The academic discipline of women's writing is a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men."[1] It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world.
Women's writing, as a discrete area of literary studies and practice, is recognized explicitly by the numbers of dedicated journals, organizations, awards, and conferences which focus mainly or exclusively on texts produced by women. Women's writing as a recognized area of study has been developing since the 1970s. The majority of English and American literature programs offer courses on specific aspects of literature by women, and women's writing is generally considered an area of specialization in its own right.
The broader discussion women's cultural contributions as a separate category has a long history, but the specific study of women's writing as a distinct category of scholarly interest is relatively recent. There are examples in the 18th century of catalogues of women writers, including George Ballard's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences (1752); John Duncombe's Feminiad, a catalogue of women writers; and the Biographium faemineum: the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments.[2] Similarly, women have been treated as a distinct category by various misogynist writings, perhaps best exemplified by Richard Polwhele's The Unsex'd Females, a critique in verse of women writers at the end of the 18th century with a particular focus on Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle.
Earlier discussion of women's broader cultural contributions can be found as far back as the 8th century BC, when Hesiod compiled Catalogue of Women (attr.), a list of heroines and goddesses. Plutarch listed heroic and artistic women in his Moralia. In the medieval period, Boccaccio used mythic and biblical women as moral exemplars in De mulieribus claris (On Famous Women) (1361–1375), directly inspiring Christine de Pisan to write The Book of the City of Ladies (1405).
Women writers themselves have long been interested in tracing a "woman's tradition" in writing. Mary Scott's The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe's Feminead (1774) is one of the best known such works in the 18th century, a period that saw a burgeoning of women writers being published. In 1803, Mary Hays published the six-volume Female Biography. Virginia Woolf's 1929 A Room of One's Own exemplifies the impulse in the modern period to explore a tradition of women's writing. Woolf, however, sought to explain what she perceived as an absence; and by the mid-century scholarly attention turned to finding and reclaiming "lost" writers.[3] There were many to reclaim: it is common for the editors of dictionaries or anthologies of women's writing to refer to the difficulty in choosing from all the available material.[4][5]
Trade publishers have similarly focused on women's writing: since the 1970s there have been a number of literary periodicals (such as Fireweed and Room of One's Own) which are dedicated for publishing the creative work of women writers, and there are a number of dedicated presses as well, such as the Second Story Press and the Women's Press. In addition, collections and anthologies of women's writing continue to be published by both trade and academic presses.
The question of whether there a "women's tradition" remains vexing; some scholars and editors refer to a "women's canon" and women's "literary lineage", and seek to "identify the recurring themes and to trace the evolutionary and interconnecting patterns" in women's writing,[6] but the range of women's writing across time and place is so considerable that, according to some, it is inaccurate to speak of "women's writing" in a universal sense: Claire Buck calls "women's writing" an "unstable category."[7] Further, women writers cannot be considered apart from their male contemporaries and the larger literary tradition. Recent scholarship on race, class, and sexuality in literature further complicate the issue and militate against the impulse to posit one "women's tradition". Some scholars, such as Roger Lonsdale, mentions that something of a commonality exists and that "it is not unreasonable to consider "women writers" in some aspects as a special case, given their educational insecurities and the constricted notions of the properly 'feminine' in social and literary behavior they faced."[8] Using the term "women's writing" implies, then, the belief that women in some sense constitute a group, however diverse, who share a position of difference based on gender. The normative events within a woman’s life do not always coincide with that of a man’s; part of this difference includes the fact that women can bear children. Motherhood has been a popular subject among women writers, especially following the second wave of the feminism movement in which women originally seen as “homemakers” began to enter the workforce and abandon their domestic traditions.
Rediscovering ignored works from the past
In the West, the second wave of feminism prompted a general revelation of women's historical contributions, and various academic sub-disciplines, such as women's history and women's writing, developed in response to the belief that women's lives and contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. Much of this early period of feminist literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Studies such as Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) were ground-breaking in their insistence that women have always been writing. Commensurate with this growth in scholarly interest, various presses began the task of reissuing long-out-of-print texts. Virago Press began to publish its large list of 19th and early-20th-century novels in 1975, and became one of the first commercial presses to join in the project of reclamation. In the 1980s Pandora Press, responsible for publishing Spender's study, issued a companion line of 18th-century novels by written by women.[9] More recently, Broadview Press continues to issue 18th- and 19th-century novels, many hitherto out of print, and the University of Kentucky has a series of republications of early women's novels. There has been commensurate growth in the area of biographical dictionaries of women writers due to a perception, according to one editor, that "[m]ost of our women are not represented in the 'standard' reference books in the field."[10]
Elaine V. Bellin's book, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance, mentions the lack of female representation in renaissance literature, and explores the idea of missing evidence of female writers of that period.[11] The widespread interest in women's writing developed alongside, and was influenced by, a general reassessment and expansion of the literary canon. Interest in post-colonial literature, gay and lesbian literature, writing by people of colour, working people's writing, and the cultural productions of other historically marginalized groups has resulted in a whole-scale expansion of what is considered "literature", and genres hitherto not regarded as "literary" (such as children's writing, journals, letters, and travel writing, among many others)[12] are now the subjects of scholarly interest. Most genres and sub-genres have undergone a similar analysis, so that one now sees work on the "female gothic"[13] or women's science fiction, for example.
