How To Suppress Women's Writing

[coalescent]

Because of the circumstances under which it was initially recommended to me, I very nearly never read this book. That would have been a shame. And in the end, to be perfectly honest, one of the reasons I read it at all was simply so that I would be able to say that I had. Moreover, I was more than half-minded not to write about it, based on the suspicion that any discussion that followed would rapidly become tiring and unproductive. But not writing about it would be to do the book a disservice, so here I am; and if you've never trusted any other recommendation you've seen of it, please trust mine. Whatever issues I bring up below, bear in mind that if you have any interest in how society discusses and assigns value to writing I would still say this book is worth reading.

How to Suppress Women's Writing is a short book by Joanna Russ, about 150 pages, first published in 1983. It is part historical study, part feminist critique, part literary survey, and part polemic. It takes as its starting point the obvious fact that writing by women is under-represented in popular and literary canons, and then outlines mechanisms by which this is achieved. Occasionally writing by other cultural minorities is also considered. You can read the prologue and the first chapter here. Laid out baldly, the list of mechanisms looks daft:

- She didn't write it
- She wrote it, but she had help
- She wrote it but she shouldn't have
- She wrote it, but look what she wrote about
- She wrote it but she only wrote one of it
- She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist (but it isn't really art)
- She wrote it, but she's an anomaly

Some of them don't look any less daft in context, but Russ doesn't, for the most part, suggest that these mechanisms are conscious--

In the case of women writers and other 'wrong' groups practicing art, the techniques of containment, belittlement, and sheer denial are sometimes so very illogical (and so very prevalent) that it's hard not to believe there's a conscious conspiracy going on--how could anyone argue so idiotically and not be aware of it? Yet it's equally easy to insist that silliness like that must be a matter of ignorance--how could anyone aware of such idiocy not stop, if for no other reason than sheer embarrassment? And if the theory of conscious conspiracy won't do (with some exceptions, chiefly where money is involved), while the theory of total ignorance won't do either, what's going on? (17)

--rather that they are unconscious, inherent in the established framework of literary study. They propagate when people do not question their context or the context of ideas presented to them. This is a (relentlessly) negative view of humanity, but it does force you to sit up and think about your own complicity in the works that society has wrought.

In general, Russ writes acutely, honestly and entertainingly about these problems. But she can also be extremely frustrating; the most common experience I had while reading How to Suppress Women's Writing was one of saying "yes, but ..." For instance, immediately after the passage above she continues:

(There is a third theory, in which each supposed case of sexism, racism or class disadvantage becomes a matter of personal enmity here or chance there or some other motive somewhere else. Such a theory is part of the problem, not its explanation. It amounts simply to the denial that there is a problem.) (17-18)

Yes, but ... this is a substantial simplification, and that makes me uneasy. Several times, Russ makes it clear that How to Suppress Women's Writing is not intended as a definitive statement, that she has had neither the time or the resources to achieve that and encourages others to pick up where she leaves off, which is fair enough; and yet, and yet. Because the thing is, a given case of sexism, racism or class disadvantage does not become a matter of personal enmity, or chance, or some other motive, it almost certainly is a matter of personal enmity, or chance, or some other motive. It is both an individual case and part of a pattern, and while--as Russ correctly points out--to concentrate only on individual details is to miss the forest for the trees, to consider only the forest seems to me equally problematic.

At other points, she undermines excellent insights with less-than-perfect metaphors:

In everybody's present historical situation, there can be, I believe, no single center of value and hence no absolute standards. That does not mean that assignment of values must be arbitrary or self-serving (like my students, whose defense of their poetry is "I felt it"). It does mean that for the linear hierarchy of good and bad it becomes necessary to substitute a multitude of centers of value, each with its own periphery, some closer to each other, some farther apart.

[...]

There used to be an odd, popular, and erroneous idea that the sun revolved around the earth.

This has been replaced by an even odder, equally popular, and equally erroneous idea that the earth goes around the sun.

