fictional works focus on the doings of men, or of women in relation to men, and as
Virginia Woolf (1928) succinctly points out, “how small a part of a woman’s life is that?”
(p. 82).
While novels like Base Ten by Maryann Lesert, The Women’s Room by Marilyn French,
and Unless by Carol Shields, excellently challenge patriarchal grand narratives and gender norms while addressing questions of female empowerment, they lack clear and protracted examples of leadership in action. Therefore, in order for a story to make it onto the short
list, it had to contain more than one example of a leadership ‘moment’. Interestingly, rather
than writing specifically about work and business, women’s stories tend to favour contexts and settings which allow for the exploration of the ‘human condition’ as a whole,
incorporating themes such as love and loss, loyalty and friendship, sympathy and compassion, growth and change, oppression and grief, care and passion, anger and
bitterness, fear and endurance within the narrative (Hill, 1990). This made it more difficult to find novels, short stories, and plays directly concerned with women leaders operating in
public work settings (Top Girls by Caryl Churchill is the only long listed story set in an
office environment) or which featured women in politically powerful positions (Welcome
to Thebes and Pope Joan). While I first saw this as a constraint, leadership itself is
concerned with more than just ‘leading’. As explored in Chapter Two, there is an
important conceptual difference between formal authority vested in a ‘leader’ figure and
leadership as a collective process. Leadership can occur in a wide variety of contexts and for a multitude of different purposes, encompassing both those who would be known as
‘leaders’ and those who would be known as ‘followers’ and the spaces created between
them (Ladkin, 2010). Since leadership is an activity employed for the purpose of addressing challenges and influencing others to collaboratively create positive change
(Sulpizio, 2014), novels concerned with the ‘human condition’, such as The Help and The
Secret Life of Bees, are equally well-equipped to explore the phenomenon of leadership as those that are set in the public sphere of work and politics.
The final criterion required that the nominated stories make the gendered nature of leadership and power visible and open to protracted discussion. In line with the requirements of my critical feminist lens, I wanted the short listed texts to reveal the
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experiences of leadership (both as leaders and followers). With this prerequisite in mind I
was able to identify ‘discussable’ themes which women writers regularly brought to the
fore in their fiction. Most notably, in historical fiction, gendered expectations and sexist perceptions of women were made salient. The ensuing gender binaries were presented as
obstacles to be questioned and overcome, such as by the Mirabal sisters in In the Time of
Butterflies. Often the heroine is required to go through a process of ‘self-actualisation’ and personal development in order to grow into or exercise her leadership potential, such as in
The Invention of Wings and Remarkable Creatures. In the play Welcome to Thebes and in
the novels The Lifeboat and The Dovekeepers, women are faced with crisis situations or
‘wicked problems’, and are compelled to exercise leadership as a result. The stories I read
frequently explored and emphasised the communal spaces created between women and the role of female mentors as sources of leadership inspiration.
The reading boundaries and short list selection criteria can be summarised as follows in Table 10.
Table 10 Summary of Reading Boundaries and Selection Criteria
Initial Reading Boundaries: Short List Selection Criteria:
1. Literary fiction written by women 2. Author profiling – feminist interests
and award-winning/nominated 3. Written after 1960
4. At least one well-developed female protagonist
1. Badaracco’s test of ‘careful reading’ 2. The ‘Bechdel Test’
3. Identifiable ‘moments’ of women engaging in or experiencing leadership 4. Relevant and provocative gender
themes and issues