Over at the Ploughshares blog, Cathe Shubert discusses the historic nature of sexism in the publishing industry, and urges her readers to keep searching for an early canon of women writers:
Despite the many gains we have made in including women in our understanding of the history of literature, many students graduate with the false understanding that women did not really write until the nineteenth century–that they just couldn’t. Even Virginia Woolf, in her iconic and popular text A Room Of One’s Own, writes of the impossibility of women writing at the time of Shakespeare, whose plays and sonnets make him famous in the minds of students of literature the world over. Woolf imagines Shakespeare had an equally talented but dismissed sister, Judith, who killed herself having never written a word, since she was never sanctioned by society to explore her gifts. Woolf’s account is heartrending—especially considering the untimely end the author met at her own hands. And yet I fear a majority of scholars and teachers of literature—and indeed even writers—have taken accounts like Woolf’s at face value and simply stopped looking for a canon of women writers beyond the token few that pepper anthologies. There is clearly still much work to be done in terms of revising our historical understanding of what it has meant to be a woman writer—and what it means to write as a woman today.
