Before the Age of Chick-Lit: A Few Words About Women's Writing
This is March, which means it's Women's History Month. I'm going to tell a short, true (as I remember it) story about the history of women's literature. Back in the days when women's studies was still a dream at most universities, great literature by women was widely thought to be an oxymoron. I was an undergraduate English major at the time. The only book by a woman I can remember being assigned was Emma by Jane Austen. At an English department social gathering I went to as a freshman, I remember the chair of the department deriding the work of a contemporary woman poet who was in town to give a reading. "There will never be any great women writers," he chuckled derisively. No wonder I took a couple of years off.
It turned out to be an eventful couple of years in academia. When I re-enrolled at another university, I could add women's studies to my English lit. major. Because of the double major, I got to read Emma three more times, which was ok since even pre-feminist professors consider it to be a perfect novel. But I did wonder if maybe they couldn't think of anyone else to teach. To be fair, George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte were added to my reading lists. In women's studies, we were reading Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, even Toni Morrison, who would later win a Nobel Prize for literature.
Mostly on my own, I discovered Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Women predated our modern era women's movement by a couple of centuries. She died in childbirth and her daughter went on to write Frankenstein. I also fell in love with the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, whose writing was a major influence on Willa Cather, but who, like another 19th century woman, the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller (editor of The Dial and author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century) was marginalized in her own time and all but forgotten today. I devoured the Diaries of Anais Nin, immersed myself in Emma Goldman's Living My Life, and read Doris Lessing's five-volume Children of Violence series straight through. Through Adrienne Rich's work my eyes were opened to the possibilities that poetry could describe my life.
As women started writing women back into history, I was thrilled to watch the women's studies section in the bookstore grow from a single shelf of Simone DeBeauvoir, Betty Freidan and Shulamith Firestone to an entire section of scholarship and memoir. Women's stories were finally being told, But my first love was novels and as a writer, I was keenly aware that the attitude of that English Department chair was far from gone. The "debate" over women's ability to produce the great American novel continues to this day. A few years ago, I read an interview with Annie Proulx, the writer whose short story inspired Brokeback Mountain. Although I've lost the citation, I'll never forget the essence of her comment: she said she didn't write about women's lives because nothing happened in them. Is her writing taken more seriously as a result? Is this attitude the modern equivalent of Mary Ann Evans writing under the name George Eliot? Thank goodness Jane Austen found women's lives interesting.
Of course, women don't have to choose between women and men a primary subjects to write great stories. Nor are women capable of writing well only about women's lives. Marilynne Robinson's first novel Housekeeping is primarily about women and girls, but her second, Gilead, is a multi-generational tale of men.
We have come a long way since I had to take a break in my pursuit of an education. Great writing by women writers abounds and is taken seriously enough to win major literary awards. Women not only teach at universities, they are taught. Today, the attitude that women can write nothing of lasting value seems ludicrous to most. But we are only one or two generations past the days when department chairs could get away with derogatory comments about women writers. Anyone born after 1987 will not know a time without Women's History Month or a time when a women's studies focus was not possible. Hopefully, they won't have to.
It turned out to be an eventful couple of years in academia. When I re-enrolled at another university, I could add women's studies to my English lit. major. Because of the double major, I got to read Emma three more times, which was ok since even pre-feminist professors consider it to be a perfect novel. But I did wonder if maybe they couldn't think of anyone else to teach. To be fair, George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte were added to my reading lists. In women's studies, we were reading Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, even Toni Morrison, who would later win a Nobel Prize for literature.
Mostly on my own, I discovered Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Vindication of the Rights of Women predated our modern era women's movement by a couple of centuries. She died in childbirth and her daughter went on to write Frankenstein. I also fell in love with the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, whose writing was a major influence on Willa Cather, but who, like another 19th century woman, the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller (editor of The Dial and author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century) was marginalized in her own time and all but forgotten today. I devoured the Diaries of Anais Nin, immersed myself in Emma Goldman's Living My Life, and read Doris Lessing's five-volume Children of Violence series straight through. Through Adrienne Rich's work my eyes were opened to the possibilities that poetry could describe my life.
As women started writing women back into history, I was thrilled to watch the women's studies section in the bookstore grow from a single shelf of Simone DeBeauvoir, Betty Freidan and Shulamith Firestone to an entire section of scholarship and memoir. Women's stories were finally being told, But my first love was novels and as a writer, I was keenly aware that the attitude of that English Department chair was far from gone. The "debate" over women's ability to produce the great American novel continues to this day. A few years ago, I read an interview with Annie Proulx, the writer whose short story inspired Brokeback Mountain. Although I've lost the citation, I'll never forget the essence of her comment: she said she didn't write about women's lives because nothing happened in them. Is her writing taken more seriously as a result? Is this attitude the modern equivalent of Mary Ann Evans writing under the name George Eliot? Thank goodness Jane Austen found women's lives interesting.
Of course, women don't have to choose between women and men a primary subjects to write great stories. Nor are women capable of writing well only about women's lives. Marilynne Robinson's first novel Housekeeping is primarily about women and girls, but her second, Gilead, is a multi-generational tale of men.
We have come a long way since I had to take a break in my pursuit of an education. Great writing by women writers abounds and is taken seriously enough to win major literary awards. Women not only teach at universities, they are taught. Today, the attitude that women can write nothing of lasting value seems ludicrous to most. But we are only one or two generations past the days when department chairs could get away with derogatory comments about women writers. Anyone born after 1987 will not know a time without Women's History Month or a time when a women's studies focus was not possible. Hopefully, they won't have to.
posted by Left Bank Books at 3:03 PM
0 comments
