Women don't blog about politics.[1] Most bloggers are white men.[2] Women are afraid to put their opinions out there.[3] What women write about is personal and narcissistic.[4] At the heart of the "where-are-the-women-bloggers" question is the issue of what counts as public discourse.[5] Women supposedly don't blog much on politics—at least, not as much or as successfully as men—preferring instead to write "mommy blogs," "knitting blogs," "personal blogs," and the like. This is, of course, a fiction: largely as a response to the cliché, political and feminist women bloggers have made a point of organizing, online and off, and making their presence known. For the most part, the major political blogs now acknowledge that women, too, write about politics. Indeed, some of the major political blogs are written by women, for example: Jeanne D'Arc's Body and Soul, Jeralyn Merrit's Talk Left, Ann Althouse, Amanda Marcotte and Pam Spaulding of Pandagon, and Michelle Malkin. In fact, it's quite difficult to determine how many of the top 100 blogs are written, or co-written, by women. According to The Truth Laid Bear rankings, most group blogs have at least one woman contributor, and a number of bloggers write under pseudonyms.

Another cliché is that "for most of history, Anonymous was a woman." And there are historical antecedents for women writers' invisibility. The main difference between then and now, as far as the "where-are-the-women" question goes, might simply be a question of feminist consciousness; we (rightly or wrongly) expect men to notice their women colleagues. We also expect women, now, to make a fuss if they're overlooked, and indeed, women bloggers' successful fussing has resulted in increased visibility. In addition to feminism, bloggers, unlike women writers of past generations, also have the nature of the Internet itself: self-publication and broad distribution are only a few keystrokes away. We can easily organize, link, collaborate, and call attention to ourselves—"fuss"—through comments, e-mail, dedicated Web sites, and group ad sales. Indeed, studies show that women and men blog in nearly equal numbers.[6]

But the association between women and anonymity continues to resonate, and the impression that women are more likely to be anonymous lingers. Though we are just beginning to test the reliability of this impression by gathering hard data, it does seem to be the case that, though women and men both blog, women may be more likely to do so under an assumed identity: for example, one study has found that "74 percent of the anonymous academic bloggers . . . are women."[7] Historically, we know that publication presented problems for women: while the modern world of novels and newspapers was being formed, readers "heard the word 'public' in 'publication' very distinctly, and hence a woman's publication automatically implied a public woman"[8]—that is, a whore. This problem, however, is surely a relic of the past, and since blogs are self-published, women bloggers need not mask their identities to overcome real or imagined publishers' prejudices. Do women bloggers write anonymously more often then men? And if so, why?

This essay constitutes one attempt to begin answering these questions. I write a pseudonymous blog that is explicitly feminist and academic, and in two years of blogging I have been frequently struck by apparent parallels between blogging and my primary research area, early periodical publication—with, as it happens, a particular focus on women's early pseudonymous periodical publishing. The same truisms—women wrote far less than men, and when they did write, they did so anonymously—have obtained in eighteenth-century periodical studies for years, even while scholars have come to recognize the centrality of women's role in other genres, particularly the novel.

The distinction lies in the question of what counts as public discourse. The beginnings of print culture corresponded with a shift in the meanings of public and private. Broadly speaking, where public had been associated with authority, and private with common individuals, the early modern period began to redefine these terms along gender lines. While the public interest included affairs of state, it also included apparently apolitical issues such as marriage, domestic life, and manners. But increasingly the role of the state was seen as managing public affairs (politics, economics) in order to create a private domestic space in which men and women, as private individuals, were free from such management.[9] Hence, although both sexes consisted of private individuals who, combined, formed a public, the increasingly gendered nature of the economic roles of men and women meant that the public individual was conceived of as a man. Where women, as women, differed from men, their roles were assigned to the private realm.

At the same time, popular publishing became a political arena. In the seventeenth century, the lead up to the English Civil War had been accompanied by an explosion in populist printing: there were two pamphlets published in England in 1640, but 1,996 in 1642.[10] Despite periodic censorship during the rest of the century, political shifts to Commonwealth and then back to monarchy brought about, for the first time, the sense of a politically aware reading public. When Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, his authority was limited by a Parliament newly aware of its own power. This power depended on public opinion in ways that monarchy had not; members of Parliament were elected, and suddenly formal political parties and public debate were an integral part of government. Although the press were (and remain) commonly subjected to criticism, the fact was that "the party system required an active press."[11] Newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides—the periodical ephemera of political news and debate&mdashtherefore created an enduring association between publishing, politics, and the public interest.

