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Hadley Freeman is always right. But sometimes she's extra-right, as with her column on the pressure on female writers to get personal. It's a variation of a point others (myself included) have long been making, but Freeman nails it:

The book publishing world has, for some time now, become wholly memoir-ified. Nothing gets a publisher’s chequebook out faster than a memoir, to the point that nonfiction books that are ostensibly about a specific subject (butchery, say, or George Eliot) are now styled and sold as memoirs (respectively Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession by Julie Powell; and The Road to Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead.) Everything must be seen through the personal lens, the theory goes, and a personal story gives the reader a narrative to follow, because the disintegration of a woman’s marriage is far more interesting than some boring old butchery. Make the writer a celebrity and the book will sell itself – ta da! 

A book is not worth buying, it seems, unless the writer discloses something shockingly personal about herself – and it is, almost invariably, a her.

And!

[I]t is a thin line between the long overdue validation of women’s lives and telling women that the most interesting thing they have to offer, and that all they can be trusted to write about, is themselves.

What can I add, apart from go read it?

One thing, I suppose, is that there's a blurring that goes on, where women are urged to write about gender-related topics that aren't about themselves specifically, but that kind of lend themselves to that interpretation. Either to a personal hook (which sometimes works but sometimes feels tacked on) or, more frustratingly, to reader interpretations along the lines of, if she's writing about contraception, she's writing about her contraceptive choices! Or, if it's something the woman maybe can't personally relate to - a thin woman writing about plus-size fashion, or a woman without kids writing about parenting - then she lacks the authority to write something on the topic, in a way that having never been to China and not knowing Mandarin or Cantonese wouldn't stop someone from writing an op-ed about China. And... there's no way for me to proceed with this thought that wouldn't, ironically enough, lead to a personal essay. Which is what Freeman ends up with, but it is, it seems, inevitable.