HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING by Joanna Russ
Evelyn C. Leeper
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HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING by Joanna Russ
University of Texas Press, 1983, ISBN 0-292-72445-4, $7.95.
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
Copyright 1992 Evelyn C. Leeper
Having followed the recent discussion on Usenet about this book, I did
something apparently rare on the Net--I went out and read the book(s) being
discussed.
First of all, HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING is in print--it had its
fifth printing from the University of Texas Press this year--and is
available from them if you can't find it locally. (I found it in Tower
Books in New York.)
But before reading HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING, I read Virginia
Woolf's A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN. The title A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN is misleading--
Woolf says what a writer (any writer, man or woman) needs is FIVE HUNDRED
POUNDS A YEAR and a room of one's own, with the emphasis clearly on the
former. Her explanation of the dearth of women's writing is that women had
no financial independence (prior to 1882 and the Married Woman's Property
Act in Britain, which is where Woolf was primarily writing about) rather
than any lack of a separate room per se. Clearly the masses of working-
class men--coal miners in Wales, for example--were no better off.
I do find amusing Woolf's claim (on page 102) that Galsworthy and
Kipling "celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world
of men... the emotion with which [their] books are permeated is to a woman
incomprehensible. ... The fact is that neither Mr. Galsworthy nor
Mr. Kipling has a spark of the woman in him." True this may be, yet I was
immediately reminded of Robert Silverberg's statement on page xii of the
introduction to James Tiptree's WARM WORLDS AND OTHERWISE: "It has been
suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is
to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't
think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the
stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the
author of the James Tiptree stories is male." Well, James Tiptree, Jr.,
turned out to be Alice Racoona Sheldon and Silverberg was only the best-
known of the people who couldn't deduce this. Would Woolf have done any
better? (This is important and I will return to this idea later.)
Proceeding to Russ's book, I have to say that she did manage to collect
a lot of quotes from--and anecdotes about--some amazing dense people. But I
believe that a collection of such anecdotal evidence could be made to
"prove" the suppression of almost every group's writings or art. See
Richard Wagner for a starter set on why Jews can't write music, for example.
ROTTEN REVIEWS and ROTTEN REVIEWS II edited by Bill Henderson will also be
useful.
Russ then lists a variety of ways that women's writing is suppressed.
Note that she is not claiming, as Woolf seems to have been, that women
didn't write. Quite the opposite--Russ claims that MOST of the books
written in the period she is covering were written by women, though I find
her evidence for that claim flimsy in the extreme. (Of the much-discussed
claim that "women wrote one-half to two-thirds of the novels published in
English in the eighteenth century," I will merely note that Russ cites as
her source for this datum a "personal interview with Dolores Palermo.") But
Russ is examining why none of these books, or very few, made it into the
accepted "canon" of literature.
Under "denial of agency," Russ lists the technique of saying "The man
inside her wrote it." (I'm not sure how this supposedly keeps things out of
the canon, so I suppose Russ is saying that this is a way of "explaining"
the few women's works that are there. Still, it seems to be somewhat out of
the purported scope of the book.) Yet the quotes she uses to illustrate this
seem perfect examples of Woolf's claim "If one is a man, still the woman
part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse
with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great
mind is androgynous" (page 98 of A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN). Woolf is cited in
HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING more than anyone else except Charlotte
Bronte, and while not always in support of Russ's thesis, this "non-mention"
is of some importance, if only to indicate that Russ is picking and choosing
her examples and quotes to support her thesis where the entirety of the data
might not. This picking and choosing is even admitted at the end of the
chapter "Pollution of Agency": "And let's discount the idiocies of the
various forms of denial of agency and pollution thereof; most critics, male
or female, will not declare a work bad ipso facto because its authorship is
female, or indulge in the indecencies of pollution of agency by declaring
the author per se improper, ridiculous, abnormal, and so on." Then why
spend so much time and space on these techniques if they are so anomalous?
Surely the fact that she gives pages of evidence and then says, in effect,
that they don't count makes us take the evidence to come with a lot of
skepticism and a large grain of salt.
In the spirit of selecting what may or may not be isolated incidents to
support a theory, I will provide a counter-example to Russ's "Double
Standard of Content": Suzy McKee Charnas's "Boobs." Russ says this double
standard is saying, "she wrote it but look what she wrote about." This is
of course perfectly applicable to Charnas's story, but the story
nevertheless did achieve a certain critical and popular success, even among
men. And Connie Willis is likely to break even more "barriers" with "Even
the Queen" (which you should all run out and read, by the way). Whether
these stories will achieve "canonical" status remains to be seen, but
certainly they don't seem to be dismissed out of hand because of their
content.