Literature is a vast and expansive category of written works. The topics chosen as subjects of books, poems, and essays are characterized by the first-hand experiences people have from their lives. While the women’s writing literary category covers a multitude of subjects and situations, there are clear common themes within works that reflect the ideals of more than one woman.
The topic of motherhood, especially pregnancy, is a highly controversial topic within the literary world. Due to the perpetual war being waged in the fight between pro-choice and pro-life lawmaking, the tone in which women writers speak of pregnancy has sparked debate amongst the feminist movement. While some believe that motherhood is a choice and reflects the ideologies of the pro-choice movement, in which people have the freedom to choose whether or not they will be a parent, others view motherhood as an “inevitable destiny” that acts as an “imposition from the repressive alliance between biology and patriarchy.”[14]
But the topic itself is analyzed further within many works written by female authors. Writers like Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Acevedo, Diane di Prima, Mina Loy, Elana K. Arnold, Robin Benway, Virginia Woolf, Janet Finch, Mary H. K. Choi, Jessamine Chan, and more have examined the subject of motherhood from a variety of perspectives, in a multitude of mediums. Many authors detail their experiences as both mothers and writers and the balance that comes with creating new art while caring for their most challenging creation yet.
While women's experiences allow them to write of these topics with more empathy for those in similar circumstances, men have been and still write for the purpose of speaking for women. Walt Whitman, one of the most famed authors of the 19th century, utilized his poem "Song of Myself" to speak for the "maternal as well as paternal" within his work.[15] While his poem was highly revered by critics and cemented his status as a highly acclaimed poet, Whitman's equipment of maternal themes and imagery draws attention away from the women who have firsthand birthed the famed poets and authors of the world. The categorization of women authors as a separate literary category addresses how inconsistent and inaccurate some men's interpretations of living as a woman can be.[16]
George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences. Oxford: W. Jackson, 1752.
Anon., Biographium faemineum: the female worthies, or, Memoirs of the most illustrious ladies, of all ages and nations, who have been eminently distinguished for their magnanimity, learning, genius, virtue, piety, and other excellent endowments. London: Printed for S. Crowder, 1766. 2 vols.
Mary Scott, The Female Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr Duncombe's Feminead. London: Joseph Johnson, 1774.
Sarah Josepha Hale, Woman's Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished women from the Creation to AD 1850 (1854)
Charlotte Mary Yonge, Biographies of Good Women (First Series, 1862; Second Series, 1865)
Julia Kavanagh, Women in France during the Eighteenth Century (1850), Women of Christianity (1852), French Women of Letters (1862) and English Women of Letters (1862). These collective biographies "all argue against idealized, sentimental portrayals of female experience. She intended these biographies to provide a corrective to the silence of male historians on the topic of female influence in a variety of sphere beyond the domestic" (ODNB).
Helen C. Black, Notable Women Authors of the Day: Biographical Sketches (1893).[17]
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds, The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. London: Virago Press, 1989.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
Feminist Press: New York-based press which began reprinting books by American women in 1972
Oxford University Press: The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. 30 vols, Oxford University Press, 1988. A 10-volume Supplement was published in 1991.
Persephone Books: London-based press which "reprints forgotten classics by twentieth-century (mostly women) writers. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and who would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial."
Virago Press since 1975 has republished over 500 post-1800 classics of women's literature (see their list and their timeline) in their series Virago Modern Classics.
↑ Blain, Virginia, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, eds. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990. viii–ix.
↑ Todd, Janet, ed. British Women Writers: a critical reference guide. London: Routledge, 1989. xiii.
↑ Term coined by Ellen Moers in Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1976). See also Juliann E. Fleenor, ed., The Female Gothic (Montreal: Eden Press, 1983) and Gary Kelly, ed., Varieties of Female Gothic, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002).
↑ Cortés Vieco, Francisco José (April 28, 2021). Bearing Liminality, Laboring White Ink: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Women's Literature (1ed.). NBN International. ISBN9781800790131.
