Women's writing (literary category)  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Redirected from Women of letters)
Jump to: navigation, search

"Mlle. de Scudery held a ready pen, and was in the habit of noting down in her letters to absent friends the conversation, which ran over a great variety of topics, from the gossip of the moment to the gravest questions. There was no morning journal with its columns of daily news, no magazine with its sketches of contemporary life, and these private letters were passed from one to another to be read and discussed."--The Women of the French Salons (1891) by Amelia Gere Mason


"damn'd mob of scribbling women"--Nathaniel Hawthorne


"As if to comment on the unity of all these points—on, that is, the anxiety inducing connections between what women writers tend to see as their parallel confinements in texts, houses, and maternal female bodies—Charlotte Perkins Gilman brought them all together in 1890 in a striking story of female confinement and escape, a paradigmatic tale which (like Jane Eyre) seems to tell the story that all literary women would tell if they could speak their “speechless woe.” “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which Gilman herself called “a description of a case of nervous breakdown,” recounts in the first person the experiences of a woman who is evidently suffering from a severe postpartum psychosis."--The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) is a book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

A Young Girl Reading (c. 1776) by Fragonard
Enlarge
A Young Girl Reading (c. 1776) by Fragonard

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Women were often the first professional writers, bestsellers have often been written by women writers and women created their own literary subculture. This has been argued by Moers 1976, Showalter 1977; Baym 1978; Gilbert and Gubar 1979 and Dudovitz 1990.

Yet women have been patriarchally erased from literary histories.

Leslie Fiedler has remarked in "Literature and Lucre" (1981) that "the struggle of High Art and Low is, moreover, a battle of the sexes."

Contents

History

Among the first known female writers is Enheduanna; she is also the earliest known poet ever recorded. She was the High Priestess of the goddess Inanna and the moon god Nanna (Sin). She lived in the Sumerian city-state of Ur over 4,200 years ago. Enheduanna's contributions to Sumerian literature, definitively ascribed to her, include several personal devotions to Inanna and a collection of hymns known as the "Sumerian Temple Hymns". Further additional texts are ascribed to her. This makes her the first named author in world history. She was the first known woman to hold the title of EN, a role of great political importance that was often held by royal daughters. She was appointed to the role by her father, King Sargon of Akkad. Her mother was probably Queen Tashlultum. Enheduanna was appointed to the role of High Priestess in a shrewd political move by Sargon to help secure power in the south of his kingdom, where the City of Ur was located.

7th century B.C.E.

Sappho was an archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by a lyre. Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost, and what is extant has survived only in fragmentary form, except for one complete poem: the "Ode to Aphrodite". As well as lyric poetry, ancient commentators claimed that Sappho wrote elegiac and iambic poetry. Three epigrams attributed to Sappho are extant, but these are actually Hellenistic imitations of Sappho's style.

11th century

The Tale of Genji was written in the early 11th century by the noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu and is considered by some to be the first novel.

15th century

Christine de Pizan was the best known late medieval French writer, rhetorician, and critic, who wrote Book of the City of Ladies in 1405, a text about an allegorical city in which independent women lived free from the slander of men. In her work she included real women artists, such as Anastasia, who was considered one of the best Parisian illuminators, although none of her work has survived. Other humanist texts led to increased education for Italian women.

The first known book in English by a woman was Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. It was written between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and survived in various manuscripts until it was first published in 1670.

16th century

Gulbadan Banu, daughter of Mughal Emperor Babur, wrote the biography of her brother, Emperor Humayun.

19th century

One of the best known 19th-century female writers was Jane Austen, author of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), who achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began another, eventually titled Sanditon, but died before its completion.

Writers from this period include:

The followed is a list of interdisciplinary female writers of the 19th century:

20th century

In the 20th century women produced many books of all genres. Among fiction books can be named such titles as Harry Potter and The House of the Spirits, among others. The following is a list of female writers of 20th century:

Distinct category

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 catalogs 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. 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. And, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) 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. 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.

Trade publishers have similarly focused on women's writing recently: 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, 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." 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 behaviour they faced.". 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.

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 like 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. f 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."

Elaine V. Bellin's book, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance, mentions the lack of female representation in renaissance literature, as well explores the idea of missing evidence of female writers of that period. 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 color, 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) are now the subjects of scholarly interest. Most genres and sub-genres has undergone a similar analysis, so that one now sees work on the "female gothic" or women's science fiction, for example.

Distinctions

In Robert Silverberg's introduction to James Tiptree Jr.’s "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," he expressed the sentiment that the pseudonym must belong to a man, as the syntax and lexicon used in the short story were undeniably masculine. Silverberg compares Tiptree’s writing to that of Hemingway, saying that the masculinity is found in the fact that the writing was "simple, direct and straightforward" and uses the style of "relying on dialog broken by bursts of stripped down exposition". He was later proven to be wrong, as Tiptree is actually Alice Sheldon, a female writer. This raises the question about whether or not male and female writers have definite difference in the way that they write, and if there are certain parameters that define "women’s writing". In fact, multiple studies support the fact that there are dissimilarities that exist between the two.

Academic writing

In academic writing, there are marked differences between them in syntax and structure between women's writing and men's writing.

