How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
"How to Suppress Women's Writing" by Joanna Russ offers a critical examination of the societal factors that contribute to the marginalization and suppression of women's literary contributions from a feminist viewpoint. It highlights the patterns by which women's writing has historically been discouraged, particularly through the lens of criticism predominantly wielded by male reviewers. Russ draws on a diverse array of literary figures—including the Countess of Winchelsea, Aphra Behn, and the Brontë sisters—to illustrate how societal expectations have historically stifled women's creativity. The text uses humor to engage the reader, framing the analysis in a way that makes the serious topic more approachable.
Russ also emphasizes the need for a redefinition of cultural aesthetics to be more inclusive, advocating for recognition that extends beyond traditional Western norms. The work incorporates feminist critiques from notable scholars like Virginia Woolf and Ellen Moers, providing a comprehensive look at the interplay between society and art. While it acknowledges the victimization of women writers, it also inspires reflection on their resilience and impact. The book ultimately invites readers to consider a broader definition of culture that includes diverse voices and experiences, challenging the established literary canon.
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How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
First published: 1983
Type of work: Literary criticism
Form and Content
In this witty analysis of the critical reception of women’s literature, Nebula Award-winning science-fiction writer Joanna Russ explores the social connections of literature and art from a feminist perspective. Russ stresses that her discussion is not a history of oppression; rather, it is an investigation of the ways in which women’s writing has been suppressed, discouraged, and marginalized.
How to Suppress Women’s Writing traces patterns in the suppression of women’s writing, mostly by male critics, drawing on examples from high culture of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States. Russ uses the examples of such diverse literary figures as the Countess of Winchelsea, Aphra Behn, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Sand, Emily Dickinson, and Anne Sexton to show how societal conditions and expectations are brought to bear on the creative efforts of women writers. Russ also provides illustrations of women artists and musicians to support her argument.
In her analysis of women’s literary marginalization, Russ draws heavily on the work of other feminist critics, especially Ellen Moers, Elaine Showalter, and Virginia Woolf. The text begins with a prologue in which Russ uses her science-fiction background to create an alien society in order to draw a parallel with the earthly conditions about which she is concerned. Each succeeding chapter addresses one of the patterns of marginalization that Russ has identified, explaining how the pattern works to suppress women’s creativity and giving many examples, both historical and contemporary, to support her argument. Chapters at the end of the text address literary women’s response to their suppression (including Russ’s own); a call for a redefinition of cultural aesthetics, which would move culture away from the center toward the margin; and the voices of women of color, who are often excluded from the literary canon.
Context
The humor in How to Suppress Women’s Writing makes the text amusing and easy to read (the title itself makes the text sound like a handbook for insecure male critics), but Russ’s humorous tone throughout masks her serious intent. Like many feminists, Russ uses humor to cushion the impact of her sharp social criticism. This is a scholarly text—each chapter contains a minimum of fifteen footnotes—but its contribution to the field of feminist criticism is not so much in the research, which is largely derivative, but in Russ’s ability to relate the social and material conditions under which women live to the art that they create. Thus, How to Suppress Women’s Writing represents an important movement in feminist literary criticism away from a preoccupation with images of women in literature toward a broader consideration of the impact of society on the production of art. The text tends to emphasize the victimization of women writers over their obvious successes in circumventing suppression, but the reader gains important insight into the ways in which the institutionalization of gender bias can influence what literature is read, how literature is read, and what constitutes the meaning of “literature” and “author.”
How to Suppress Women’s Writing is also important for its insistence on an alternative, more inclusive definition of culture which would include literature and art judged by standards other than the traditional Western, white, middle-class, and male orientation.
Bibliography
The Atlantic. CCLII, November, 1983, p. 148.
Christian Science Monitor. February 27, 1984, p. 21.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. This wide-ranging and groundbreaking work examines the responses of nineteenth century women writers to the male-dominated literary tradition in England. Psychologically rather than socially oriented, this text traces a female tradition in literature.
Kirkus Reviews. LI, September 15, 1983, p. 1049.
Poovey, Mary. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Poovey’s work is a sophisticated extension of the social perspective used by Russ. In it, she argues that nineteenth century representations of gender were sites of struggle for power and authority between the genders and reads such texts as Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849-1850) and Jane Eyre from this position.
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. A text from which Russ derives much of the support for her study, this book is one of the first analyses of a woman’s tradition in literature. Like Russ, Showalter uses a social and literary approach as she compares women novelists to their female contemporaries in order to trace the complexity of women’s literary relationships.
Spender, Dale, ed. Living by the Pen: Early British Women Writers. New York: Teachers College Press, 1992. This collection of essays traces the literary heritage of early British women writers in order to distinguish that tradition from the male tradition. Includes essays on the women themselves, the topics on which they wrote, and their achievements as artists.
Todd, Janet. Feminist Literary History. New York: Routledge, 1988. In this introduction to feminist literary theory, Todd seeks to defend the early sociohistoric enterprise of American feminist criticism, of which Russ’s text is an example. She refutes the claim of French feminists that this criticism is historically naïve and, while admitting its limitations, attempts to place it within a larger context of feminist literary criticism.