Thus, for the first time in history, early eighteenth-century England had an established, permanent reading public. Urbanization and colonial trade were giving rise to a growing middle class. People could purchase inexpensive reading material, there were new coffeehouses where they could pick up a paper or discuss what they read, they had enough leisure to enjoy light reading and enough political and economic power to feel compelled to keep up with foreign and domestic news. The modern public sphere was founded on print publication.

To these new readers of the eighteenth century, the emergence of modern print culture felt as revolutionary and innovative as the shift to online publication and digital technology seems to us. Probably more so: in the twenty-first century, the shift from paper to online publication is primarily a shift in medium and access. But for eighteenth-century readers, the entire concept of publication, reading, and the public sphere were new inventions. Many of the arguments and objections we now hear about the revolutionary nature of blogging—that it shifts political power away from party elites to common people, that it allows almost anyone a public voice, that the proliferation of periodicals/blogs puts good writing on the same level with bad—were made then. In 1711, John Gay complained of "whole Swarms of little . . . Scriblers."[12] In 2006, David Brooks—employing a metaphor from Gay's era, no less—takes issue with "the land of the Lilliputians."[13] Each man represents the less established writers to whom new publishing forms give voice as trivial, small, irritating.

Brooks's criticism of bloggers is incidental to his criticism of Kos (Markos Moulitsas Zúniga) as a new "Kingpin" of "self-importance." In contrast, Gay dismisses the "swarms of scribblers" specifically in order to praise Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's new essay periodical, The Spectator. But both rely on an implicit contrast between named writers (Zúniga, Steele and Addison) and the anonymous horde; the implication is that anonymity or obscurity signifies deficiency.

There's an important difference between Brooks's focus and Gay's, though. Brooks is speaking of political blogs specifically, while Gay refers to essay periodicals, a genre that explicitly disassociated itself from party politics. The first of the type, Steele's Tatler, began by satirizing "politic persons, who are so public spirited as to neglect their own affairs to look into transactions of State" and ended with an apology for "the least excusable Part of all this Work . . . That I have, in some Places in it, touched upon Matters which concern both the Church and State," i.e., "Politicks."[14] In fact, Steele's Tatler was pseudonymously published by "Isaac Bickerstaff," rather than Steele himself, in order to allow him to publish opinions at a remove from his official position as the editor of the government-approved Guardian. Throughout the eighteenth century, essay periodicals lifted themselves above newspapers by claiming a literary status that transcended the merely political and ephemeral; in the twenty-first century, blogs are widely perceived as less reliable or important than newspapers and magazines. (The latter, as it happens, are considered by historians of journalism as the direct descendants of essay periodicals.)

But these two genres—essay periodicals and blogs—do share some important and characteristic formal features. Blogs encourage and publish readers' comments, while essay periodicals, unlike their newspaper contemporaries, solicited and published readers' letters. Both forms also offer, not an official authoritative voice, but an informal and personal one. These attributes are crucially important to arguments that blogs or essay periodicals are inherently democratizing. They lie behind Jürgen Habermas' declaration that it was essay periodicals specifically that "transposed 'public spirit'" into the spirit of the age.[15]

Pseudonymity, or the potential for pseudonymity, underpins both the author/reader dialogue and personal voices that characterize these two genres. Authors and readers of blogs and essay periodicals use pseudonyms as a matter of course. Pseudonymous authorship allowed periodical essayists to blend personal voices with public commentary. To those familiar with eighteenth-century precedents, this is one of the most striking resemblances between periodical essays and today's blogs.

A pseudonymous persona draws attention to the problem of authorship; the absence of a "real" name draws attention to the fact that the text is written by a real, absent person. Hence a pseudonym prevents a text from being impersonal, from pretending to objectivity. At the same time though, by hiding an author's real name, a pseudonym makes a text more fully public. To the eighteenth century, hiding an author's status and political connections placed more weight on readers' judgment of the text itself, without regard to their opinions of the author. For twenty-first century readers, the claim is that "on the internet, no one knows you're a dog," as the cartoon puts it.[16]

