How To Suppress Women's Writing / Joanna Russ
How To Suppress Women's Writing is an essay published by Joanna Russ in 1983, which she describes as "a sketch of an analytic tool: patterns in the suppression of women's writing" (prologue, p. 5).
It is a brilliant book, containing a mine of information and a wealth of insight into sexist tactics in literature, covering the vicious circle that operates from the prohibitions and material conditions that prevent women from writing, to the obstacles in publishing, the social conditions that meet authors who have published, and the impact on readers.
The Afterword "is poetic justice" (p. 135): Russ addresses her own suppression of writers of colour from the purview of How to Suppress Women's Writing and describes the consequences of her ignorance of their work.
Related Reading
At the start of a later work, Joanna Russ refers to Dale Spender's essay, Women of Ideas: What Men Have Done to Them, published in 1982:
- Many feminists have suspected that women's achievements in general and previous feminist movements in particular have been edited out of critical history, but only in Spender's book have I found this suspicion substantiated by an accumulation of evidence (more than eighty cases) that didn't allow me to say, "Oh, sure, we all know that," but instead, "Omigod, I didn't know it was that bad."
Spender's work in Women of Ideas precedes and complements Russ's, in adopting a chronological study of specific instances that illustrate the same patterns which Russ began to analyse independently. Dale Spender situates the suppression of women's ideas by men as a function and a result of the sexual harassment used to oppress women as a class.
Jeanne Gomoll wrote "An Open Letter to Joanna Russ" in 1987 in which she said about the dismissal of women's contribution to SF in the 70s:
- I think I've just discovered another strategy to suppress women's writing (...) "They wrote it, but they were a fad."
The letter contains an eloquent attack against the men's forgetfulness about science fiction fandom.