What Makes a Story "Big" or "Small"?

There are few ways to see the fundamental sexism of American culture as clearly as by observing what stories many people consider “big” and “small.”

This week my historical novel, Lilli de Jong, comes out in paperback. The novel brings forward the history of girls and women forced by prejudice to give up their “bastard” babies. Being forcibly separated from one's offspring is a fundamental human tragedy. We see this lately through immigrants whose children have been ripped away, and through parents whose children have been killed by guns. When will the culture at large to consider the bonds between parents and children a big story?

In 1883 Philadelphia, Lilli, a Quaker schoolteacher, realizes she’s pregnant after her lover has left for Pittsburgh. Expelled from home, she gives birth at an institution, planning to return home without her baby. Most unwed girls and women gave up their newborns then—and many still do—due to the consequences, which could include permanent expulsion from home, rejection from most forms of employment, and exploitation due to their desperation. But Lilli decides to keep her helpless newborn. Motherhood can be a radicalizing experience, especially if society pits itself against your ability to provide for your child and arrays its forces against your and your child’s well-being. Lilli de Jong is transformed by her experiences of motherhood amid fierce prejudice into a powerful voice and presence.

Recently I spoke with an expert who talks all day with a wide range of Hollywood producers, trying to sell stories to them. This person told me that I needed to understand that Lilli’s is “a small story.” Hollywood, she said, wants “big stories."

"So what's a big story?” I asked facetiously. “One with bombs and war?"

The answer was an unfacetious yes. Politics, too, are big, she said. In essence, whatever occurs in arenas long hostile to women. Welcome to the same mentality that keeps women out of most accounts of history, the same mentality that decides what stories go in the front sections of major newspapers, the same mentality that determines our government’s long-standing priorities, which rarely include addressing the common needs of women and children.

I wasn’t truly surprised to learn that some Hollywood producers think this way; I’ve been alive a while. But in recent years I’ve seen some extraordinary and successful movies that didn’t match those criteria, including Philomena (2013), Room (2015), Hidden Figures (2016), and Lady Bird (2017). I’ve watched episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale and Call the Midwife. I’d heard that Hollywood is opening up to women’s stories.

Apparently, not so much.

The reason these “big” stories are so sought after, I was told, is that they often earn many times more than the money it costs to make them. Yet there’s always a self-perpetuating logic to such a paradigm. In every business, expectations drive resource allocation. If the same money and time go into promoting "small" stories as “big,” “small” stories will be far more likely to earn scads of money.

I tried to explain why I don't consider Lilli’s story small and that all stories are, really, a small story within a larger context. Even a war movie features a small number of characters against a big backdrop. What’s small about the fact that, for much of U. S. history, the infants of unwed mothers usually died due to being separated from their mothers by social prejudice? Whether left at foundling hospitals or orphanages or on the street, they died of malnutrition, disease, dehydration, and/or neglect. This occurred in America on a huge scale, and untold numbers of times worldwide. The recent unveiling of underground recesses containing the bones of nearly 800 children at a single institution in Ireland where unwed mothers were forcibly confined is a fresh reminder of the little value placed on the lives of “bastards.”

It seemed my words were coated in the aural equivalent of invisible ink. "That’s all really sad,” the expert said kindly. “But why should we care about it now?"

Why should we care about the history of widespread prejudice against any group? Doesn’t such a history always resonate?

I continued swimming against the tide. Readers and reviewers have brought up the story’s relevance today, I said. Single mothers still suffer prejudice, unequal wages, and many other barriers to providing food, clothing, shelter, and care for themselves and their children. Women’s access to birth control and abortion is never safe. Most American mothers and fathers get no paid leave when they have a newborn, and those who do get barely any. Working full time and having even a perfectly healthy baby is a very hard combination. If that baby becomes ill or has greater needs than average, it can be excruciating. And, as journalist and book author Kathryn Joyce has powerfully revealed, unmarried women are still being coerced into giving up their newborns, sometimes at federally supported crisis pregnancy centers.

I’ve been indoctrinated as much as the next person into a particular way of thinking about who and what matters. I know that “small” stories are domestic, interior, affecting a small number of characters, focused on intimate relationships, usually involving women, while “big” stories are exterior, focused on what we call action, often involving arenas of power outside the home, with more characters overall, predominantly male. I know this mentality well not only from a lifetime’s cultural exposure, but also from working as the only woman on a team writing historical documentaries. The absence of women’s stories was largely excused by the idea that the spheres of life in which women have usually been the primary actors are not important.

If history focuses on political and other arenas that purposely excluded most women, and is unwilling to explain and explore this exclusion, women will be largely left out. Even when women were active and effective in the political sphere, I was told repeatedly as I offered possible subjects that there was room for only one featured woman per episode.

There’s much that must be rendered invisible to make sure our past stories support men’s unequal advantages today. Largely excluded are those spheres that take up all humans’ time yet are identified chiefly with women: the spheres of children, marriage, family relationships, reproduction, friendships, food, clothing, and shelter. No doubt there are others. When most of human life is left out of stories of past and present, we perpetuate the unfair advantages of those whose stories are legion. The consequences of this bias are dire. They dictate how our society accords power and resources. They perpetuate the idea that what women do and have done is insignificant.

In “The Women of Hollywood Speak Out” (New York Times Magazine, Nov. 20, 2015), Maureen Dowd shares testimony and numerical evidence showing women’s exclusion from access to top storytelling resources in our most influential story-making industry. “Hollywood’s toxic brew of fear and sexism,” Dowd notes, renders women even more under-represented than we are in two other notoriously anti-woman bastions, Silicon Valley and the federal government.

