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How to Suppress Women's Writing 1st Edition

4.6 out of 5 stars 70

By the author of The Female Man—a provocative survey of the forces that work against women who dare to write.


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Editorial Reviews

Review

"She didn't write it. She wrote it but she shouldn't have. She wrote it but look what she wrote about. She wrote it but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art. She wrote it but she had help. She wrote it but she's an anomaly. She wrote it BUT..." How to Suppress Women's Writing is a meticulously researched and humorously written "guidebook" to the many ways women and other "minorities" have been barred from producing written art. In chapters entitled "Prohibitions," "Bad Faith," "Denial of Agency," Pollution of Agency," "The Double Standard of Content," "False Categorization," "Isolation," "Anomalousness," "Lack of Models," Responses," and "Aesthetics" Joanna Russ names, defines, and illustrates those barriers to art-making we may have felt but which tend to remain unnamed and thus insolvable. With the apparent proliferation of women writers in the last decade, is this book still relevant? Ask yourself how many women you know who are trying to make art? And how many find the time, resources, and support to succeed? So long as poverty, lack of leisure, and sexism - those "powerful, informal prohibitions against committing art" - exist, How to Suppress Women's Writing remains timely. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen

Review

"A quirky, irreverent, iconoclastic, idiosyncratic piece of work. It catalogues all the various attitudinal problems and misconceptions ...that allow us to disregard or even discard the artistic productions of women. By defining these patterns so clearly and succinctly, Russ holds a mirror before us a mirror in which we can see ourselves anew." (Annette Kolodny)

"A book of the most profound and original clarity. Like all clear-sighted people who look and see what has been much mystified and much lied about, Russ is quite excitingly subversive. The study of literature should never be the same again . . ." (Marge Piercy)

"Extraordinary and original ...feminist literary criticism rarely explores the social context in which literature is selected for posterity. This, Russ does persuasively, movingly, and in the finest of critical traditions." (Phyllis Chesler)

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0292724454
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Texas Press; 1st edition (September 1, 1983)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 160 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780292724457
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0292724457
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.9 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 out of 5 stars 70

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
70 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2024
Excellent. Informative and well written.
Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2018
Joanna Russ was a science fiction writer who came to prominence in the field in the 1960s, when women in the field were beginning to increase in numbers, but the explosion of women in science fiction of the 1970s was still in the future. She was also one of science fiction's home-grown scholars and critics, doing the work academics and more conventionally "respectable" literary critics were not yet ready to do.

In How to Suppress Women's Writing, she once again takes on work respectable academics and literary critics weren't willing to do: take a long, hard look at how and why women writers and artists, as well as other minority group writers and artists, keep disappearing from the record. Prominent in their own times, they quickly fade from view, leaving later generations to believe that only an exceptional few ever existed, or if they did exist, were inferior, forgettable talents. Emily Dickinson, for instance, is generally presented as springing from nothing, influenced by no predecessors or contemporaries, and influencing no women who came after her.

This is simply wrong. Emily Dickinson corresponded with other women writers, and other women writers and artists in every era had other women they knew, corresponded with, met, were aware of. They supported, influenced, competed with each other.

Often what they were doing appears thin, weak, or simply sui generis, because the literary tradition of which they are a part is invisible or forgotten. Or it's about women's experience, women's lives, women's perception of the world, which appear trivial and superficial in a literary tradition and a culture that centers white, male, heterosexual experiences and viewpoints.

This is a groundbreaking work, and yes, even thirty years later, you do want to read it. It will broaden and enrich your experience of literature, even as it alerts you to the ways in which women's creative work is still devalued.

Highly recommended.

I bought this book.
7 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2014
For reasons both good and bad, HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING by Joanna Russ reads like it could have been written yesterday. Actually, the book is older than me—published in 1983—but Russ’ smirking, clear-eyed perspective is still relevant.

HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING investigates historical and social reasons that may have kept whole generations of women from writing in the first place (things like differential rates of literacy, disparate access to education, women’s historical lack of leisure time and position as wife as a second work shift). She also interrogates how it is that when women somehow do manage to write that women’s writing is ignored, slandered or undercut. The book was published by the University of Texas Press, which puts it squarely in the realm of academic works, but the writing is colloquial and accessible throughout. You do not need to be steeped in literary criticism or feminist theory to read and understand Russ’ arguments here, which is a great strength.

She argues that what is considered “good” or “worthy” literature (and by extension, that which is taught and thus survives across generations) is designated as such by privileged groups who have a vested interest in keeping themselves privileged. The ways in which they limit entrance or access to literature are by mental acrobatics such as assuming women writers didn’t really write their works, or that it doesn’t matter if they wrote it because it’s the wrong kind of work, or that maybe they wrote it and maybe it’s good but it’s the only good thing she ever wrote. Some of this is deliberate, but just as much is unconscious bias. Each chapter is broken into one tactic that has been used to suppress women’s writing, and Russ packs her chapters full of anecdotes, survey results, and historical examples to support her claims. And, somehow, she does it with a wry and witty voice that makes the writing lively.

Still, the book is not a perfect one. It’s centered very squarely on white middle class women’s experiences. Russ occasionally throws in an anecdote about her friend and colleague, Samuel Delany, a Black scifi writer, but he himself is tokenized in the doing. Clearly throughout the text she attempts to draw parallels between gendered exclusions in literary circles and race-based exclusions, but Delany pops up over and over again as if he is the only Black writer she knows (and as if Black writers are the only voices who can counterpart the voices of white writers). White lesbian authors pop up far more frequently than writers of color, and women writers of color are virtually never mentioned in the main body of the text. This lack of intersectional focus irked me while I read it—it’s such a good book, and also such a clear example of the failings of second wave feminism. Russ uses the Afterword to acknowledge her failing here, directly addressing her unfamiliarity with and inability to capture the struggles of women writers of color. She talks about stumbling across a beautiful, rich treasure trove of writing by women of color—a parallel canon, as it were—which unintentional struck me as fetishizing and exoticizing of women of color’s experiences.
28 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2017
How can a book written about sexism and suppressing the writing and work of women written in 1983 still be so relevant? More, Russ was keen on the intersections of oppression and spoke not just to sexism but also racism and classism. Should be read by those interested in reading and writing culture, as well as feminism.
6 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2019
As illuminating in 2019 as when it was written, this book is like turning on a light when you didn't know you were in the dark.
3 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2018
Why aren't women called geniuses? Why aren't many women in the literary canon? This book will tell you why, and it has nothing to do with their ability.
4 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2016
Clear and honest and intelligent. The only problem is that Russ's critique is still relevant decades later.
7 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2020
So many very long quotes and longer personal diatribes. The book is well researched, but annoying to read because of the above. Makes you not care what the subject is about.
One person found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Heather Number 1
5.0 out of 5 stars women haven't had the chance to be geniuses or produce great works, because of culture
Reviewed in Canada on April 5, 2017
ESSENTIAL reading. Even progressives may have looked at literary (and artistic) history and thought, Well, women haven't had the chance to be geniuses or produce great works, because of culture, child-rearing, etc. But no! They've done it backwards, in high heels, and then had critics dismiss it (for all the reasons stated in each chapter of this book, including claims that they weren't the real author, or that they did write something but it was a fluke). Really just a great overview of how people who claim to be objective or logical will dismiss every example that doesn't fit their sad little worldview of gender cliches.
2 people found this helpful
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Kristyn Willson
4.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking
Reviewed in Australia on December 14, 2019
... but sad that suppression is still happening.
Cliente Amazon
4.0 out of 5 stars Nice
Reviewed in Spain on November 1, 2015
Even though the book is quite old, it is in perfect condition.
I liked it very much and it came fast.