How to Suppress Women's Writing

Joanna Russ

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781477316290
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This landmark feminist critique presents a "brilliant and scathing" survey of the forces that work against women who dare to write (Nicole Rudick, New York Review of Books ). Are women able to achieve anything they set their minds to? In How to Suppress Women's Writing, award-winning novelist and scholar Joanna Russ lays bare the subtle—and not so subtle—strategies that society uses to ignore, condemn, or belittle women who produce literature. As relevant today as when it was first published in 1983, this book has motivated generations of readers with its powerful feminist critique. "What is it going to take to break apart these rigidities? Russ's book is a formidable attempt. It is angry without being self-righteous, it is thorough without being exhausting, and it is serious without being devoid of a sense of humor. But it was published over thirty years ago, in 1983, and there's not an enormous difference between the world she describes and the world we inhabit" (Jessa Crispin, from the foreword). "A book of the most profound and original clarity."
—Marge Piercy "Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer, a writer of real moral passion and high wit."
—Adrienne Rich

1. Prohibitions

IN CONSIDERING LITERATURE written by women during the last few centuries in Europe and the United States (I’m going to concentrate on literature in English, with some examples drawn from other literature and from painting), we don’t find the absolute prohibition on the writing of women qua women that has (for example) buried so much of the poetic and rhetorical tradition of black slave America, although many of the same devices are used to trivialize the latter when it does get written down; James Baldwin’s “long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer”¹ can be easily dealt with by a majority culture in which what is written down is what counts. The fragments that remain are dealt with largely by simply ignoring them, though when such things do surface, more sophisticated methods—to be discussed below—come into play. (For example, education was at first against the law. Then, after emancipation, it became rare, inferior, and unfunded. Such is progress.)

But some white women, and black women, and black men, and other people of color too, have actually acquired the nasty habit of putting the stuff on paper, and some of it gets printed, and printed material, especially books, gets into bookstores, into people’s hands, into libraries, sometimes even into university curricula.

What do we do then?

First of all, it’s important to realize that the absence of formal prohibitions against committing art does not preclude the presence of powerful, informal ones. For example, poverty and lack of leisure are certainly powerful deterrents to art: most nineteenth-century British factory workers, enduring a fourteen-hour day, were unlikely to spend a lifetime in rigorously perfecting the sonnet. (Of course, when working-class literature does appear—and it did and continues to do so—it can be dealt with by the same methods used against women’s art. Obviously the two categories overlap.) It’s commonly supposed that poverty and lack of leisure did not hamper middle-class persons during the last century, but indeed they did—when these persons were middle-class women. It might be more accurate to call these women attached to middle-class men, for by their own independent economic exertions few middle-class women could keep themselves in the middle class; if actresses or singers, they became improper persons (I will deal with this later), and, if married, they could own nothing in England during most of the century (1882 was the year of the codification of the Married Woman’s Property Act). The best an unmarried lady could manage was a governess-ship, that anomalous social position somewhere between gentlewoman and servant. Here is a Miss Weeton in 1811, who, rescued from oblivion by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas, “burned to learn Latin, French, the Arts, the Sciences, anything”—a desire perhaps exacerbated by her duties as governess, which included sewing and washing dishes as well as teaching.² Thirty years later we find the author of Jane Eyre paid twenty pounds a year, “five times the price of laundering a governess’ not very extensive wardrobe” (four pounds a year was deducted for washing) and “about eleven times as much as the price of Jane Eyre,” according to Ellen Moers in Literary Women.³ According to M. Jeanne Peterson, Mrs. Sewell, writing in 1865, equated the salary of a nursery governess with that of a lady’s maid, that of an informed but not accomplished governess with that of a footman, and that of a highly educated governess with that of a coachman or butler.⁴ Emily Dickinson had no money: she had to ask her father for stamps and for money to buy books. As Woolf puts it in A Room of One’s Own, “all those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch” were written “by women so poor that they could not afford to buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write.”⁵ As for the leisure that, one would suppose, attended this odd kind of poverty, Emily Dickinson seems to have had it (although she participated in the family housekeeping and nursed her mother during the latter’s last illness), but according to biographer Gordon Haight the time of the famous Marian Evans (later to become George Eliot) was demanded, through her late twenties, for managing the household and caring for her dying father, she “nursing him night and day . . . looks like a ghost.” In 1859, after ten years in lodgings, the famous novelist and George Henry Lewes bought a house; hers were “the responsibilities of housekeeping—buying furniture . . . finding and managing a servant, ordering meals—a task which Lewes sometimes undertook to leave her free to work.”⁶ Marie Curie’s biographer, her daughter Eve, describes her mother’s cleaning, shopping, cooking, and child care, all unshared by Pierre Curie and all added to a full working day during Madame Curie’s early domestic years, which were also the beginnings of her scientific career.⁷

Nor does the situation change much in the twentieth century. Sylvia Plath, rising at five in the morning to write, was—as far as her meager work-time went—fortunate compared to Tillie Olsen, a working-class woman, who describes the triple load of family, writing, and full-time outside job necessary for family survival. Olsen writes:

When the youngest of our four was in school . . . the world of my job . . . and the writing, which I was somehow able to carry around within me, through work, through home. Time on the bus, even when I had to stand . . . the stolen moments at work . . . the deep night after the household tasks were done. . . . There came a time when this triple life was no longer possible. The fifteen hours of daily realities became too much distraction for the writing. I lost craziness of endurance. . . . Always roused by the writing, always denied. . . . My work died.⁸

Olsen also quotes Katherine Mansfield:

The house seems to take up so much time. . . . So often this week you and Gordon have been talking while I washed dishes. . . . And after you have gone I walk about with a mind full of ghosts of saucepans and primus stoves. . . . And you [John Middleton Murry] calling, what ever I am doing, writing, “Tig, isn’t there going to be tea? It’s five o’clock.”

