Russ, Joanna - How to Suppress Women's Writing
Fri, Jun. 9th, 2006 02:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceter(O Readers, do not doubt, for I am putting race into this as well!)
(uh, not that anyone is probably looking forward to that...)
I think, had I seen the title of this book ten years ago, I would have thought, "'Suppress' is such a harsh term! Yes, women's writing is nowhere near being acknowledged widely, but is it really actively being suppressed?"
These days, I think suppression doesn't have to be an active process, particularly when the status quo already favors an imbalance in the portrayal of minority writing (women, who aren't statistically a minority but are in terms of representation; people of color; experiences from other religions; differences of sexual orientation; class differences, etc; and all of the above combined).
And, even worse, I self-identify as feminist, and I still don't recognize many of the female authors Russ names, I still haven't read enough about them in textbooks to recognize the portrayal of them. I know who James Joyce hung out with and who read Keats' poetry, but I don't know who Jane Austen read or who she influenced, beyond the Brontë sisters (right?), and I'm ashamed of that.
Russ frames the book as an instruction manual for an alien race on how to suppress women's writing; the introduction is a little cute for me, but I can see it being deliberately shocking as well. I think Russ also notes that all these instructions work for suppressing any "undesirable" group's writing.
The book is divided on chapters, each one discussing one more way to suppress women's writing. The first, not given a chapter, is of course to not educate women, to not let them read or write. But after that, the arguments become more and more sophisticated and more difficult to argue with because they are based on truth (I will get into this more a little further down).
Arguments include: She didn't really write it (a man did, or even her own "masculine" side). She wrote it, but it's not literature. She wrote it, but look what she's writing about! She wrote it, but she only wrote one. She wrote it, but she's alone in the tradition. She wrote it, but....
It hurts, reading the list. It hurts knowing that I haven't even read enough women's writing to have seen all these reasons used.
Some of the reasons for individual female authors are true, but as Russ points out, if the vast majority of criticism and scholarship on female authors fall into these categories, the individual truth about an individual author becomes part of a larger, societal construct used to suppress women's writing. Russ goes into the fact that literature is defined as what men write or what men write about ("It's a romance! It's not literature!") and how the suppression of women's writing feeds on itself. If one female author is mentioned in one generation with another female author, and if one of those authors isn't mentioned the next generation, of course it will look like female authors are writing in a void and out of a tradition, when in fact they were. It's just that no one knows what tradition, because it's not in the textbooks.
And the worst part is, each argument is more sophisticated than the last, and like I mentioned before, each one is based on truth. The only problem is, they don't point out the entire truth, that women's writing isn't literature because "literature" was defined by men, that women appear to write in a vacuum because only a few works by women are emphasized, that they do seem to only write one good work because that good work is defined by men, that they even do write in a vacuum because it's so difficult to find broad access to literature by women. And this is why the arguments can build on each other, because they are supported by systemic exclusion of undesirable minorities. So while they are true, they aren't the whole truth.
Naturally, my thoughts turned to the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate (of DOOM!).
But thankfully, Russ spared me the need to draw my own conclusions and connections, because the version I got out of the library has a few chapters at the end that I think Russ wrote after the first edition of the book. She writes about reading books by Black women writers after she was indirectly or directly accused of being racist and classist (I think), and how her reaction to Zora Neale Hurston was that the book was too messy, too incomprehensible, too foreign from the literary tradition that Russ was accustomed to.
And then she realized she was having the exact same reactions that so many male authors and readers had to works by female authors, and she went on to read more from the Black female literary tradition.
I felt so relieved and so moved to read Russ' experience of trying to see systemic suppression from the opposite side; it's painful just how many times I have to read these so I can tell myself that no, I'm not making it up.
Highly recommended.
Links:
-![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cupidsbow's essay on feminism and fan fiction, as informed by this book
(uh, not that anyone is probably looking forward to that...)
I think, had I seen the title of this book ten years ago, I would have thought, "'Suppress' is such a harsh term! Yes, women's writing is nowhere near being acknowledged widely, but is it really actively being suppressed?"
These days, I think suppression doesn't have to be an active process, particularly when the status quo already favors an imbalance in the portrayal of minority writing (women, who aren't statistically a minority but are in terms of representation; people of color; experiences from other religions; differences of sexual orientation; class differences, etc; and all of the above combined).
And, even worse, I self-identify as feminist, and I still don't recognize many of the female authors Russ names, I still haven't read enough about them in textbooks to recognize the portrayal of them. I know who James Joyce hung out with and who read Keats' poetry, but I don't know who Jane Austen read or who she influenced, beyond the Brontë sisters (right?), and I'm ashamed of that.
Russ frames the book as an instruction manual for an alien race on how to suppress women's writing; the introduction is a little cute for me, but I can see it being deliberately shocking as well. I think Russ also notes that all these instructions work for suppressing any "undesirable" group's writing.
The book is divided on chapters, each one discussing one more way to suppress women's writing. The first, not given a chapter, is of course to not educate women, to not let them read or write. But after that, the arguments become more and more sophisticated and more difficult to argue with because they are based on truth (I will get into this more a little further down).
Arguments include: She didn't really write it (a man did, or even her own "masculine" side). She wrote it, but it's not literature. She wrote it, but look what she's writing about! She wrote it, but she only wrote one. She wrote it, but she's alone in the tradition. She wrote it, but....
It hurts, reading the list. It hurts knowing that I haven't even read enough women's writing to have seen all these reasons used.
