I came across an article that made a salient observation:
"While the male characters of literature built countries, waged wars, and traveled while smoking plenty of illicit substances, the women were utterly boring... There are no Jack Kerouacs or Holden Caulfields for girls."
Luckily, there's been a recent collective push from people and movements (such as We Need Diverse Books), toward greater representation of anyone who's not a heterosexual, white cis male.
While I bet our group specifically could rattle off many book titles with strong, real, flawed, imperfect, independent, substantive female protagonists of various ethnicities, sexual orientations, etc., do you think that in general, what's accepted as the classics of literature is still dominated by men, and/or that women aren't allowed beyond the confines of their quest to find love?
The issue I see is that the Western lit canon is mostly comprised of stories about white heterosexual men (not surprisingly, written by white heterosexual men).
Some women do get a chance to have their stories told; however, the author of the article I read also notes:
"one percent of the Best Novels are about women doing something other than loving."
This entire topic reminded me of a Suzanne Hildenbrand quote I found while reading for LIS:
"Dominant groups manage memory and myths, and that management is crucial to their dominance or control of contemporary resources. These groups create systems that "explain and order the world" in a way favorable to themselves and reserve for themselves the power to name and define. Because women have been so poorly represented in dominant groups, it's not surprising that women are so frequently invisible or written out of history."
In this case, written out of history vis-a-vis the Western literature canon.
The writer ends by acknowledging some recent popular books in which women are able to choose their career (or just a life that isn't completely dominated by men and children) but she fails to mention that usually, these women have their own lives not in addition to love, but rather at the expense of love. In The Devil Wears Prada, our protagonist loses her romantic partner because he's salty that she prioritizes her career. In The Help, our protagonist chooses career over marriage; the implication is that she cannot have both. Men are, in fact, still an integral part of these female protagonists' story lines; and the men make it clear that they are not interested in a women who wants a life outside her relationship.
One of the reasons I decided to read all books by women in 2017, is that not enough books by women, about women, are considered worthwhile contributions to literature. I can't remember where I read it, but another writer said that when a woman writes a book about woman's life, it's chick lit, but when a man writes a book about a man's life, it's about the human condition.
Agreed... unfortunately.