Which brings us to the particular problem of gender. It's widely perceived that women bloggers are far more likely to be anonymous.[17] Similarly, the essay periodical canon is traditionally male; it's been argued that the genre created national consensus by creating a typical figure—male, white, and propertied—who represented an imagined national average.[18] Indeed, critics of Habermas's idea of the public sphere have pointed out that his idea of its inclusiveness is deeply flawed in that the public sphere has long excluded women along with ethnic minorities, the uneducated, and other disenfranchised people.[19]

But this argument, like the belief that women don't blog and didn't write essay periodicals, relies in part on a form of erasure. My research in eighteenth-century essay periodicals has convinced me that the genre was, in fact, more democratic, more truly public, than either Habermas' critics or the traditional canon have recognized. In fact, by rejecting overly political content, essay periodicals feminized themselves: Bickerstaff claims to have named his paper The Tatler "in honour of the fair sex,"[20] and Gay praises Steele for rescuing wit "out of the hands of Pedants" and making it "a most welcome guest at Tea-tables."[21] The Tatler's most successful rival was The Female Tatler. There were also The Young Lady, Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator, Frances Brooke's Old Maid—all successful, long-lived titles— as well as many other papers which had the shorter runs that were typical of most essay periodicals.

This brief historical sketch may sound very familiar to blog-savvy readers. The dominance of political blogs looks like the early stages of canon formation: newspapers and news magazines are, of course, most interested in (and threatened by) political and news blogs, so those receive most of the traditional media's attention. But as with the essay periodical, one of blogging's main strengths lies in its ability to be both topical and personal, to address a broader range of experience than that deemed "newsworthy," to bring private experience into public view.

Bloggers have been making these arguments for some time now, but focused study of the genre has only just begun. My personal interest in blogging, along with my academic interest in issues of periodicity, audience, authorship, and genre, have led me to begin looking into the way they resonate in this emerging form. Because blogs are perceived as uniquely democratic—anyone who can write can, theoretically, keep a blog—one of the main questions in blogging is, Who blogs? And on what subjects?

These questions have even been the focus of national legislation: in January, the reauthorized Violence Against Women Act contained a provision making it illegal for someone to use the Internet in order to "annoy" "without disclosing his identity."[22] Bloggers are concerned: does this mean that anonymous or pseudonymous blogging could become illegal?[23] At this moment in history, concerns about security and civil rights coincide with the rise of blogging to make pseudonymity a particularly pressing issue. Given the historical association of pseudonymity with women's writing, I began by asking: Do women, in fact, blog anonymously more often than men?

In order to begin to address this question, I conducted an exploratory survey of both male and female bloggers. I posted two announcements on my own pseudonymous blog: one asked for women, the other for men, willing to answer questions about their blogging. I explained that I was particularly interested in the questions of who blogged under their name and who blogged pseudonymously, and welcomed responses from those who blogged with ungendered or cross-gendered pseudonyms. I e-mailed survey questions to all who requested them. Survey respondents were therefore self-selected from among a broad group of bloggers and blog readers who are largely interested in gender and academia; responses are therefore probably somewhat atypical in having a heightened awareness of gender and self-presentation. Nonetheless, it is a starting place. In fact, given the feminist inclinations of most respondents, I would expect any distinction between men's and women's answers to the survey to be magnified in the general population.

The survey asked respondents whether they were men or women; whether they blogged under a pseudonym; whether this pseudonym was male, female, or gender-neutral; whether their content was masculine, feminine, or neutral (and how this was demonstrated); whether readers had mistaken their gender; and whether readers had criticized their content in specifically gendered terms. I also provided space for respondents to add their own thoughts on gender and pseudonymity. I wanted to find out if there was a marked difference between men's and women's tendency to use pseudonyms, or in their reasons for doing so; if men and women differed in their consciousness of expressing or masking gender in their writing; whether they found that readers were conscious of gender cues in their writing; and if so, whether this consciousness was generally positive or negative.

Eventually, I received over 500 responses to the survey. This article reports the results of the responses that were available at the time I wrote it, twenty-seven of which were from men while 114 were from women. One respondent identified as neither male nor female; this person was in transition between genders. One hundred and five of the 141 respondents used pseudonyms. Seventy-eight percent of the men and 67 percent of the women used pseudonyms. Five women reported using male pseudonyms; no men reported using female pseudonyms. Forty-seven percent of all pseudonymous bloggers reported that their pseudonyms were gender-neutral. Forty-three percent of pseudonymous women and 34 percent of pseudonymous men had ungendered pseudonyms. Most of these reported that they had not deliberately chosen an ungendered pseudonym; however, a few women reported that they had chosen ungendered or male pseudonyms in order to preempt gendered criticism of their writing. No men mentioned this being a concern, although some men did comment that they had occasionally felt their opinions were dismissed or minimized (for example, on feminist issues) because they were men.