“Excluding their art-house divisions, the six major studios released only three movies last year [2014] with a female director.” “[I]n 2014, 95 percent of cinematographers, 89 percent of screenwriters, 82 percent of editors, 81 percent of executive producers, and 77 percent of producers were men.” In the years 2007 to 2014, only 30.2 percent of “speaking or named” roles were female in the 100 top-grossing fictional films. In her May 2018 Atlantic article, Ruth Franklin writes pithily, “In the end, the question of who gets to speak comes down to who has power and what must be done to maintain it . . .”

There’s been no upswing since then. Per TheWrap, in 2018, “only 3.3 percent of the films scheduled for release this year by the six major Hollywood studios have a female director—the lowest percentage in at least five years. Worse yet, fully half of the majors—Paramount, Sony and Warner Bros.—have only men directing all of their 2018 releases.”

Dowd quotes successful women who are quite aware they’re swimming in polluted water. Said Jessica Elbaum, head of production at Gloria Sanchez Productions, “I think there’s a fear that females can only tell female stories, like if they’re given free rein they’ll just write stories where everyone’s braiding each other’s hair and crying.” Said director Shira Piven, “I feel that there is something going on underneath all of this, which is the idea that women aren’t quite as interesting as men. That men have heroic lives, do heroic things . . . and that women have a certain set of rooms that they have to operate in.”

This notion of women as homebound is a fantasy, not factual, allowed to persist because our forebears’ achievements outside the home are largely left out of history—and of our current news. Even so, I’d be overjoyed to see more movies as nuanced and rich as women’s hair-braiding and crying allows. I’d take a few decades dominated by hair-braiding movies to balance out the years dominated by “big” stories that devolve into simplistic, adrenaline-pumping, us-versus-them battles with lots of gore, a clear winner (the “good guys”), and no lasting trauma. These are not the stories we need today.

Women love and belong in “big,” “action” movies. But let’s not stick women into situations and roles created for men, with superficial modifications. (I haven’t seen anyone skewer these more directly than Michele Wolf.) Even Wonder Woman, gratifying as it was for some women to watch, didn’t pass the Bechdel test, named after Alison Bechdel, who suggested that we observe whether a movie gives female characters the chance to talk with one another about a topic other than the male characters.

Equal access to storytelling resources and promotion—even access to equal dialogue onscreen—seems like a pipe dream. Writes Dowd, “Female writers in Hollywood told me they are used to hearing things like, ‘Can you insert a rape scene here?’ or ‘Can they go to a strip club here?’”

Lest you think the book industry is without its gender problems, consider an analysis of more than a hundred thousand bestselling novels, reported in “Women Were Better Represented in Victorian Novels Than Modern Ones.” Between about 1800 and the 1970s, the researchers saw a “steady decline” in women authors—from about 50 percent to under 25 percent. The number of named women characters also declined. Fortunately, the numbers began moving up slowly a few decades later.

Then there are the facts gathered by VIDA, most recently for 2016. VIDA studies gender representation in the “top-tier journals, publications, and press outlets by which the literary community defines and rewards its most valued arts workers.” The data reveal significant and ongoing inequality—implicit bias.

Surveys of reading habits reveal a few salient things. One: American women read more fiction than men. Small wonder! In fictional worlds, particularly in fiction by women, we are more likely to find our lives given sufficient weight and depth. Historical fiction can answer the need for this experience nicely; it brings the overlooked to light. In such books, women have a place in the historical record, if only in our imaginations. Two: The majority of men don’t read books by women. Why is this? Perhaps it would be too disorienting to discover how much women mean to ourselves, and to find out you’re not the main characters in every plot.

I’m not saying there’s no meaning to the concept of big and small stories. Some stories are bigger in scope, in numbers of people affected, in scale of relevance beyond their particular characters. But this concept is difficult to apply, as any powerful situation facing humans echoes widely, and there are many stories written by men that are adapted for screen without meeting this metric. The issue is whether those affected are considered “important.” The values that inform notions of big and small make the terms into a code for “these people matter, and those people don’t.” Evidence to the contrary is dismissed. As TV producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes told Dowd, “[E]veryone has amnesia all the time. Every time a female-driven project is made and succeeds, somehow it’s a fluke.”

Is The Diary of Anne Frank a big story? A small one? What about The Color Purple by Alice Walker? Both are intimate and huge. This doubleness is one reason for the heartbreaking, mind-altering, long-lasting power of these works. Arguably, all of our culture’s most transformative art has this quality.

My novel Lilli de Jong begins with a woman who has a baby inside her. This is where every human life begins. With the bond or lack of a bond that begins at birth, an infant's life is set on its path. And in forging that bond, a mother opens her life to take on the life of another, not knowing what may come. This happens millions of times a year around the globe. Making these stories “small” enables the hatred of women we see today at a scale many can no longer consider insignificant.

For instance, consider this testimony by Angelica Rebecca Gonzalez-Garcia, who was apprehended by Border Patrol agents in May with her seven-year-old daughter. She reported that the officers were about to forcibly separate them and told her she would never see her daughter again. “I cannot express the pain and fear I felt at that point,” she wrote. “One of the officers asked me, ‘In Guatemala do they celebrate Mother’s Day?’ When I answered yes he said, ‘Then Happy Mother’s Day’ because the next Sunday was Mother’s Day. I lowered my head so that my daughter would not see the tears forming in my eyes. That particular act of cruelty astonished me then as it does now. I could not understand why they hated me so much, or wanted to hurt me so much.”

Stories tell us who we are. Those with women—including mothers—at their centers have always been at least as enormous as any others, and they need to be recognized as such.