Short of asking the deans of various English Literature departments
             why they have virtually removed the women's short story genre from
             coursework, perhaps another way to get at an answer is to review the status
             of "women's lit" generally in the society. A very basic place to start
             (and one isn't arguing that it is literature in the same class of art with
             the aforementioned short stories) is with romance novels. In 1999, 41
             million Americans read a romance novel. It made up 38.4 percent of all
             adult popular fiction sold in1998, and more than 54 percent of all
             paperbacks. These figures dwarfed sales of science fiction (which one
             might reasonably call half of men's lit), mysteries, Westerns (arguably the
             other half of men's lit) and general fiction. (Williams, 2000)
             Despite this, famous romance authors such as Nora Roberts are not
             compared to Hemingway. Perhaps this is because the readers are older, with
             32 percent over 65 and half over 45. They tend to be working- to middle-
             class, and their incomes were, in 2000, between $10,000 and $35,000 per
             year. The novels are most popular in the South, and most readersâ€"77
             percentâ€"are white. (Williams, 2000)
             In order to make the leap from the wildly impressive sales of fluffy
             fantasies to proposing a reason for the dearth of women's' short story
             studies, one must accept that the academic community would not regard the
             demographics above as anything even faintly resembling those they expect in
             their classrooms. And because women's fiction of any kind is, a priori,
             women's, there is reason to believe that by virtue of the word alone,
             women's short fiction is given short shrift by serious scholars.
             It is possible, in fact, that the very popularity of lightweight
             women's' fiction has harmed the reception of serious women's fiction.
             Bridget Jones's Diary is a case in point. A successo...