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I’ll say it up front: I despise the term “chick lit.”

Let me also admit that I steadfastly avoid the kinds of books I think of as belonging to this category: the designer-name-dropping, upscale-housing-trendy, single-female-on-a-shopping-and/or-sex-spree-but-longing-for-mister-right books.

But I’ve seen plenty of well-written, nuanced books tagged with the term, and it seemed to me that these books were only called “chick lit” because the main character(s) and/or the author are female. If characters of the same depth and writing of the same caliber came from a man, it would be “mainstream” or “literary” fiction. Elaine Schowalter touches on this dichotomy in this interview with Sarah Nelson from BookTV (sorry, embedding has been disabled).

Every time I consider this question, I think of an interview I did with author Shauna Singh Baldwin. (It appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle.) She talked a bit about the “masculine” or hero’s journey, and said she considered “chick lit” the masculine/hero journey performed by a woman. Here’s her take on what she calls the “feminine journey”:

What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to try to be an individual with all the pressure surrounding you today that tell you to conform to whatever group it is that wants you to behave a certain way, dress a certain way, talk a certain way, get married, produce children, raise them in this particular fashion with that particular way of doing things, have them spout this ideology or that way of thinking. How does a woman keep her individuality within all of that? That is the feminine journey, not Persephone, Demeter, Sitha or any other old mythology that we might be referring back to. I think it’s time we took a look at the modern myths that shape us, and the modern kind of messages that women have to overcome.

In so many cases, I think that we’re recovering ourselves as we were at 11. At least I am, in the sense of losing that confidence and losing then because everybody around you says you can’t or you won’t or we won’t let you, you know, self-actualize to that extent. You have to be caring, nurturing, wonderful person, perfect in all regards, and this is what eventually you have to resist …. that journey is also a very, very old journey.

Is what Singh Baldwin calls the feminine journey for a female-only audience? I doubt the writers who set characters on such a journey think so. What about publishers? What about booksellers? Why will girls read Harry Potter books but boys reject the Twilight saga? Does a genre specifically labelled as female (chick lit) create a ghetto? Or a helpful category? Or both?

If Jane Austen were writing today, would her work be considered “chick lit”?