Almost a century ago, Virginia Woolf published one of her most famous works, A Room of One's Own. She defines this very room as a key step towards the realization of a woman as a writer. The room has a double meaning - it gives a woman time for herself and her thoughts, but it also represents the freedom to own property, an act that was not a reality for many women (and still is not for some) in the past.
In the last hundred years, a lot has changed in terms of women's rights, especially in the part of the world we call the West (although we know the situation is still far from ideal), where women who want to become writers generally have their own personal space from which they create new worlds and share them with loyal readers. However, during my undergraduate studies in language and literature, I noticed that the books I read in various lectures were mostly written by male writers. During the three years of study, the total number of books that were foreseen by the program, and which were written by women, was five. A devastatingly small number for a college attended mostly by the female part of the population. The situation is not better in Serbia either, where Isidora Sekulić is the only author on the must-read list of modern literature.
It all starts with formal bans that meant restricting women's ability to get paper, pencils or any way of writing, and up to informal ones, which meant creating such expectations and ways of life for women that did not allow them time for intellectual activities. If a woman manages to get out of the role of a good mother, a devoted wife and a respectable lady, then the next step is to simply deny the fact that a woman wrote the book. The book that marked the beginning of science fiction, Frankenstein, was long thought to have been written by Percy Shelley, the husband of the real author Mary Shelley, not only because he wrote the foreword to the book but also because critics of the time thought that a woman could not come up with something as terrifying as Frankenstein's monster. There are other patriarchal defense mechanisms: characterizing women as immoral if they engage in art, or deeming the male experience more important than the female. As Ras herself states in the book, if a man describes anger and rage, he shows revolutionary emotions, while a woman is simply frustrated and hysterical. Putting women in the wrong category is another linguistic mechanism: thus Marie Curie was once presented to the scientific community as "her husband Pierre's laboratory assistant" and the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was defined as "the wife of the famous poet Robert Browning", automatically isolating her work to the Portuguese sonnets she wrote to her husband.
Elizabeth is not the only one whose work has met with isolation. It has happened (and still happens) to many women writers that the literary community accepts their works as valuable, but defines them as a unique and unrepeatable case. Thus, Charlotte Brontë's only valuable work became Jane Eyre, Sylvia Plath reduced to her confessional poetry with elements indicating her mental state, and Amy Lowell to works representing her as an unhappy married woman.
Some of the examples Joanna cites will make you laugh, others will make you sad, or perhaps make you feel powerless and angry when you realize that the book was published in 1983 and some things still haven't changed. Let reading this book this very March 8th be your small change that will equalize the female written word with the male. Happy eighth of March!
Miona Dinic
