Adam Weinstein

At the New Yorker, women write less than 29 percent of the articles. VIDA

Update: MoJo's editors discuss the controversy with ASME chief Sid Holt.

They called it the Count, and the concept was simple: Tally up how many women get published in some of the world's top literary magazines and journals, compare it with the number of men gracing those pages, and slap the results into a pie chart. Red for men, blue for women. The result was a lot of big red pie slices. First published in 2011, they conveyed a clear fact: From Harpers to The New Yorker to The Atlantic, it's still very much a man's world. Roughly 65 to 75 percent of the space in the prestigious magazines went to male writers.

The Count is the brainchild of two accomplished poets, Cate Marvin and Erin Belieu. In 2009, the duo founded VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, a nonprofit that acts as part online community, part advocate and agitator for women of letters. The idea, Belieu says, came in a "moment of loathing and terror and revolutionary spark."

They intended the Count to be a conversation starter, and it certainly has been: After they published the first round, some major magazine editors slammed the numbers as unscientific or meaningless by themselves. Others took them to heart and vowed to work harder for parity. "We've got to do better," New Yorker editor David Remnick said of his magazine's results. The conversation heated up again this February, after the second tally was published. (Turns out that Mother Jones has done better: We weren't included in the VIDA tallies, but we surveyed our own print pages and found just as many women as men contributing to them.)

Half of MoJo's bylines are women's. Chart: Samantha Oltman

And now the problem has once again reared its head: On Tuesday, when the 2012 National Magazine Award finalists were announced, exactly zero women were nominated in the big brass-ring categories—reporting, features, profiles, essays, and columns. (Some women did get nominations in other categories, most encouragingly two nods in public interest journalism, although more typically for pieces about breast cancer economics and "mommy tucks.") "The National Magazine Awards have sent a pretty clear message," Belieu says. "When it comes to a career in journalism, chicks should stick to writing about chicks."

Mother Jones picked Belieu's brain at a steamy outdoor bar in north Florida. She's enjoyed some successes in the literary world: A celebrated poet who's worked with Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, and Adrienne Rich, she currently teaches creative writing at Florida State University. She also raises a son—and works at expanding VIDA's reach in whatever remaining time she has.

Mother Jones: What was your reaction to Tuesday's National Magazine Award nominations?

Erin Belieu Courtesy photoErin Belieu: Not to denigrate the genuine accomplishments of the small number of women who were nominated, but it's interesting that they're acknowledged for what Ann Friedman identifies as "service" writing—the vast majority of their nominated articles concerning "women's issues"—on breast cancer, under-aged brides, women's body image. These are all worthy subjects and the nominations are well deserved, but it does beg the question: Do women journalists only want to write about "women's issues"? Or is that the only thing for which they're commonly rewarded? Why is it that the nominated men wrote about such a variety of topics that don't seem to be strictly defined by the equipment they sport from the waist down?

A friend of mine defines this kind of intellectual segregation as the "tits and nether bits" ghetto, a place in which women only speak to other women. Meantime, men are allowed and encouraged to speak to whomever they want. These issues and questions are ones we at VIDA hope editors may think through in the future when assigning articles to reporters. And we also want to give women writers the confidence to say, "Hey, I can write about whatever I want. I have authority. I have expertise. I have a unique perspective as a person, first and foremost."

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Kathleen Flynn/Tampa Bay Times/ZUMA Press

In some sense, it's history you could recount from many places in America: It could be Miami, where Trayvon Martin came up, and where rioters scorched the streets in the 1980s over black motorists killed by police. It could be Prince Edward County, Virginia, near where George Zimmerman grew up, and where the county board of supervisors once abolished public education rather than comply with integration. Or it could be southern Wisconsin, where not long ago a noose and racial threats turned up on a college campus, and where earlier this month another gun owner killed a black man allegedly in self-defense.

But when it comes to a history of fear, racism, and violence, Sanford, Florida, has a particularly fraught past, one that traces right up to the night a month ago when an unarmed black kid was shot dead on one of its streets, and his killer went free.

Long before the live oaks and Spanish moss gave way to interstate highways and box stores, Sanford began as a citrus town in the 1870s, conceived by a New England tycoon. Henry Shelton Sanford, who had ingratiated himself to Abraham Lincoln and served as Lincoln's ambassador to Belgium for eight years, had the town built by Swedish laborers. Though the citrus empire he dreamed of didn't exactly flourish, Sanford proved instrumental to promoting trade with the Belgian-controlled territory of Congo—which included his vision of promoting Congo as a place to ship America's freed blacks. The African locale, he said, represented an outlet "for the enterprise and ambition of our colored people in more congenial fields than politics." A Congo peopled with African Americans could be "the ground to draw the gathering electricity from that black cloud spreading over the Southern states."

The back-to-Congo movement never took off, but Sanford's Florida hamlet did. In 1911, it absorbed the town of Goldsborough, an autonomous black community. The merger was hostile, according to local historian Francis Oliver. "[Sanford] never paid restitution to the people who lost their jobs and asked for money because they...no longer [had] jobs," she said. "The mayor didn't have a job, City Council people didn't have a job, the postmistress didn't have a job, the jailers didn't have a job, the marshal didn't have a job."

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