To the Editor:

In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his publisher, “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women .” Although he was referring specifically to sentimental novelists, his letter expressed the larger belief that women’s writing was not worth reading or publishing, that their words and ideas didn’t matter, and that their work was, to use the language of Hawthorne, “ trash .”

As a historian, I see this playing out not only in the antebellum period, but also in the postwar era when I read letters to the editor. As I scan through various national newspapers, day after day, year after year, I find myself hoping that someday, eventually, women will be represented proportionally. I am always disappointed; they always skew male.

Perhaps Hawthorne’s disdain for scribbling women is not such distant history.

This problem is especially concerning because unlike an Op-Ed — where the writer presumably has some expertise in the subject matter — anybody can submit a letter to the editor. It is, I’d argue, the most democratic section of the paper because children and adults, billionaire philanthropists and minimum-wage workers, and people of all genders can contribute. Each has an equal opportunity to express her or his thoughts and participate in a robust debate in the public sphere. Therefore, I’m troubled that in 2019, The New York Times struggles to find women’s letters that are worthy of publication.

When I first inquired as to why so few women were writing, I was told that there aren’t formal statistics on the number of women submitting letters, but that a large majority come from men. Gail Collins provided a similar explanation when she became the first woman editor of the editorial page at The Times in 2001 and started looking into this problem. She found that in letters to the editor and Op-Ed submissions, “the preponderance of men was off the charts .”