In 1660, a woman named Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published a collection of plays, poetry, and philosophical treatises under her own name. This was, at the time, borderline scandalous. Women in seventeenth-century England could write privately, as a hobby, as therapy, as correspondence. But to print and sell your work publicly, to compete for attention in the literary marketplace alongside men? That was something else entirely. Samuel Pepys called her “mad, conceited, and ridiculous.” He was hardly alone in that opinion.

Cavendish didn’t care, or if she cared, she didn’t let it stop her. Over her career, she published over a dozen books, including what is often considered the first work of science fiction written by a woman, The Blazing World (1666). She attended meetings of the Royal Society. She argued publicly with the leading philosophers of her age. She was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most productive and ambitious literary figures of the seventeenth century.

And most people have never heard of her.

This erasure is not accidental. It’s the result of three hundred years of publishing history in which women’s contributions were systematically minimized, misattributed, or forgotten. I work in publishing. I should know this history better than I do. The truth is that until I started researching this piece, my knowledge of women’s role in early publishing was embarrassingly thin, limited to a few famous names (Virginia Woolf, the Bronte sisters, Mary Shelley) and a vague sense that things had been “harder for women.” That vagueness, I’ve come to realize, is itself a form of erasure. When you reduce centuries of institutional exclusion to “things were harder,” you flatten the specific, documented, often infuriating ways that women were pushed to the margins of an industry they helped build.

So I want to tell some of those specific stories, not as a comprehensive history (which would require several books, and better ones than I could write) but as a publisher’s reckoning with an industry whose past is more complicated and more unjust than I had understood.

Before we called it publishing

The story of women in publishing goes back further than most people realize. In medieval Europe, the production and circulation of written texts was largely the domain of monasteries. And while monks did most of the copying, nuns were active scribes and illuminators in convents across Europe. Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century Benedictine abbess, wrote theological, scientific, and musical texts that circulated widely during her lifetime. She was not marginal. She was one of the most respected intellectual figures of her century.

But Hildegard was exceptional, and her authority was inseparable from her religious status. As a woman, she had no secular authority. As an abbess believed to have divine visions, she could say things that would have been unprintable coming from a laywoman. This pattern, women’s voices being tolerated when they come from within sanctioned institutions and silenced when they don’t, repeats throughout the history of publishing with depressing regularity.

When Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe in the 1440s, the commercial publishing industry was born. And from the very beginning, women were involved, though rarely in the roles that history remembers. Printers’ wives frequently ran the business side of early print shops: managing apprentices, negotiating with booksellers, keeping accounts. When their husbands died, widows often took over the press entirely. In sixteenth-century Lyon, one of Europe’s major printing centers, at least a dozen women ran print shops as widows or co-owners. Charlotte Guillard managed one of the most prominent presses in Paris for nearly thirty years in the first half of the sixteenth century, producing scholarly editions that were respected across Europe.

These women were publishers in everything but name. They made editorial decisions. They chose which texts to print. They managed distribution and marketing. And yet when histories of early publishing are written, they’re usually mentioned in passing, if at all, as footnotes to their husbands’ or fathers’ stories.

The pseudonym problem

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women were writing and publishing in significant numbers, but often under conditions that required them to hide or disguise their identities. The list of women who published under male pseudonyms is long and well-known: George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin), the Bronte sisters (Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell). Less well-known is the economic reasoning behind the disguise.

It wasn’t just social stigma. Books by women sold fewer copies, received fewer reviews, and were taken less seriously by the critical establishment. This wasn’t speculation; it was measurable market reality. When Charlotte Bronte submitted Jane Eyre as Currer Bell, it was reviewed on its merits. When her identity was revealed, reviewers began describing the novel’s passion as “unwomanly” and its frankness as inappropriate for a female author. The book hadn’t changed. The reviewers’ perception of it had.

This dynamic, where the quality of writing is perceived differently depending on whether the reader believes it was written by a man or a woman, has been documented by researchers as recently as the 2010s. Studies in which the same manuscript is submitted to agents or publishers under male and female names consistently show that the male-named version receives more favorable responses. We are, in some ways, still living with the same bias that drove Mary Ann Evans to call herself George.

What interests me, though, is not just the bias itself but what it cost us culturally. How many women never wrote at all because the barriers seemed impassable? How many wrote but never published? How many published but were forgotten because the critical establishment of their era couldn’t see past their gender? These are questions we can’t answer, and the impossibility of answering them is itself the damage.

The women who built publishing houses

While women writers were navigating pseudonyms and prejudice on the authorial side, other women were building the institutional infrastructure of modern publishing, often without credit.

Blanche Knopf co-founded Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. with her husband in 1915 and was responsible for bringing many of the firm’s most important international authors to American readers. She traveled extensively in Europe and South America, scouting manuscripts and building relationships with foreign publishers. Her editorial judgment shaped one of the most prestigious catalogs in American publishing. And yet the firm bears only her husband’s name, and most histories of Knopf treat her as a supporting character in his story.

Barney Rosset gets credit for building Grove Press into a counterculture powerhouse, and he deserves much of that credit. But his editor, Judith Schmidt (later Judith Schmidt Douw), was instrumental in identifying and developing the experimental writers who defined the press. Similar stories exist throughout the publishing industry of the mid-twentieth century: women editors doing transformative work under the names of male publishers.

