Watching the outpouring of grief and reflection over the death of Adrienne Rich last week, I admit, to my shame, that I was surprised. Surprised not because of any judgment about Rich’s poetry, which I barely know, but because I had thought of her as an icon of another era. That era, of course, was the era of the women’s movement, of which Rich was a brash troubadour, asserting the value and distinctiveness of women’s experience and lamenting their—our—submission to patriarchy. But when I came of age intellectually, in the 1990s, this mode of expression had fallen out of fashion. In my undergraduate and graduate studies, I was mentored by male and female professors alike who encouraged me to take my place as a student of the literary canon. But I was never directed to read a poem by Adrienne Rich.

There are two distinct types of equality, I realize now, and women of my generation had achieved only the first. We had gained admission to the world of men. (This was literally true at Columbia University, where I went to college, which had gone co-ed less than ten years before I enrolled.) But there is another type of equality, the type that Rich alludes to in her great poem “Diving Into the Wreck,” in which she imagines plumbing the depths of the ocean as both mermaid and merman, exploring a past that hasn’t bothered to record her presence, “a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear.” That type of equality involves remaking the landscape itself, redefining the terms on which value is assessed, rewriting the book of myths. At this type of equality we have yet to make significant progress, which is why Rich’s poem, nearly 40 years later, retains its immediacy and its longing.

The place of women in the literary world is still as urgent an issue as it has ever been. I worry that other women of my generation, having taken their admission to this world as a natural right, have grown as complacent as I have been. But admission is not the same thing as acceptance. And what the reception of literature by women over the last few decades—longer, of course, but let’s keep to a manageable scope—shows us is that acceptance is a long way off.

This is the lament of Meg Wolitzer in The New York Times Book Review last weekend, in which she argues that women, as fiction writers, are still subject to segregation and prejudice, ranging from book covers that subtly (or not so subtly) hinder women’s novels from reaching a large audience to a literary environment that generally fails to understand that women’s issues are everyone’s issues. Wolitzer was reacting to the latest statistics from VIDA, an advocacy organization that for the past two years has published a tally of the number of male and female bylines in major book reviews to demonstrate that men publish the majority of the reviews in American literary publications, and (not coincidentally) women’s books are reviewed far less often than men’s. The problem in fact goes deeper: as I demonstrated last year, part of the reason books by women are being reviewed in lower numbers is that they are being published in lower numbers. (The Huffington Post agrees.)

Regardless of where it begins—are manuscripts by women also submitted in smaller numbers?—it is clear from these statistics that the bias against women in publishing takes multiple forms. Wolitzer argues that books by women tend to be lumped together as “women’s fiction,” which segregates women writers and prevents them from “entering the larger, more influential playing field.” Publishers perpetuate this bias in ways large and small, including packaging that primes readers to regard women’s books as less important: Big novels by men often have text-only covers, while novels by women tend to be illustrated by domestic images. The underlying problem is that while women read books by male writers about male characters, men tend not to do the reverse. Men’s novels about suburbia (Franzen) are about society; women’s novels about suburbia (Wolitzer) are about women. This is true regardless of the novels’ quality or whether they are judged as important or not. It is the same unconscious sexism that prevented me, as a college student, from seeking out the works of Adrienne Rich: I believed that because they dealt with women’s issues, they were less important than the works of the canon to which I sought admittance.