Mansfield continues, blaming herself (“I loathe myself today”) and asks for Murry to say, “I understand.”⁹ (She does not ask for help.)

It is also Olsen, in her heartbreaking biography of Rebecca Harding Davis (in Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills),¹⁰ who studies, detail by detail, the impossibility of being artist, full-time housekeeper and mother, and full-time family breadwinner. In 1881, Davis writes her son, Richard Harding Davis, “Not inspiration, practice. A lasting, real success takes time and patient, steady work” (p. 149). But she herself, as Olsen makes clear, did not, and could not, take her own advice: “Often there were only exhausted tag-ends of herself in tag-ends of time left over after the house, Clarke [her husband], the babies, for a book that demanded all her powers, all her concentration. Sometimes she had to send off great chunks unread, unworked, to meet the inexorable monthly deadline” (p. 129). It is perhaps no accident that George Eliot, the Brontës, and Christina Rossetti were childless, and Elizabeth Barrett effectively so (one child, late in life, and servants), or that Davis

. . . accepted unquestioningly that . . . it was Clarke as a man who should be enabled to do his best work, while her ordained situation as a woman was to help him toward that end: to be responsible for house, children, the proper atmosphere for his concentration and relaxation. (p. 138)

A contemporary writer, Kate Wilhelm, says this:

. . . there were so many pressures to force me into giving up writing again, to become mother, housewife, etc. . . . My husband was sympathetic and wanted me to write, but seemed powerless. . . . I realized the world, everyone in it practically, will give more and more responsibility to any woman who will continue to accept it. And when the other responsibilities are too great, her responsibility to herself must go. Or she has to take a thoroughly selfish position and refuse the world, and then accept whatever guilt there is.

Unless a woman knows she is another Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen, how can she say no . . . ? It is generally expected that the children, the house, school functions, husband’s needs, yard, etc. all come first. . . . to reverse that order . . . is hard. Nothing in our background has prepared us for this role.¹¹

If time is vital, so is the accessibility of materials and training. This may not seem as much of a factor for writers as it does for painters, but if women have never been denied the possession of grade-A bond paper and lead pencils, that may be only because such a prohibition would be impossible to enforce. The history of debarring women from higher education is too well known to need repeating here. What may not be generally known is that the debarring, in modified form, sometimes continues. For example, when I entered Cornell University’s College of Arts and Sciences in 1953 I entered (unknowingly) under a female quota. When I entered the college again as a faculty member in 1967 the quota had been increased to 50 percent, and when I left in 1973 the college was in the midst of a battle over whether to abolish the quota altogether and, for the first time in history, to allow female entering students to outnumber male (since the girls competing for places in the freshman class had better academic qualifications, by and large, than the boys).

Certainly in fields where access to materials and training could be controlled, they were. As Karen Petersen and J. J. Wilson point out in Women Artists, the two female founders of the Royal Academy in England (Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffmann) are not present in person in John Zoffany’s group portrait of the academy’s founders, The Academicians Studying the Naked Model, but are there “only in portraits on the wall, as they were forbidden by law and custom to be in the studio with a nude figure, male or female.” (No other women were allowed into the academy until 1922.) We find, in the next century, that although women could study from plaster casts of the antique, in 1848 “the nude statuary gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts was open to women only between ten and eleven on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.” By 1883 in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Thomas Eakins’ “Ladies Modeling Class,” “forbidden access to nude human models,” studied anatomy from a cow.¹²

But even though paper and pencil are easier to obtain than canvas and paint, even if one can deal with the matter of time and all the familial obligations that are assumed to come first, even if formal education is not formally denied, there is still that powerful intangible known as climate of expectation. Here in 1661 is Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, blessed with leisure, wealth, and (according to Virginia Woolf) an understanding husband:

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen

Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed,

That fault can by no virtue be redeemed.

And here is Dorothy Osborne’s comment on Winchilsea’s contemporary, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, also leisured, wealthy, and “married to the best of husbands”: “Sure the poore woman is a little distracted, shee could never bee soe rediculous else as to venture at writeing book’s and in verse too, if I should not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that.”¹³

In 1837 Charlotte Brontë wrote the then poet laureate, Robert Southey, asking his opinion of her poetry. Southey answered “that it showed talent” but “advised her to give up thoughts of becoming a poet”: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as . . . recreation.” Brontë replied:

I carefully avoid any appearance of pre-occupation and eccentricity. . . . I have endeavored not only attentively to observe the duties a woman ought to fulfill but to feel deeply interested in them. I don’t always succeed, for sometimes when I’m teaching or sewing I would rather be reading or writing; but I try to deny myself.¹⁴

Somewhat later Ellen Glasgow took the manuscript of her first novel to New York City to a “literary advisor” (that is, agent) who told her, “You are too pretty to be a novelist. Is your figure as lovely in the altogether as it is in your clothes?” He then attempted to rape her, letting her go “only after I had promised to come again, and he had kept not only th...