On the British side, the Hogarth Press is usually associated with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, but Virginia was not merely a writer who happened to have a printing press in her basement. She was a publisher with strong editorial opinions, a keen sense of market positioning, and an understanding of physical book design that influenced the press’s entire output. The Hogarth Press published T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for instance, in part because Virginia recognized its importance when others didn’t.

These women didn’t just participate in publishing; they shaped it. Their editorial instincts, their international connections, their willingness to take risks on unfamiliar voices, these are the decisions that determined what got published and what didn’t, which writers found audiences and which were lost. To tell the story of twentieth-century publishing without centering these women is to tell an incomplete story. Which is exactly what most publishing histories do.

The agents who changed everything

One area where women have been disproportionately influential, and where their influence is somewhat better recognized, is literary agenting. Women have dominated the ranks of literary agents since the profession’s early days, and some of the most important agent-author relationships in literary history have been between female agents and their (often male) clients.

Audrey Wood represented Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Carson McCullers. Candida Donadio represented Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip Roth. Lynn Nesbit represented Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion. These agents didn’t just negotiate contracts; they shaped careers, guided artistic development, and fought for their clients’ creative freedom in ways that directly affected the books we now consider classics.

The irony is that agenting was, for much of the twentieth century, considered a “suitable” career for women in publishing precisely because it was seen as a service role, a support function, less prestigious than editing or running a house. The men who ran publishing houses viewed agents as intermediaries, necessary but not creative. The agents, meanwhile, were making the creative decisions that determined which manuscripts reached those editors’ desks in the first place.

Today, the agency world remains majority female. According to a 2022 survey, about 74 percent of literary agents in the United States are women. This overrepresentation at the gateway of publishing means that women’s judgment shapes which stories enter the pipeline, even as men still hold disproportionate power at the top of major publishing houses.

What’s changed and what hasn’t

The contemporary publishing industry is, in many respects, more equitable than it’s ever been. Women run major publishing imprints. Women win the biggest literary prizes. Women dominate bestseller lists. The idea that a woman would need to publish under a male name seems, to most people in 2024, like an artifact of a distant past.

But the picture is more complicated than it appears. Women dominate the junior and mid-level ranks of publishing (editorial assistants, publicists, junior editors) while men still hold a disproportionate number of senior leadership positions, particularly in the corporate structures that own the major houses. The pay gap in publishing tracks the broader economy: women earn less than men for comparable work, and this gap widens at higher levels.

On the authorial side, the VIDA Count, an annual survey of gender balance in literary publishing, has documented persistent imbalances in who gets reviewed, who gets reviewed at length, and who gets reviewed in the most prestigious outlets. While the numbers have improved over the past decade, men still receive more and longer reviews in many major publications. This matters because reviews drive sales, and sales drive careers.

And then there’s the question of genre. Women writers are disproportionately represented in fiction (particularly literary fiction and romance) and underrepresented in nonfiction, where advances tend to be higher and media attention more generous. This imbalance is self-reinforcing: publishers acquire fewer nonfiction proposals from women, which means fewer women see nonfiction as a viable career path, which means fewer women submit nonfiction proposals. Breaking this cycle requires deliberate effort from publishers, agents, and media outlets.

What we’re doing about it (and what we could do better)

At ScrollWorks, our catalog skews toward gender parity, which is something I’m conscious of but not willing to turn into a marketing claim. Publishing women isn’t a corporate initiative for us; it’s a natural consequence of reading widely and choosing the best manuscripts we encounter. When I look at our list, which includes Catherine Voss’s The Last Archive, Elena Marsh’s Still Waters, James Whitfield’s Echoes of Iron, and David Okonkwo’s The Cartographer’s Dilemma, I see a balance that reflects the quality of work being submitted to us, not a quota.

But I also recognize that “just choosing the best work” is insufficient as a response to structural inequity. The submissions we receive are already filtered through a system that discourages certain voices and amplifies others. If fewer women submit nonfiction proposals, it’s not because women have less to say about nonfiction subjects; it’s because the industry has historically told them, through its acquisition patterns and marketing priorities, that nonfiction is a male domain. A publisher who simply accepts what comes across the transom is accepting the biases built into the submission pipeline.

So we actively seek out work by women writers, particularly in nonfiction and in genres where women are underrepresented. We attend conferences and workshops where women writers gather. We build relationships with agents who represent diverse lists. We try, imperfectly and with full awareness that we’re a small publisher with limited resources, to be part of the correction rather than part of the problem.

I’m not going to claim we’ve solved anything. Publishing’s gender issues are deep, structural, and will require generations to fully address. But I think small publishers have a particular opportunity here, because we can be intentional in ways that large corporate publishers, driven by market data and shareholder expectations, often can’t. We can take risks on voices that the market hasn’t validated yet. We can invest in writers who don’t fit neatly into existing categories. We can make decisions based on what we believe rather than on what algorithms predict.

That’s a form of power, and I want to use it responsibly. The women who built publishing, from Charlotte Guillard’s print shop in sixteenth-century Paris to Blanche Knopf’s editorial office in midtown Manhattan, didn’t have the institutional power to fully realize their vision. We do. The least we can do is use it in ways that honor what they started.

Written by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team. We publish the voices that history too often overlooks.