Some of the reasons for individual female authors are true, but as Russ points out, if the vast majority of criticism and scholarship on female authors fall into these categories, the individual truth about an individual author becomes part of a larger, societal construct used to suppress women's writing. Russ goes into the fact that literature is defined as what men write or what men write about ("It's a romance! It's not literature!") and how the suppression of women's writing feeds on itself. If one female author is mentioned in one generation with another female author, and if one of those authors isn't mentioned the next generation, of course it will look like female authors are writing in a void and out of a tradition, when in fact they were. It's just that no one knows what tradition, because it's not in the textbooks.
And the worst part is, each argument is more sophisticated than the last, and like I mentioned before, each one is based on truth. The only problem is, they don't point out the entire truth, that women's writing isn't literature because "literature" was defined by men, that women appear to write in a vacuum because only a few works by women are emphasized, that they do seem to only write one good work because that good work is defined by men, that they even do write in a vacuum because it's so difficult to find broad access to literature by women. And this is why the arguments can build on each other, because they are supported by systemic exclusion of undesirable minorities. So while they are true, they aren't the whole truth.
Naturally, my thoughts turned to the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate (of DOOM!).
But thankfully, Russ spared me the need to draw my own conclusions and connections, because the version I got out of the library has a few chapters at the end that I think Russ wrote after the first edition of the book. She writes about reading books by Black women writers after she was indirectly or directly accused of being racist and classist (I think), and how her reaction to Zora Neale Hurston was that the book was too messy, too incomprehensible, too foreign from the literary tradition that Russ was accustomed to.
And then she realized she was having the exact same reactions that so many male authors and readers had to works by female authors, and she went on to read more from the Black female literary tradition.
I felt so relieved and so moved to read Russ' experience of trying to see systemic suppression from the opposite side; it's painful just how many times I have to read these so I can tell myself that no, I'm not making it up.
Highly recommended.
Links:
-
cupidsbow's essay on feminism and fan fiction, as informed by this book
(no subject)
Sat, Jun. 10th, 2006 02:36 pm (UTC)On a side note:
>uh, not that anyone is probably looking forward to that...)<
Well, I think some people are. Me, for one.
(no subject)
Sat, Jun. 10th, 2006 03:41 pm (UTC)Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel covers a lot of the neglected women writers from the 17th c. on.
meanders by again
Sat, Jun. 10th, 2006 04:09 pm (UTC)She didn't really write it (a man did, or even her own "masculine" side).
Out of curiosity, where does Tiptree fit in here? (And 'Andre Norton'?)
She wrote it, but it's not literature. She wrote it, but look what she's writing about! She wrote it, but she only wrote one.
Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird. Still ends up on nearly every "American Classic" list.
She wrote it, but she's alone in the tradition. She wrote it, but....
On a side note, because you do bring up "literature is defined by men" - do you hold that quality in literature is without affect by cultural norms - that what Russian readers find to be "great" would be the same sort of thing that American readers find as great?
Do different things appeal to different cultures and ages, and is it possible that within a culture that different things would appeal more to men than to women? So that even in a gender-neutral society, a survey of women on "greatest lit ever" would yield a list that does not equal the results of a survey of men?
Granted, this isn't in the situation we are in now, but I think this might be useful for identifying what we want to end up with, rather than just saying what we have now is insufficent.
If one female author is mentioned in one generation with another female author, and if one of those authors isn't mentioned the next generation, of course it will look like female authors are writing in a void and out of a tradition, when in fact they were. It's just that no one knows what tradition, because it's not in the textbooks.
When I read this, my reaction, as a writer, is I'm not doing women's writing. I don't read women's writing. I am influenced by writing.
Is it possible that at least some of these women were not writing from a vacumn, but from the 'mainstream lit' - including the lit produced by (mostly) men?
I mean, for example, Butler (Octavia E) was a black woman writing SF. *pause to swear about not having more Butler novels to read, ever* The lit tradition Butler had to draw from was sf by mostly (now) dead white men. And she should be read, I think, in that context, not as a co-writer of the same school as Walker and Morrison.
I'm not trying to say that there has not been an ongoing series of decisions made along the lines of "this story isn't about the sort of things that relate to my life because the writer is not like me" in relation to writing by "people of non-dominant groups", but that I have trouble with the term "oppression".
YMMV.
- hg
(no subject)
Mon, Jun. 12th, 2006 05:57 pm (UTC)When I was counting Asians and other minorities at WisCon, Mely mentioned that people tend to overestimate the actual number of minorities or women or etc. present, which reminds me a little of the rhetoric of inclusion -- one female writer represents many more, while one male writer usually just represents himself or a specifc era, just because there are so much more that they go by narrower frameworks.
And thank you!
(no subject)
Mon, Jun. 12th, 2006 05:58 pm (UTC)Yeah, I wasn't sure about Austen as an influence; all I remembered was that Charlotte really disliked her (negative influence?).
Re: meanders by again
Thu, Jun. 15th, 2006 06:07 pm (UTC)On a side note, because you do bring up "literature is defined by men" - do you hold that quality in literature is without affect by cultural norms - that what Russian readers find to be "great" would be the same sort of thing that American readers find as great?
No, I think quality in literature and what's defined as literature is greatly affected by cultural norms. I can't say if a list by women in a gender-neutral society would be different from a list by men, though I'd argue that right now, because most of what's considered as "great" literature has been defined by men, it's hard to talk about it without that filter.
I think many women write within a male tradition (aka, the "mainstream" tradition), largely because there is no documentation of a female tradition. It's hard to write in a tradition that you don't know exists.
While Russ' book is intended to be confrontation with its use of the term "suppress," which is why I think she wrote it in the style of a manual, I think she makes a good point. People don't have to deliberately intend to oppress something on an individual level if the societal strictures are already in place to do that for them.