The distinction between the gender of respondents' pseudonyms and the gender of their content reflects the fact that, according to the bloggers surveyed, most gender-neutral pseudonyms were chosen accidentally. That is, they realized that their pseudonyms were not clearly gendered, but had not thought about this when they began blogging. Ninety-two percent of pseudonymous women reported that their content was clearly feminine: for instance, they discussed pregnancy, their husbands, their concerns as women in academia, and so on. Only one woman reported deliberately avoiding mentioning anything that could be gendered in order to guard her privacy and ensure that her writing was read without gender bias.

In contrast, only 65 percent of male pseudonymous bloggers thought that their content was explicitly masculine. I have not confirmed whether the 35 percent of pseudonymous men who reported that their content was gender-neutral were accurate in their assessment; one commented that he had never considered whether his gender was reflected in his writing and that therefore he assumed it was neutral, and two men reported neutrality but also said that they mentioned their wives (one resolved this apparent contradiction by explaining that "nowadays, that doesn't necessarily mean anything").

Both men and women reported occasionally having readers mistake their gender. Men and women alike reported that a minority of these mistakes were offensive, although more women than men found their gender being used to cast aspersions on their content. One man reported having his opinions dismissed as "typically male"; fifteen women reported having their writing criticized in gendered terms.

There were a number of similarities and a few potentially significant differences between men's and women's explanations of their choices to blog pseudonymously. Both men and women used pseudonyms to protect their jobs from possible employer disapproval of their blogging. However, both men and women also explicitly reported using their real names because they wanted their blogging to be professionally advantageous. Men were far more likely than women to report that they viewed blogging as a form of professional advertising, though these men also said that they guarded their family's privacy by minimizing personal content. A number of women reported the opposite decision: they blogged pseudonymously so that they could talk about personal experiences of work or domestic life while maintaining their privacy. This survey, then, suggests that the association of men with the public world and women with the private world is reflected, to some extent, in bloggers' choice of topics, and that the latter—rather than diffidence about the public nature of blogging—drives some women's choices to use aliases.

This choice, however, is mutable. Two of the women who blogged pseudonymously said that they had deliberately chosen to break their pseudonymity in order to claim the blog as a professional asset; in other words, they did not initially plan to use blogging as a career benefit. No men indicated that their awareness of blogging as a potential career benefit had developed over time.

It seems important to call attention to the specific advantage of periodicity in this regard: because blogs are published at intervals over time, bloggers' conceptions of the purpose and audience of their blogs is subject to change, and this change in turn may affect their self-presentation and content. The mechanisms of these changes are beyond the scope of this study, but the effect of blogs' temporal nature on readers, authors, and content surely bears further examination.

The most striking distinctions between men and women bloggers were in their reported awareness of gender as it affected content and in their reasons for using pseudonyms. A much larger percentage of women than of men explicitly recognize the ways that their content was gendered; even women who saw their blogs primarily as professional, rather than personal, reported that they occasionally addressed specific gender issues on their blogs. Most interesting to me, two men who used pseudonyms reported doing so as a kind of game, because they found it amusing to experiment with a persona. In contrast, most women who said that they enjoyed creating their pseudonymous characters explicitly said that this enjoyment was a post facto realization. Although both men and women said they used pseudonyms to avoid being identified by their employers, many women simply explained pseudonymity as the result of fear, not of professional repercussions, but for their or their children's physical safety. Five women reported having been "threatened" online before taking up blogging.[24] One man who did express anxiety about putting his or his family's real names on the Internet explicitly noted that his wife was more afraid of it than he was.

Perhaps as a corollary to their fear of being personally harassed, a number of women reported that being pseudonymous allowed them to be more honest, more confident, and more assertive writers. Women were particularly likely to articulate the ways that blogging functioned as a process of discovery (including, as mentioned above, the discovery of the advantages of using their real names). My sense of survey respondents' comments is that bloggers, like eighteenth-century periodical essayists, begin with pseudonyms because of perceived material dangers to their livelihoods or, particularly for women, their persons. Unlike periodical essayists, however, modern women bloggers report no concern about the personal effects of publishing in and of itself. In fact, several pseudonymous bloggers said that they wished they could "claim" their writing, and that this desire made them feel ambivalent about their anonymity.