↑ Tharp, Julie Ann; McCallum-Whitcomb, Susan; Tharp, Julie, eds. (2000). This giving birth: pregnancy and childbirth in American women's writing. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. ISBN978-0-87972-807-6.
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name refers to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.
Joanna Russ was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire, and the story "When It Changed".
The Western canon is the body of high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly valued in the West; works that have achieved the status of classics. However, not all these works originate in the Western world, and such works are also valued throughout the globe. It is "a certain Western intellectual tradition that goes from, say, Socrates to Wittgenstein in philosophy, and from Homer to James Joyce in literature".
Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature. This school of thought seeks to analyze and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature. This way of thinking and criticizing works can be said to have changed the way literary texts are viewed and studied, as well as changing and expanding the canon of what is commonly taught. It is used a lot in Greek myths.
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination is a 1979 book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in which they examine Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Gilbert and Gubar draw their title from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Rochester's wife is kept secretly locked in an attic apartment by her husband.
Susan D. Gubar is an American author and distinguished Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at Indiana University.
Lesbian literature is a subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes. It includes poetry, plays, fiction addressing lesbian characters, and non-fiction about lesbian-interest topics.
Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman is Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished novelistic sequel to her revolutionary political treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The Wrongs of Woman was published posthumously in 1798 by her husband, William Godwin, and is often considered her most radical feminist work.
Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life is the first published work of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Published in 1787 by her friend Joseph Johnson, Thoughts is a conduct book that offers advice on female education to the emerging British middle class. Although dominated by considerations of morality and etiquette, the text also contains basic child-rearing instructions, such as how to care for an infant.
Michèle Brigitte Roberts FRSL is a British writer, novelist and poet. She is the daughter of a French Catholic teacher mother and English Protestant father, and has dual UK–France nationality.
Feminist literature is fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry, which supports the feminist goals of defining, establishing, and defending equal civil, political, economic, and social rights for women. It often identifies women's roles as unequal to those of men – particularly as regarding status, privilege, and power – and generally portrays the consequences to women, men, families, communities, and societies as undesirable.
Phebe Gibbes was an 18th-century English novelist and early feminist. She authored twenty-two books between 1764 and 1790, and is best known for the novels The History of Mr. Francis Clive (1764), The Fruitless Repentance; or, the History of Miss Kitty Le Fever (1769), and The History of Miss Eliza Musgrove (1769). She received recent attention with the scholarly publication of Hartly House Calcutta (1789) in 2007.
Feminism has affected culture in many ways, and has famously been theorized in relation to culture by Angela McRobbie, Laura Mulvey and others. Timothy Laurie and Jessica Kean have argued that "one of [feminism's] most important innovations has been to seriously examine the ways women receive popular culture, given that so much pop culture is made by and for men." This is reflected in a variety of forms, including literature, music, film and other screen cultures.
A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to support themselves in this way or write as an avocation. Most novelists struggle to have their debut novel published, but once published they often continue to be published, although very few become literary celebrities, thus gaining prestige or a considerable income from their work.
Joanne Schultz Frye is a Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at the College of Wooster. Frye is known for her feminist literary criticism and interdisciplinary inquiry into motherhood. She specializes in research on fiction by and about women, such as the work of Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olsen, and Jane Lazarre.
Despite a long-held belief in pre-modern China that women lacked literary talent, women's works – particularly poetry – did win a degree of respect within Chinese literature during the Imperial period. During the first half of the 20th century, writing by women reflected feminist ideas and the political upheavals of the time. Women writers conveyed expression from a feminine perspective, as opposed to man writers who conveyed expressions from a masculine perspective.
Heather Elizabeth Ingman is a British academic, noted for her work on Irish and British women's writing, the Irish short story, gender studies and modernism. Also a novelist and journalist, Ingman has worked in Ireland and the UK, especially at Trinity College Dublin, where she is an Adjunct Professor of English and Research Fellow in Gender Studies.
Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (1986), by Dale Spender, is a foundational study for the reclamation project central to feminist literary studies in English in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Pandora Press is a UK feminist publishing imprint that was founded in 1983 by Philippa Brewster at Routledge and Kegan Paul, with Dale Spender as editor-at-large. It was the first imprint to produce a list devoted primarily to feminist non-fiction. Among early Pandora Press titles were Spender's There's Always Been a Women's Movement This Century (1983) and Time and Tide Wait for No Man (1984), and other authors published by the imprint included Marge Piercy and Jeanette Winterson. Brewster took on a book written by the women of Greenham Common, about which she has said: "That seemed to fulfill what we really wanted to do. ...We were all part of the women's movement. We represented it, but we also informed it." Also a commissioning editor for Pandora Press was Candida Lacey, who went on to become publisher of Myriad Editions for 15 years.
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