Let's Talk with Debra H. Goldstein
Sadie Hawkins Day and Parity in the Mystery World
November 13, 2025
Today is Sadie Hawkins Day! This holiday was originally a fictional creation of cartoonist Al Capp (Alfred Gerald Caplin) in his Li’l Abner comic strip. In the cartoon, Hekzebiah Hawkins, afraid his daughter will never land a husband, declares a Sadie Hawkins Day during which she can break the societal norm that a man chases a woman. Under his rules of Sadie Hawkins day, no bachelor in Dogpatch was safe from being pursued (and caught) by Sadie.
The public embraced Capp’s concept through their own invention of Sadie Hawkins days and dances which permitted women be the one asking a man to the dance or popping the even bigger question of marriage. Not only was this fun, but it permitted a woman to be socially aggressive without being labeled as a fallen woman.
In 1987, a small group of women which included Sara Paretsky, Margaret Maron, Nancy Pickard and Sandra Scoppottone, met in New York to create an organization (Sisters in Crime-SinC) that would seek parity for women writers. At that meeting, they discussed the fact that the influential New York Times Book Review was seven times more likely to review a work written by a man than by a woman. The group drafted and sent a letter to the New York Times Book Review stating this fact. Although the letter was never directly acknowledged, the number of reviews of books by women increased.
The outgrowth of this also was the simultaneous establishment by SinC of the Monitoring Project which sought parity for woman writers by annually tracking, compiling, and publishing how women writers were being reviewed in national and regional newspapers, trade publications, and genre-specific magazines. In 2021, to go beyond the binary limitations of the Monitoring Project, SinC began releasing the Business of Books Survey, too.
As much as Capp’s Sadie Hawkins Day gave the public a new way of looking at relationships, Sisters in Crime provided the same thing for the mystery writing world. How has the premise established by Sadie Hawkins Day influenced you or your career?
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Posted in with Debra H. Goldstein • Tags: Debra H Goldstein, Let's Talk, Sadie Hawkins and Parity in the Mystery World | 6 Comments
That’s very interesting – I had never known that. Thank you for sharing! ❤️
My pleasure
Unfortunately, Sadie Hawkins Day didn’t help me at all when I graduated college and was looking for my first job–or subsequent jobs. Many of the interviewers weren’t interested in hiring me, no matter how qualified I was because they assumed I’d quit once I got pregnant! It wasn’t even subtle. Quite a few came right out and said it! I also found that when I was hired, there was no parity in pay between men and women doing the same job. Sadly, that’s still the case in many industries, even decades later, where women are routinely paid less than their male counterparts.
I understand … and had some of the same experiences in the legal field. A few turned out to be comical and in hindsight make for a good story, but they weren’t so funny then.
Interesting to know the history behind The Sadie Hawkins day. It didn’t really make any difference in my choice of a career. I worked in the transportation industry and we were members of the Teamsters Union, so the women made as much as the men .
You were lucky. In so many fields, that wasn’t the case.