How to Suppress Women's Writing

Description

Joanna Russ in a short, useful book from 1983, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, outlines various patterns in the ways that commenters have dismissed women's writing in literary criticism, book reviews, and literary history. These patterns are often widely applicable to the ways women's work is treated. It is very helpful to have them named, to help us spot them and call them out! These strategies are used to deny that women have done significant work. She opens the book with "Prohibitions", a short discussion of prohibitions against women writing, whether formal prohibitions against education, literacy, lack of job opportunity, lower pay, or active discrimination. She includes pressures particularly gendered and aimed at women-- around family and children, housework, caretaking of others, and the idea that some activities are feminine and others, like writing, are unfeminine and make a woman unattractive to heterosexual men, or are unhealthy. All these complicated "prohibitions" are skimmed over quickly by Russ as the factors discouraging women from even beginning their work. The prohibitions are often internalized by women who have to fight an internal battle, who face an internal split in identity, between the "normal woman" and the woman who works and creates. Russ then discusses privilege and what Sartre calls "bad faith". She believes that acts of conscious bigotry are fairly rare, but speaking from privilege while claiming objectivity is common.