Why Women Dominate Cozies
Why are cozies dominated by women? The vast majority of cozy mystery readers and writers are women, perhaps more so than any other subgenre in fiction.
In our database we have more than 2,000 cozy mystery authors. Less than ten percent of those authors are men. We have more authors who use just their initials than are identifiable as men.
Is that gender imbalance reasonable? It’s not a bad thing, it’s just curious to see how imbalanced it is. To figure out why, we have to take a look at history.
Women and policing
In the early days of policing—say, the 1800s—men dominated the field, as they did in so many other professions.
The first police forces were all men. The first private detectives were all men. Men went out and did the work while women stayed safely at home.
This is all baloney, of course.
Women were forced into lesser roles by the systems of the time, even though they are just as capable as men. If women attempted to join the police they were ridiculed or patronized. As private detectives they fared little better.
The first female private detective was probably Kate Warne, who became a member of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1856. The first female police officer in the United States was Lola Baldwin in 1908. In both cases women in the United Kingdom seem to have followed a few years later, but women were not widely seen in the role in either country until after the Second World War.
Women and detective novels
Mystery novels first appeared with Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841. For the next few decades they grew rapidly in popularity, leading up to Sherlock Holmes in 1887. Both male and female writers excelled in the genre, but they mostly wrote about male detectives because that’s mostly what they saw in real life.
A list of female detective characters on Wikipedia shows very few women before 1900, and at least some of those were written by modern writers. Actual authors of the time, writing about women detectives of the time, are few and far between.
Again, the reason is obvious: representation. If you don’t see people in a role, you don’t think of them in that role when you’re creating characters. Alternatively, if you do create such a character, people find the possibility too fantastic to believe and your stories quickly disappear.
The changing style
It took, of course, Agatha Christie to change the system.
She can’t take all the credit, but Agatha was perhaps the most famous author to put women into prominent detecting roles, particularly with Miss Marple.
When creating stories, female authors like Agatha Christie wanted to write about female detectives. They couldn’t reasonably write about female police officers, because they were virtually non-existent. They couldn’t write about female private detectives, because they either didn’t exist, or worse, they were only able to take on the smallest of cases, not the juicy murders Christie wanted to write about.
So she created her own: Miss Marple. Not police, not a detective, just a little old lady who knew a lot about people. The perfect amateur sleuth, as she came to be known.
The amateur sleuth became widespread in fiction after being popularized by Agatha Christie and similar authors. They also had the unfortunate effect of polarizing the genre.
In came women
Plenty of male authors were writing about the hard-boiled private dicks, or the rough noir cops, but they hardly ever mentioned women. The only women in their stories were the dames who needed rescuing by the heroic man.
This left the amateur field wide open, and it was filled by women authors, and those authors wrote about women characters.
By the time the 1980s and 1990s came around, women authors were writing about women amateur detectives, and women readers were devouring their stories. Few men were interested in reading or writing these books, and in fact they derided the genre for many years.
On the other side, some women authors made inroads into the male-dominated police and detective stories. Interestingly, some women authors began writing about women in the police force, and their stories became very popular. Today we can see an almost even split between men and women in both the writing and reading of the wider mystery genres, as well as strong representation among women in television detective roles.
But cozies remain the province of women.
The Modern Cozy Fan
In part marketing causes this gender split. Men are told to be rough and tough, and their reading choices reflect that. They look for spies like Bond, or more recently the likes of Jack Reacher. The kind of books which make great action movies.
When men walk into the mystery section, they may be turned away by the style of covers the publishing industry has chosen for cozy mysteries. Women are perhaps not as afraid to try new things and embrace all forms of mystery.
In many ways this can be seen as a celebration of women.
Too many things these days are marketed to men, and women are brought on as an afterthought, if at all. The rare industry which is for women tends to repel men. This attitude is changing and has made great strides in the last decade or two, but it still needs to go further.
We would love to see more men reading and writing cozy mysteries. We would love for publishers to be much more inclusive. They don’t even have to change anything to include men. It just takes getting books in their hands, and every woman can help with that.
A wider market can only be helpful to every reader and writer of cozy mysteries. The bigger the genre grows, the more money will be in it, and that will attract even more people to read and write cozy mysteries.
Do you have anything to say about this article? Agree or disagree with what we have to say? Let us know in the comments below.
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Chengzhou· Reply
Nice to meet you!
I am a Mystery lover from China. I have been reading Cozies these days(I just finished reading Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club!), and I find your website very helpful and your articles quite insightful.
There several websites about Mysteries in China founded by Mystery fans. I hope to translate this article into Chinese and share with other book lovers. Of course, I will indicate the author and source and it will not be used for commercial purposes.
I hope I can get your permission, and if possibly I would like to know the name or pen name of the author of this article. Thank you!
Best wishes!Yours,
Chengzhou
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