A good female friend of mine and I had lunch recently, and she told me about an experience that bothered her. For nearly two years, she had run a monthly fiction meeting for a writing organization. She organized it, facilitated discussions, helped create community, and gave her time freely because she cared about writers and literature. She worked two years for this organization. Then life became more complicated, and she had to step away.
When she left, not one person thanked her. Not one person acknowledged the hours she had contributed or the emotional energy required to keep something like that running month after month. And when she later mentioned feeling hurt by that, a member of the board responded, “You seem to expect too much of people.”
What struck me wasn’t just the lack of gratitude. It was what sat underneath the comment: the assumption that this kind of labor should simply be given. That she should not have expected acknowledgment or gratitude for the countless hours she had contributed.
Women are often expected to do this kind of work.
We organize communities. We support people emotionally. We mentor emerging writers. We edit. We encourage. We host events. We smooth over conflicts. We create spaces where literary communities can function. Much of this work is invisible, and almost all of it is unpaid.
And when women want compensation or even recognition for that labor, people often react with discomfort or hostility. A recent Substack writer, Joy Sullivan (Necessary Salt) wrote openly about wanting to earn $60,000 a year from her writing. The backlash was immediate. People accused her of “selling out.” Someone even wrote, “HAS THIS ACCOUNT BEEN HACKED?”
Think about that for a moment. A woman says she wants to make a living from her writing, and people respond as though she has violated some moral code.
Meanwhile, male writers regularly discuss money publicly—book deals, subscription numbers, speaking fees, six-figure incomes—and they are often admired. One recent male author on Substack talked about how he makes 70K a month, and there were no negative comments. Not one. His ambition is applauded. Women’s ambition, especially around money, is more likely to be interpreted as greed, vanity, or inauthenticity.
Why?
Why are we uncomfortable with women wanting financial power? Why is it more acceptable for women to sacrifice themselves for literary communities than to benefit from them financially?
As an editor, I see another version of this dynamic constantly.
Writers resist paying submission fees because they have already invested enormous time and emotional energy into creating their work. They don’t believe they should have to pay someone to read it. And, understandably, they want to be paid for their writing. I agree that writers deserve compensation for their writing. And at Chicago Story Press, we pay the writers we publish.
But literary magazines also require labor. Someone has to sort through hundreds or thousands of submissions. Someone has to read them carefully. Someone has to correspond with writers, manage platforms, build websites, promote issues, edit work, and keep the entire thing functioning. Most literary magazines barely survive financially. Many are held together by unpaid labor, and much of that kind of community and editorial labor is done by women.
What troubles me is the disconnect: writers want to be paid for their work, yet many are unwilling to help support the literary journals that rely on unpaid labor to exist.
It’s not just literary communities that expect women to work for free. According to the Gender Equity Policy Institute, women spend roughly twice as much time as men on unpaid childcare and household labor, leaving them with significantly less free time. Those expectations also extend into the workplace. The World Economic Forum summarizes multiple studies showing that women are expected to take on the emotional/social labor that keeps organizations functioning—planning events, mentoring coworkers, organizing service projects, smoothing over conflicts, and building community. Sadly, this type of work is least likely to lead to promotions or power.
I have no problem with volunteering. I’ve donated thousands and thousands of hours to literary and community organizations over the years because I care about them deeply. And I do not make any income from the literary journal that I run.
My problem is that much of women’s unpaid labor has become expected rather than appreciated. I worry that creative communities have quietly come to rely on women exhausting themselves emotionally and financially while treating acknowledgment, support, or compensation as somehow excessive—or worse, unrealistic.
Money matters in our society. It buys time, opportunity, access, visibility, and influence. When women are consistently expected to give away their labor, they end up with less power and less financial stability. And the reality is that everyone needs money to live. We cannot continue expecting one gender to have less of it than the other. The last time I checked, my grocery store accepted only currency. They don’t care about my volunteer work.
We wonder why women feel resentful, exhausted, or invisible in creative communities. Maybe part of the answer is simple: people cannot continue giving endlessly while being told they should expect nothing in return.
And perhaps it’s time for literary communities to ask themselves a harder question: Why are we so comfortable benefiting from women’s labor while simultaneously feeling uncomfortable when women want recognition or compensation?
Sources
Gender Equity Policy Institute (2024). The Free-Time Gender Gap: How Unpaid Care and Household Labor Reinforces Women’s Inequality. https://thegepi.org/GEPI-Free-Time-Gender-Gap-Report.pdf
Morgan, K. (2024). ‘The extra shift’: The unpaid emotional labour expected of women at work. BBC.com. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240313-invisible-emotional-labour-women-in-workplace
Masterson, K. (2021). Women are burning out doing invisible ‘office housework.’ World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/11/women-workplace-2021-invisible-labour/
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