I wasn't sure about what to write about this week, so I decided to share with you some of my thoughts from my women writers class.
Women writers have been writing for centuries. They’ve been writing poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays, movies, and the list goes on. You might have noticed that not many women have been showcased in the literary world. Where have these women been? Throughout history, we’ve seen many great works by men. These books are studied and researched and talked about constantly - but what about the women?
Women writers have been overshadowed by men for centuries. In 2014, the London Review of Books featured 527 male authors and critics on their pages, while they only had 151 women featured. If you think about it, you could probably name more male authors than female. Why is this? In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf claims, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. By saying this, she means that women must have the materials to write, and that means also having money and her own space. What does this have to do with women being overshadowed by men? Many women did not have these materials. Women did not have the money to have their own space. Woolf herself says, “...all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get two thousand pounds together”. Women had to spend their time working, and then would normally spend that money on their families. Many women also didn’t have the money to get their work noticed by a publisher. This is still a common occurrence today. Many women struggle to hold their family together and have other things to do. On the flip side, men had all these things. For a long time, the man was the breadwinner and had the money to have their own space and materials to write. They also were able to get their work published easier.
The idea of women struggling is a common theme in Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. Though it was written about 50 years after Woolf’s work, it still holds this thought of women struggling to be seen and have creativity. While Walker is talking about her own mother, she states, “There was never a moment for her to sit down, undisturbed, to unravel her own private thoughts; never a time free from interruption - by work or the noisy inquiries of her many children.” Her mother worked from sun up until sun down to provide for her children and family. She had no time to sit down in a space of her own and create. She could only work - except when she was gardening. Walker states, “And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seen of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.” By saying this, Walker says that thought women have been creative and have been writers, their writing has not been seen. Her mother’s struggle resonates among many mothers, past and present.
We also have to bring notice to the fact that men have mostly been in control for so long. We still haven’t had a woman as our president, and we still struggle to fight for basic rights - such as reproductive rights. Recently, some angry men even wanted to revoke the amendment that let women vote in the first place - which wasn’t put in place until 1920. Many of the reasons why women writers have not been noticed is because men didn’t want to notice them. Many of our history books are written by men - predominantly white men - who choose what we do and do not learn. This is a major reflection on which women have been noticed in the literary world.
Woolf herself admits in A Room of One’s Own that women and fiction remain “unsolved problems”. What Woolf means is that she doesn’t even know why women and fiction have been so removed from the times. There could be the argument that women have been seen in literature. For example, you could take Mary Shelley and claim that women have been seen in literature and that they haven’t struggled much. Mary Shelley’s work is studied in classrooms across the US, and is spoken very highly of. In reality, this is not the truth. There are hundreds of women authors that still remain unseen. There are even lists on the internet of books written by women writers, one list in particular called, “20 Forgotten, Overlooked Classics By Women Writers Everyone Should Read”. Why have they been forgotten? Possibly because, referring to Woolf’s statement and my previous paragraph, many people don’t know the struggles that women have to face in order to become noticed as a writer.