Russ's contention that only female poets are negatively categorized,
while male poets when categorized are done so in terms flattering to the ego
is arguable--I don't think "Self-Destructive Visionary" is notably more
positive than "Madcap," and the categorizations of Poe and Coleridge one
sees are hardly likely to arouse envy or emulation. Much is made of the
negative characterization of Emily Dickinson, yet that has not prevented her
from being ranked with Whitman as one of the two great American poets. (And
Whitman also had his detractors when his work first appeared. They also
said, "he wrote it but look what he wrote about.")
There has been some discussion of whether Russ's theory is scientific
in the sense of being falsifiable--that is, can it be demonstrated to be
wrong. And apparently it can't, since any statements which attempt to
explain why there are so many more well-known male authors than female Russ
can claim are merely rationalizations. No one can argue that there are NOT
more men in the "canon" than women. What is at issue is why, and whether
"canon" is a reasonable measure. After all, as has been pointed, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs are certainly non-canon,
yet have survived perfectly well--better in fact than many canonical
authors. My personal feeling here (based on what I have read, though of
course your mileage may vary) is that Woolf is closer to the truth than
Russ: women never did the writing in the first place--as with Woolf's
example of Shakespeare's (fictional) sister--or women wrote but never sent
their work to be published--even Emily Dickinson was hesitant about showing
her poetry to others, and how many others never even got that far. The old
adage that a woman's name should appear in print only three times--when she
was born, got married, and died--probably kept a lot of writing in the desk
drawer. As I said before, I am skeptical of Russ's (actually Palermo's)
claim of the large number of books by women being published in times gone
by.
But even worse, any attempt to correct the situation is met with
hostility. Nzotake Shange was "criticized by some blacks for being anti-
male" for her play FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE
RAINBOW WAS ENUF. But when she "received praise from white male
reviewers ... one friend of [Russ's] commented ... sourly, 'They don't think
it's about them.'" If they don't like it, that's proof of the suppression;
if they do, that's no good either, because it must mean they don't get it.
(Russ of course feels entitled to criticize or praise men's writing--is
there a double standard here?) So if male educators et al had admitted all
this women's writing into the canon, it seems as if there would still be a
problem--they would have admitted it because they didn't get it.
To be fair to Russ, she does then flail women (well, white heterosexual
women) for using the same methods to suppress or at least disparage the
writings of minority women or lesbians. Unfortunately this, coupled with
her comments on Shange, seems to lead to a fracturing of literature--the
implication that only black women can appreciate works by black women, only
women can appreciate works by women, etc. This all gets to a very basic
question: is literature, or indeed art in any form, universal, or is it
specialized? Like many questions, this has a compromise answer (in my
opinion). Someone once said, "Anyone who thinks that music is a universal
language should try telling an Eskimo his igloo is on fire using only a
kazoo." We need to learn to appreciate different musical styles. (Peking
opera, Mozart's DON GIOVANNI, and Glass's EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH are all
operas--whatever that means--but have little in common besides that word.)
So maybe what Russ is trying to say in HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING
is that we are taught to appreciate too narrow a range of art. Certainly
there are examples of men's art that was initially rejected (Whitman,
Stravinsky, etc.) and then eventually "understood." But on the other hand
we cannot say that everything in every style is valid as "great art." (I'm
not sure what "great art" is, but if Russ is asking why women's writing is
not in the "canon," she must have some concept that there IS a canon.)
Woolf's answer was that the author needs to "be in touch" with both the
anima and animus (to borrow the Jungian terms) of her or his personality.
Russ seems to be saying that the author does not need this, and in fact
should reject this. Women haven't been accepted because what they write
isn't understood by men, but that's the fault of the men, who apparently
should either work to understand it (though how can you ever tell if they
do), or accept it on someone else's say-so. This is cultural relativism and
when carried to its ultimate conclusion, ends up saying that every novel or
poem is as valid as any other, so long as it has some set of people that it
speaks to. But Woolf seems to feel that the great writers write so that
both men and women can appreciate them, which is why she feels that
Galsworthy and Kipling are not great writers. On the whole, I have to say
that I agree with Woolf. A great novel or poem transcends the barriers of
sex, race, religion, or class to touch something universal. Yes, people
should be exposed to a variety of styles. Ernest Hemingway is not James
Joyce, and Alice Walker is not Jane Austen. (Though any discussion of books
written in the last fifty years is questionable--only time will tell what
the classics, or "canon" will be.)
%T How to Suppress Women's Writing
%A Joanna Russ
%C Austin
%D 1983
%I University of Texas Press
%O paperback, US$7.95
%G ISBN 0-292-72445-4
%P 159pp
%T A Room of One's Own
%A Virginia Woolf
%C New York
%D 1929
%I Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
%O paperback, US$5.95 [1989]
%G ISBN 0-15-678783-4
%P 114pp
Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | att!mtgzy!ecl or e...@mtgzy.att.com
Valerie Maslak
Tillie Olsens' _Silences_ and Carolyn Heilbrun's _Writing a Woman's
Life_
Valerie Mzslak
Bronis Vidugiris
) Having followed the recent discussion on Usenet about this book, I did
)something apparently rare on the Net--I went out and read the book(s) being
)discussed.
