How to Suppress Women's Writing

After coming across references to this book in a range of books and other works, I decided to read this foundational text myself, and I’m glad I did. First of all, I want to point out Russ’s humor. She is sharp, sassy, and incredibly witty. While she critiques the literary world and its structures, she remains consistently eloquent and insightful. This is not a quick or easy read. There are many, many literary references, quite a few of which were very unfamiliar to me, but it’s absolutely worth sticking with. Joanna Russ doesn’t focus so much on "why" women are excluded from the literary world, but rather on "how" this exclusion happens. She outlines several mechanisms: the denial of agency, the pollution of agency, the double standard of content, false categorization, isolation, and more. Overall, the book shows how women have been suppressed within the literary world, but more so it explains why their literature has often been treated as fundamentally different and why, under these conditions, it perhaps could not have been otherwise. The key point is women’s lived realities, which they attempted to express in their writing, but rarely fit into the established literary canon. This is because they experienced different lives and, therefore, a different reality, one that was barely represented or recognized. This book encourages you to question your own assumptions and the way you evaluate literature. I highly recommend it. Although it was written in the 1970s and much has changed since then, many sexist structures still persist today.