Despite surface similarities, then, the experiences and intentions of anonymous women bloggers do not seem to be the same as those attributed to anonymous women writers from previous eras. This distinction may indicate a revision of our understanding of previous generations of women who, being no longer available to report their intentions and self-perceptions as writers, have to rely on scholars' interpretations of circum-stantial evidence for our understanding of their experiences. For contemporary scholars of blogging, it suggests that the "where-are-the-women" question must be understood in a historically specific light. While the very thing that allows some women to be more confident writers—pseudonymity—also makes it easier for careless or casual readers to overlook their presence as women, we also have a unique opportunity to study how that seeming disadvantage may actually contribute to women's decisions to write and to their development as writers. Historically, pseudonymity rendered eighteenth-century women essayists invisible, but while it may seem to do the same for women bloggers, their own words intimate a new appreciation of the ways that in fact it brings them into the open.

Endnotes

1. Kevin Drum, "Women's Opinions," posted to Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, February 20, 2005, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
archives/individual/2005_02/005691.php. [Return to text]

2. Steven Levy, "Blogging Beyond the Men's Club," Newsweek, March 21, 2006, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/
id/7160264/site/newsweek/. [Return to text]

3. Maureen Dowd, "Dish It Out, Ladies," The New York Times, March 13, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/
2005/03/13/opinion/
13dowd.html?ex=1268456400&en= f2460981091aa10e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland. [Return to text]

4. David Hochman, "Mommy (and Me)," The New York Times, January 30, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/
fashion/30moms.html?ex=
1264741200&en=635d616a9c739515&ei=
5090&partner=rssuserland. [Return to text]

5. CNN.com, "Pundits and Knitters Find Common Ground in Weblogs," November 3, 2005, http://edition.cnn.com/
2005/TECH/internet/08/10/mena.trott/. [Return to text]

6. Deborah Fallows, "How Women and Men Use the Internet," Pew Internet and American Life Project, December 28, 2005, http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Women_and_Men_online.pdf; Susan C. Herring et al., "Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs," in Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community and Culture of Weblogs, ed. L. Gurak et al. (University of Minnesota: 2004), http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/women_and_children.html. [Return to text]

7. Scott Eric Kaufman, "A Post in Two Parts," posted to Acephalous, February 12, 2006, http://acephalous.typepad.com/
acephalous/2006/02/a_post_in_two_p.html. [Return to text]

8. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 23. [Return to text]

9. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). [Return to text]

10. Asa Briggs, A Social History of England, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1999), 146. [Return to text]

11. Richmond P. Bond, Studies in the Early English Periodical (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), 9. [Return to text]

12. John Gay, "The Present State of Wit (1711)," in Essays on Wit, facsimile of the original edition with an introduction by Donald F. Bond (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society). [Return to text]

13. David Brooks, "Respect Must Be Paid," The New York Times, June 25, 2006, http://select.nytimes.com/
2006/06/25/opinion/25brooks.html. [Return to text]

14. Richard Steele, The Tatler, 1709-1711, 3 vols., ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). [Return to text]

15. Habermas, 93. [Return to text]

16. Peter Steiner, cartoon in The New Yorker, July 5, 1993, 61. [Return to text]

17. The following list of posts is just a sample: Academics Anonymous, Against My Better Judgment, Anonymous Female Academic Blogging: A Parallel Blogosphere?, On the Internet, No One Knows You're a Dog, Women Bloggers (And Other Quiet People) [available by password only]. There's even a blog with the title Anonymous is a Woman. [Return to text]

18. Shaun Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). [Return to text]

19. Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). [Return to text]

20. Steele, 17. [Return to text]

21. Gay, "The Present State of Wit." [Return to text]

22. Declan McCullagh, "Create an E-Annoyance, Go to Jail," CNet News, January 11, 2006, http://news.com.com/
2102-1028_3-6022491.html?tag=st.util.print. [Return to text]

23. John Holbo, "Blogging and the Law," posted to Crooked Timber, January 10, 2006, http://crookedtimber.org/2006/01/10/blogging-and-the-law/. [Return to text]

24. There have been a number of studies showing that women are very likely to be harassed or threatened online. Robert Meyer and Michel Cukier report that women are 25 percent more likely to be harassed online than men ("Assessing the Attack Threat Due to IRC Channels" [University of Maryland: 2006], http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf). [Return to text]