What recent discussion was this? Nothing in our spool directory in either
of the two newsgroups this was posted to.
I've read some of Russ's other stuff - I liked some of her earlier SF
(such as Picnic on Paradise) but became disenchanted sometime around
'The Female Man' and stopped reading her. Though the quoted work was
apparently quite influential in some SF circles, I've never had the
opportunity or inclination to read it - I may have seen a few summaries
of it here and there.
So I'll break net.tradition and not comment on this specific work any more,
but I'd certainly be interested in any more generic disucssion of Russ
and her books, if it is not limited to some specific works.
Diana Bental
> didn't write. Quite the opposite--Russ claims that MOST of the books
> written in the period she is covering were written by women, though I find
> her evidence for that claim flimsy in the extreme. (Of the much-discussed
> claim that "women wrote one-half to two-thirds of the novels published in
> English in the eighteenth century," I will merely note that Russ cites as
> her source for this datum a "personal interview with Dolores Palermo.")
Well, there's a wealth of support for Russ's claim in
Dale Spender: "Mothers of the Novel" Pandora, 1986
From the introduction (p5):
"While I leave myself open to the charge of not having looked hard
enough, I must confess that my researches turned up more than one
hundred women novelists before Jane Austen and no more than thirty
men".
This book is subtitled "100 good women writers before Jane Austen". It
includes a list of 106 women writers and their 568 novels published in
the 18th and early 19th century.
From the section "Literary standards" (p118)
".. if since the eighteenth century it has become a well-established
fact that women did not write novels during the 1700s, or that women
did not write good novels, this was a fact which was *not* known
at the time. For then it was widely appreciated that women wrote
novels and wrote them well. ... it was not unknown during the
eighteenth century for men to masquerade as female authors to obtain
some of the higher status (and greater chances of publication)
which went with being a woman writer.
... as early as June 1770 the "Gentleman's Magazine" thought it proper
to conduct its own investigations as to the sex of authors in the
interests of being able to provide its readers with information on
whether the latest production form a supposedly female pen was genuine.
...
In 1773 the "Monthly Review" stated that when it came to fiction the
field was filled by ladies, and well into the nineteenth century
it was conceded that not only were women novelists plentiful, but
that were good.
Yet by the twentieth century when Ian Watt comes to outline the
rise of the novel, women are no longer held in high esteem. He
does - in passing - acknowledge that *the majority of eighteenth
century novels were written by women*, but how very damning is this
faint and only praise."
[Ian Watt, "The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and
Fielding" (1957)]
The following page also includes an estimate that roughly half the
novels published in the 18th century were written by women, based on
Spender's list and Ian Watt's estimate of 2000 novels published in the
18th C (flaky arithmetic but there may be more women writers than are
listed because some authors are of unknown sex and she only includes
writers for whom there's evidence that they're women.)
Dale Spender notes some of the reasons why Woolf might be wrong when
she describes her own university education (p115-116):
"along with all the other graduates of `Eng Lit' departments I
left university with the well-cultivated impression that men
had created the novel and that there were no women novelists
(or none of note) before Jane Austen ...
Like Virginia Woolf in the British Museum I too found that the
library catalogue and shelves were filled with books predominantly
authored by men. And in the bookshops a steady stream of new and
attractively packaged editions of early male novelists helped
to reinforce the belief that it was only men who had participated in
the initial production of this genre. I neither stumbled across
fascinating "old" editions of women's novels on the library shelves
nor found interesting republications when browsing through bookshops.
As far as I knew both the old and the new were representative of
the books that had been published, and as there were virtually no
women among them it had to be because women had not written books."
Dale Spenders comments that she found it hard to track down early
women writers. Many reviews and critics simply left early women
writers out or lumped them together as unworthy of inclusion or
discussion. Her long list of references includes several very recent
books by female writers such as
Janet Todd, "Dictionary of British and American Women Writers
1660-1880 (1984)
which was published while Spender was writing her book. These books
have made information about early women writers far more accessible
than it would have been when Joanna Russ was writing her book (and
certainly more than when Virginia Woolf was writing). My guess is
that the "personal communication" was needed simply because the books
were still in press!
Diana
Diana Bental, JANET: di...@uk.ac.ed.aisb
Dept of Artificial Intelligence, ARPA: di...@aisb.ed.ac.uk
University of Edinburgh. UUCP: ...!ukc!aisb.ed.ac.uk!diana