Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the authors
OK
How to Suppress Women's Writing 1st Edition
By the author of The Female Man—a provocative survey of the forces that work against women who dare to write.
- ISBN-109780292724457
- ISBN-13978-0292724457
- Edition1st
- PublisherUniversity of Texas Press
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 1983
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
- Print length160 pages
Books with Buzz
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more
Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Climate Pledge FriendlyProducts with trusted sustainability certification(s). Learn morePRODUCT CERTIFICATION (1)

Reducing CO2 products reduce their carbon footprint year after year. Certified by the Carbon Trust.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Review
"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)
From the Back Cover
About the Author
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
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,693,418 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #651 in Women Author Literary Criticism
- #863 in Women Writers in Women Studies
- #6,990 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
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.
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.
Top reviews from other countries
I liked it very much and it came fast.

