Genevieve Pfister, Staff Writer—
Indulge me for a minute. Think back to your high school literature classes. Who did you read? Fitzgerald, maybe? Orwell? Hemingway? Steinbeck? Bradbury? Hawthorne? Twain? Of the names you thought of . . . how many were women? Women of color? If there’s a decent number, that’s awesome. If not, you’re not alone.
The writers mentioned above, and perhaps several others you remembered, are staples of the U.S. literary canon, the unofficial list of works and writers most commonly taught in American classrooms, and lauded as ‘quality’ literature.
The number of historical women writers represented in the canon, and in many American literary textbooks and anthologies, is still concerningly low. Some scholars say this is because there are not enough women to integrate into the canon, and that the few works by women that do exist aren’t high quality.
As a woman who has written a 13-page research paper on the subject, presented that paper at the Midwest Modern Language Association’s conference, and curated a digital database of over 70 under-researched female writers, I can confidently tell you that is absolutely false.
Historical sexism and prejudice, of course, made it incredibly difficult for women to break into the literary sphere, and it’s true that fewer works by women were published as a result. But that does not mean none were. On the contrary, many women writers, including many on my database, employed brilliant blends of subtlety and radicalism to write impressive works of literature that quietly advocated for women’s rights and social justice causes at times when such sentiments were wildly unpopular. In The Revolt of Mother, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman tells the story of a smart, authoritative woman who directly contradicts her husband’s wishes while operating within the traditional gender roles of wife and mother. In The Prologue, poet Anne Bradstreet calls out society for never taking women writers seriously and always seeing them as less intelligent and fitter for domestic tasks than their male counterparts. And in her poem On Being Brought From Africa to America, Phillis Wheatley criticizes white Christian slave traders so skillfully and subtly that her work was promoted by both slaveholders and abolitionists.
You get the idea. The argument that there are no women writers from history or that their work is inferior just doesn’t hold up. And the historical exclusion of women’s voices from the canon is not an excuse to continue that exclusion; it’s the reason we should amplify them.
I am a firm believer in the windows and mirrors principle of literature, which says that books students read in school should serve as both windows into the experiences of others, and mirrors that reflect aspects of their own experience. Thus, the authors and books presented to students should reflect, as much as historically possible, the diversity of writers in history and the diversity of our world today. Yet our society still persists in teaching a literary curriculum dominated by white men, one that perpetuates archaic sexism and the misogynistic myth of women’s inferiority, by implying men’s work is most worthy of study. You tell me: what message does that send students?
Now, I’m not proposing we gut the existing canon. I’m not saying the male authors mentioned above aren’t worthy of study. But it’s time to end the prioritization of their voices over those of women, to end the erasure of women’s very existence from American literature, and to pull back the curtain on centuries of sexism to rediscover the writers history forgot. It’s time to diversify the American literary canon.
For more information on historical women writers, visit missingpageslit.us.