There's a great post by Leah Stewart over here, on the subject of literary sexism. She's taking issue with the view that 'male writers tackle the great subjects, while women write only about relationships'; and with the view that 'relationships are not one of "the great subjects"'. I won't try and summarize what she says, just urge you to read the post.
However, I will use it as a peg on which to hang my own bafflement - which I've expressed before in writing about Anne Tyler - that anyone could take the view that a person's most intimate relationships (family ties, other loves, friendships etc) could be a small subject. It's merely philistinism to think so. Then there's the little matter of Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës, Wharton, Woolf; to say nothing of Tyler, Pym, Taylor, Spark, Robinson... and so on. Isn't it a bit late in the aeon for the idea that women still have something to prove?
Here are a few women's 'relationship books' I've read this year that I would have been poorer for not having read: After You'd Gone; My Lover's Lover; Good to a Fault; Body Surfing; Olive Kitteridge; Fortune's Rocks; Abide with Me. Just read the last of them and try to say with a straight face that it falls short as serious fiction. Why, you'd be laughed at even down the bar of your local rugby club.