In fact, the moon and the earth revolve around a common center, and this commonly-centred pair revolves with the sun around another common center, except that you must figure in all the solar planets here, so things get complicated. (120-21)

You can see what she's trying to do, and I'm sympathetic to it, but the problem is that as soon as you start thinking about her metaphor in terms of why, it breaks down. The reason a heliocentric view was (eventually) adopted is that it is more accurate than geocentrism. The reason we have not adopted a more general view of cosmology for our day-to-day lives, although we know that it is true, is because it is not particularly more useful to do so. Heliocentrism is good enough for most purposes, and I don't think that's an implication that Russ wanted there.

My biggest reservation about the book, though, is in what it says about reviewing and criticism, or more accurately in what it leaves me as a reviewer able to say: sometimes, it doesn't seem to leave me very much at all. That is to a certain extent to be expected. This is primarily a piece of political writing, one that draws attention to patterns that anyone thinking about fiction should be aware of; it is probably not intended to be taken as a literal model for criticism. And yet ...

Chapter 7 deals with 'she wrote it, but she only wrote one of it': the idea that, say, Jane Eyre is the only book by Charlotte Bronte in the literary canon because it's the only book she wrote that's worth reading. I had a number of problems with this. First, it is an argument directed at people who believe that 'the canon' is in some way definitive, whereas I take it to be a starting point. Secondly, it should be obvious that representative cherry-picking is not something that afflicts only women writers. Russ is well aware of this, and so it turns out that the first few pages of the chapter are misdirection before she gets to the real thrust of her argument:

One might argue--and justly--that many male writers are also represented by only one book or one group of poems. I would answer first that the damage done the women is greater because the women constitute so few of the total in anthologies, classes, curricula, and reading lists at any level of education. Moreover, the real mischief of the myth of the isolated achievement, as it is applied to the "wrong" writers, is that the criteria of selection are in themselves loaded and so often lead to the choice of whatever in the writer's work will reinforce the stereotypical notion of what women can write or should write. (65)

This makes sense; I buy it. It doesn't distill into a soundbite as neat as 'she wrote it, but she only wrote one of it,' however, which is a bit unfortunate for a book that is most often referenced by its soundbites. And what do you do if you believe that the soundbite is true? If you've read most or everything by a writer, but are of the opinion that only one or two of the works are genuinely memorable?

I also had problems working out what Russ actually thinks about "women's writing" as a category. In the above quote she appears to be against the idea that it is a category with unique content. This view comes up at other points as well: one of the variants of "she didn't write it" that she examines is "the man inside her wrote it", deriding the idea that "human or personal complexity is reduced to two sets of characteristics, one male, one female." (22) And yet at other times, she seems quite strongly attached to the idea that there are things only women's writing says, going so far as to argue that men misunderstand women's art, and therefore undervalue it, because they are ignorant of women's experience. This seems slightly contradictory, and leads into another restriction on what I can say:

If women's experience is defined as inferior to, less important than, or "narrower" than men's experience, women's writing is automatically denigrated.

If women's experience is simply not seen, the effect will be the same.

She wrote it but look what she wrote about becomes she wrote it, but it's unintelligible/badly constructed/thin/spasmodic/uninteresting, etc, a statement by no means identical with she wrote it, but I can't understand it (in which case the failure might be with the reader). (48)

There's a variant of the accessibility debate to be had here--is it desireable that a work contain the information necessary to make it comprehensible?--but I'm more than willing to accept that works can be misinterpreted by readers outside their context. But this seems to go further, arguing that because I am a man I can never be a part of the work's context, and that the only valid criticism of a book that I don't like that is by a woman is "I can't understand it."

This somewhat kneecaps criticism. For instance, I have read two particularly strong science fiction novels by women that were published this year, by Justina Robson and Tricia Sullivan. Can I say that I think the Robson is the more successful? What do you think of my opinion if I further tell you that the Sullivan is the more overtly feminist? How about if I say that a couple of the stories in Holly Phillips' collection In The Palace of Repose do, in fact, seem to me a little thin? The problem is that although every statement that means "I can't understand this" can be written as a more face-saving "this is badly constructed", not every "this is badly constructed" means "I can't understand this." Because fiction by women is going to be just like fiction by men: flawed. The solution, of course, is to write reviews grounded in specific criticisms that allow the reader to judge for themselves whether the conclusions drawn are valid; but this still requires a certain trust in the reviewer, rather than prejudging their suitability on the basis of gender.

As I said before this long litany of nitpicks, I think How to Suppress Women's Writing is worth reading. In a weird way, the fact that I've nitpicked is meant as a recommendation; it is such an argumentative book that you want to argue back, which is as good a way as any of testing how well your own positions stand up. The best way to avoid unconscious prejudice is to be conscious, and for the most part Russ does an excellent job of demonstrating how and why her list of suppressive mechanisms work (how relevant they are twenty-two years after the book was published is up to the individual reader to decide; for myself, some of them seem more prevalent than others). What's missing, perhaps, is a sense of the possible. This is a book that says 'this must be done.' It even ends with a direct challenge: "I've been trying to finish this monster for thirteen ms pages and it won't. Clearly it's not finished. You finish it." (132) But the book doesn't seem terribly confident that this can ever really be done. I'd like to be a little less pessimistic than that.

Comments

[wychwood]

This is an interesting review. I like Joanna Russ' writing, I find her challenging and difficult, and she really makes me think. The Female Man was something that blew me away when I first read it - I have all kinds of problems with some of her points, and some parts of what she is talking about have actually gone now, or at least altered beyond recognition, but nevertheless, she makes some really important points about the way we are accustomed to think.

I don't subscribe to the notion that members of one category cannot critically engage with works by members of another category, if only because no one person is ever exactly the same as any other person. It doesn't matter who the writer is, the reader will never be coming from exactly the same place - but that doesn't mean that we can't learn from one another.

One thing I've found interesting with Russ, though, is that discussions often involve some of the participants saying that her attitudes are completely out-dated, that women aren't discriminated against these days - while others can cite examples of similar behaviour in their own lives. A lot of people are surprisingly unaware of discrimination within society, particularly sexism but also racism and all the various other -isms. And not all of the people in the "unaware" category are from the privileged side of things, either. Insofar as she makes us reconsider the way we think and act, I think she's still an important writer.

I shall have to get hold of this book.

PS I believe it's enmity, not emnity, from "enemy".

[greengolux.livejournal.com]

I was more than half-minded not to write about it, based on the suspicion that any discussion that followed would rapidly become tiring and unproductive.

You are a better man than I. Glad you are writing about it. I think that the question of how to navigate these issues as a reviewer is a particularly important and interesting one. Not sure it's one I'm ready to have on the internet in public mind you, but I'm glad you are.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Insofar as she makes us reconsider the way we think and act, I think she's still an important writer.

Yes, I think that's what I was trying to get at, and I've noticed the same things about discussions of her writing. Even the conclusions I think don't stand I have to think about, question my views, make sure. That can't hurt.

(There is a whole other post to be written sometime about how she defends her style, which is as I said passionate and argumentative, and how and why that influences whether it's seen as 'scholarly'. But another day, I think.)

The Female Man is one I've been meaning to read for a while. 2006, hopefully.

PS I believe it's enmity, not emnity, from "enemy".

Ah. Hmm. How embarrassing! Thank you.

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

I certainly don't believe I have nothing valid to say about writing by women, but I do sometimes hesitate to say it for fear of seeming patronising, sexist or just stupid. (All of which i am quite capable of being, I'm sure.)

What I do believe is that there is a casual assumption in the term 'Women's writing' which suggests that all women share the same concerns. Does Russ adress this?

Reading Gilbert & Gubar's The Madowman In The Attic I found a passage early on citing various authors assertion that imagination is inherently masculine. The trouble I then have is that one of the examples is from Coleridge who whilst stating that "imagination... echoes the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM" also believed that "a great mind is androgynous". My understanding of the first quote is that it has no gender component, but in order to add weight to a point already made Gilbert & Gubar make an unsubstantiated claim that Coleridge's 'androgyny' didn't actually mean 'man-womanly' in the way Virginia Wooolf meant it. This enables them to claim that Coleridge meant a male creation not a female creation. They might be right, but the examples they use don't support that, which undermines the rest of the argument.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I just lost a onger commnet on thsi to you, sigh..

I haven't read this since the 80s and would have to fully engage here I think. But I loved every word of this book and more than anything, I loved Russ's righteous anger in her writing style. Why SHOULD the oppressed, the minimised , the marginalised always have to meekly adopt the most reasonable tone tolerated by the superior cast to get even the smallest of hearings? I loved her roar, her bitterness, her fury. It burnt in my veins and did much for my general feminist awakening in the 80s. The oppressed as well as everything else need usually first to stop being ASHAMED of being oppressed (after as zero'th, they have recognised they are,of course...)

Another world, I know, from the glorious Noughties you've come to adulthood in, where "I'm not a feminist but", where everything is solved on paper, except, actually, equal pay, equal opportunities, equal voice, equal representation in politics, the arts, business etc.

I'm a feminist and. I may put that on a badge.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

I left my Christmas present copy in Bradford. Gutted. Expect comments to this post in three months time.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Why SHOULD the oppressed, the minimised , the marginalised always have to meekly adopt the most reasonable tone tolerated by the superior cast to get even the smallest of hearings?

I don't think I said, or even implied, that they should. I'm just on the fence about whether it's the most effective way to present an argument; at the very least I think it depends on who you're trying to convince.

If you wanted to set out to mobilise the troops, as it were, I think How to Suppress Women's Writing is exactly the book you'd write. That is what righteous anger is good for, firing up the blood of people who were just waiting to be convinced. You write this book if you want to make noise and scare the other side. That's an important reason for writing; I'm not trivialising it.

What I'm not sure I can imagine this book doing is inducing road-to-Damascus conversions. Maybe I'm wrong--maybe you were dead-set against feminism before you read it. But if I didn't already basically agree with everything Russ was saying, I'm not sure I'd have responded at all well to this book, and the central reason is her tone. On a certain level, I am always suspicious of heated argument. There's always a feeling that maybe the writer has decided on their conclusion before ever writing a word, and simply marshalled the facts accordingly.

And here's the thing--if someone reacts that way, it's not an unreasonable thing. If scholarly style was developed to encourage a dispassionate tone, and discourage anger, it's not without reason. Anger can influence judgement. That's not to say it always does, or that it did in the case of How to Suppress Women's Writing, and it's certainly not to say that dispassionate writing is necessarily better or unbiased. People need to think critically about what they read more often. But if you want to convert people to your cause, it seems to me that fighting on two fronts--one about the validity of your arguments, and one about the validity of the way in which you're presenting them--is an unnecessarily complicated way of going about things.

(This viewpoint brought to you by my degree, a science degree, and my job, which is all about targeting your style to your audience to get a message across most effectively.)

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I don't think Russ wrote it to convert the troops - I think she wrote it becasue she had anger in her that burnt to come out. (yes, i was already a feminist when I read it.)I think mainly she wrote it because she wanted to.

And sorry, the bit about "This isn't really a comment on what *you* wrote, but a comment on how I remember I felt when I read the book" fell off the second time I had to write it :-)

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I would add that Russ wrote it because it needed saying, which accounts for why the book remains relevant today--and will remain so indefinitely.

I also think that she chose the right tone; she's not writing it for people who will be pissed off by the content anyway.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

If you read The Two of Them (and also Suniti Namjoshis Blue Donkey Fables) you'll find the last point--about not being the target audience so not being able to criticise) is something that is about the reader blocking understanding by saying "this isn't about my world, so I can't comment" and much less about Russ arguing that an "outsider" can't criticise.

Sorry, not very clear.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

"road to damascus conversions"

No, that's what The Female Man is for.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Russ addresses the heterogeneity of women's concerns in the later book, To Write Like a Woman,.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I agree with both points.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

discussions often involve some of the participants saying that her attitudes are completely out-dated, that women aren't discriminated against these days

I was reluctant to open the comments thread for just that reason. I get depressed.

I get particularly annoyed by the following exchange (crude parody follows):

'discrimination against women doesn't happen any more'

'well, I have experienced discrimination events x, y and z'

'I hate to say it, but that must be because you are weak, lazy and stupid'

[communicator.livejournal.com]

why should (the oppressed) always have to meekly adopt the most reasonable tone tolerated by the superior cast to get even the smallest of hearings?

Fantastic

[ticking-fool.livejournal.com]

There's always a feeling that maybe the writer has decided on their conclusion before ever writing a word, and simply marshalled the facts accordingly.

Which is just more effectively hidden by a 'reasonable', 'dispassionate' tone - I point you towards the unsigned editorials in the Times, or indeed any broadsheet, for example. All of the best-selling and most influential work on eugenics was written in the voice of science, and is still racist shit for all that (I'll never get over reading all that Victorian crap...).

These things are constructed and they're constructed on a male/female, rational/irrational, dispassionate, disinterested/passionate, partisan binary. To feel strongly about something is to be unreliable, untrustworthy - to want to change things is to be irrational. That calm, sober, disinterested, dispassionate voice is the voice of patriarchy.

I've become more convinced in the last year that there is no point trying to tailor your argument to convince people on political points. No point trying to tone things down, trying appeal to a particular constituency, trying to keep quiet about the controversial bits or anything like that. You're never going to be able to do that as well as those in power, especially if you're not willing to lie. I don't care anymore about convincing people that my politics are correct, that I have the right interpretation of the world. If people are already on my side then I try to convince them of particular nuance in order to persuade them of particular courses of action, but turing a liberal into an anarchist, or a liberal feminist into a radical by argument: not going to happen. They'll do it themselves or they won't do it at all. Get the information out there by all means, put the arguments and evidence on paper, but don't kid yourself that you're going to convert people. Look at Chomsky's sales - he's read by hundreds of thousands of people in this country - there are not hundreds of thousands of radical socialists here.

(This all assumes that I'm not pissed and arguing for the fun of it)

Russ's goal is not to convince you that she's right, it's to get you to act to change things. The goal is not conversion, but action. Her rhetoric seems perfectly adapted to that for me.

[grahamsleight.livejournal.com]

Possibly relevant Russ quotation, from her "Letter to Susan Koppelman" collected in To Write Like a Woman. The context is a paper by "_________" on a Russ story, sent to Russ by Koppelman, who had heard it presented at an MLA conference. This passage comes towards the end, after Russ has criticised ________ for constructing her ideas of feminism from received ideas - particularly ideas received from male narratives of how the world works:

"These folks are advancing backwards with all possible speed and calling themselves feminists as they do so. I ache for ________ because she’s young but where is her anger? I think from now on I will not trust anyone who isn’t angry. Hopelessness is not a first step. It may be the prelude to finding out where one is, but that’s all. Nothing really good is ever easy – but it’s worth it. The other sort of thing is merely the old feminine (not feminist) game of Ain’t It Awful.”

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

These things are constructed and they're constructed on a male/female, rational/irrational, dispassionate, disinterested/passionate, partisan binary. To feel strongly about something is to be unreliable, untrustworthy - to want to change things is to be irrational. That calm, sober, disinterested, dispassionate voice is the voice of patriarchy.

I disagree with almost every word of this paragraph. Huzzah! For instance, I don't agree that to be rational is to be male and to be irrational is to be female, and I don't agree that to want to change things is to be irrational. To want to change things is to want to change things; whether a particular want is rational or irrational depends on what you want to change and why. Wanting a more equal society is an entirely rational position. I also don't agree that presenting your arguments thoughtfully and carefully entails keeping quiet about the controversial bits.

I suppose my basic problem with all of this is that it feels to me like giving up on the most effective tools of argument and debate, and accepting inferior ones.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

You could always nominate it for instant_fanzine. (I think I'm going to put The Female Man up at some point.)

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I hate being me, because although I agree that the exchange you cite is annoying, I can't help pointing out that "It happened to me, therefore it must be important and/or common" is equally annoying. Although it is important to acknowledge personal experience, it's also important to acknowledge that a sample size of one is not a good basis for broad conclusions. (This problem can come up in debates about almost anything, of course, not just feminism.)

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

To feel strongly about something is to be unreliable, untrustworthy - to want to change things is to be irrational. That calm, sober, disinterested, dispassionate voice is the voice of patriarchy.

Excellent summary.

"She wrote it but of course she was clearly being irrational."

[communicator.livejournal.com]

You can refute a generalisation with a single counter-example, famously one black swan refutes the premise 'all swans are white'.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Sure. But my point was that seeing one black swan doesn't tell you anything about how many black swans there are in total.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

I've got a copy of The Two Of Them with me so I might nominate that.

Everyone is stupidly full of beans this morning, don't they now what day it is?

[secritcrush.livejournal.com]

oh that will be fun. Remind me to point it out to whileaway.