Children

In addition, the article "Gender Differences in EFL Writing" states that "research on gender differences in writing have mostly been conducted among children. Punter and Burchell’s study (1996) on the GCSE English language exam in the UK primary school discovered that girls scored better in imaginative, reflective, and empathetic writing while boys scored better in argumentative and factual writing", which provides evidence for the stance that there is an ingrained difference in the writing of men and women, one that starts very early on in life. This, however, is not the case for everybody, as shown by Alice Sheldon's "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," which was believed to be written by a man based on the type of language used. Further evidence for the difference between written word of boys and girls is provided in Written Communication. Analysis of the assignments of eighth graders shows that the girls consistently scored higher on their assignments than the boys, even when the boys showed an increased or above average proclivity towards writing. The article even states that the writing behavior of girls are "more desirable" in the public school setting. The studies show that when all factors are the same, including learning behavior and attitude, girls are still more successful in writing classes.

Creative writing

These "more desirable" traits extend on into adulthood, as study in the use of creative or emotional language in adults shows the same results. Examination on the differences in description of color shows that women have greater "emotional" regards to it. Women generally use more descriptive language than men. Men used less, and are referred to be less "emotional" overall. There is no correlation between being emotional and age for men, but it is there for women. This supposed ingrained difference between men and women is supported further by the fact that there seems to be no difference in different countries/cultures. "Interestingly, such results have been reported across many cultures. Yang (2000) studied male and female Chinese speakers who were undergraduate English majors and found women possessed more color vocabulary (both in English and in Chinese), were more elaborate in the Chinese translations of the color words." While this may have something to do with the supposed superiority of women in identifying shades of color, it also shows that the language they use to describe it is more vivid and detailed with "emotionality," and this difference persists throughout races and cultures.

Coding

The stylistic differences between the syntax and lexicon of men and women extends even beyond written communication. In other applications of communication the same rift exists. In computer programming and coding, women are believed to write code that is more user-friendly, containing comments that explain how to use it, and easy to understand variables, while code written by men tends to be cryptic and obscure. Emma McGrattan, a programmer located in Silicon Valley, says she can accurately determine whether code was written by a man or a woman just by looking at it.

Women's code may be different than men's, but that does not make it feminist by nature. Feminist code does exist, mainly through the lens of its purpose. The online programming projects WWO and the Orlando project were feminist archive projects meant to collect the works of women throughout history. Women's styles of writing have blended into the digital coding world, and emerged as feminist practices. Jacqueline Wernimont says of the archives, "Digital archives unite two historically gendered fields — computer and archival sciences. Literary scholars who depend on archival or rare book materials still confront, whether they acknowledge it or not, the legacy of an institutional form through which patriarchal power exercised the authority to determine value, classification and access. "Because men and their ways of addressing literature have been in charge for so long, women have to sort it through the digital archive, which is most important in a feminist sense. The styles of men's writing influence how they have viewed literature as the authority in the field, but women have become more relevant, their styles and strategies of writing have come into the light.

"Exemplary women" tradition

"Exemplary women" tradition

Resources

  • Abel, Elizabeth, Writing and Sexual Difference. University of Chicago Press, 1982.
  • Allison, Dorothy. Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature. New York: Firebrand Books, 1994.
  • Ayres, Brenda, Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers. Westport, CT: Praeger Pub, 2003.
  • Backscheider, Paula R., and John Richetti, eds. Popular Fiction by Women, 1660-1730. Oxford: OUP, 1996.
  • Busby, Margaret (ed.). Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present. Jonathan Cape, 1992.
  • Eagleton, Mary, ed., Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
  • Fetterley, Judith, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction. Indiana University Press, 1978.
  • Figes, Eva,Sex and Subterfuge: Women Writers to 1850. The Macmillan Press, 1982.
  • Ferguson, Mary Anne, [compiler]. Images of Women in Literature, 3rd Edition, Houghton-Mifflin Co. 1981. Template:ISBN
  • Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979. Template:ISBN
  • 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 UP, 1989.
  • Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds., Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
  • Greer, Germaine, et al., eds. Kissing the Rod: an anthology of seventeenth-century women's verse. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988.
  • Hobby, Elaine, Virtue of Necessity: English women's writing 1649-1688. London: Virago Press, 1988. Template:ISBN
  • Lonsdale, Roger ed. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
  • Moi, Toril, Sexual/ Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 1987. Template:ISBN; Template:ISBN (second edition).
  • Robertson, Fiona, ed. Women's Writing, 1778-1838. Oxford: OUP, 2001.
  • Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women's Writing. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1983.
  • spender, dale, Mothers of the Novel: 100 good women writers before Jane Austen. London and New York: Pandora, 1986. Template:ISBN
  • Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of their own: from Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing. London: Virago Press, 1977.
  • Spacks, Patricia Meyer, The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of women's writing. George Allen and Unwin, 1976.
  • Spencer, Jane, The Rise of the Woman Novelist. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Template:ISBN
  • Todd, Janet, Feminist Literary History: A Defence. Cambridge: Polity Press / Basil Blackwell, 1988.
  • Todd, Janet, The Sign of Angellica: women, writing and fiction, 1660-1800. London: Virago Press, 1989. Template:ISBN

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Women's writing (literary category)" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools