women writers
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Maintaining Human Life
Writing may be hard work, but it isn’t the kind that pays the bills. Tillie Olsen’s seminal Silences wonders just what kind of work writing really is, and who has the privilege to do it: Though access to education has…
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The Internet Hates Female Writers
More than 5 percent of the messages a woman receives online will be abusive or derogatory in nature, on average. Piers Morgan, whom researchers rank as the No. 1 receiver of hate tweets per day, gets 8.4 percent negative comments…
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BinderCon: A Symposium on Women Writers Today
Mitt Romney ignited a feminist revolution during the 2012 presidential debates when he said, “I went to a number of women’s groups and said: ‘Can you help us find folks?’ And they brought us whole binders full of women.” Throw VIDA’s pie…
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Writing Romance Fiction is a Feminist Act
The overall theme of feminism, for me, is not about having it all. It’s about having what you want and being honest about who you are. It’s about respecting who you are and what you do.
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Privilege vs. Privilege
In an excerpt from her book The Shelf, Phyllis Rose illustrates the systematic dismissal of women writers through the imagined figure of Prospero’s Daughter: wealthy and educated yet burdened by the demands of a family life whose quotidian challenges, having…
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The Women of Brooklyn
I can confirm, based on my own reading list this spring, that there is no shortage of fiction set in Brooklyn. In fact, you could almost say that the Lethems and, more recently, the Lins have been supplanted: It’s been…
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Funny Women
Love our “Funny Women“ column as much as we do? Find out who “Funny Women” editor Elissa Bassist thinks is hilarious, courtesy of Vela Magazine.
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We Respectfully Decline
At Guernica, Alexandria Peary observes a fine but lethal distinction between being declined and being rejected, a difference that had very real effects on the literary ambitions of nineteenth-century female writers. While to decline a submission implies thoughtful deliberation over that…
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A Year of Women Writers
Although plenty of critics and academics have done a wonderful job reinterpreting what it means to be “the canon,” there are still many readers in the US who, consciously or subconsciously, believe that men have contributed most of what we…
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What’s Sexist and What’s Not
Novelist Jennifer Weiner has long been an outspoken critic of literary sexism, vocally demanding respect for herself and other female authors and pushing back against stodgy heavyweights like Jonathan Franzen. But how much dismissal of Weiner can be attributed to…
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What Men Talk About When They Talk About Mary Gaitskill
I hate it when men talk about Mary Gaitskill. I call for a permanent moratorium on men gassily discoursing on Mary Gaitskill.
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Literary Geniuses Say Some Not-So-Genius Things
In “honor” of David Gilmour’s comments to a Hazlitt interviewer about how he refused to teach books by female authors, Rumpus contributor Michelle Dean rounded up some other literary men’s contributions to the field of misogyny. From Hemingway blaming all men’s…