I've come across a wonderful, most fascinating book: The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack. The author (a fellow at Oxford) traces the extraordinarily slow and difficult process through which women gained access to the written word and to the powers it confers (the power to think independently, the power to express oneself). The opposition to women's literacy has been universal, and has been violent; consequently, until recent times, Jack can document very rare instances of women readers and writers.
The author in whose company I would put Jack is no other than Hélène Cixous, the French writer, philosopher and feminist who, in 1975, published a famous essay, The Laugh of the Medusa, in which she extolled women to write in their specifically womanly way, voicing their womanly voice. In other words, she asked women to use the power of the written word to express their minds, their bodies, their selves. To take power from and through the written word, and to make it theirs.
Of course, before they could write, women had to be able to read. And it is through writing Jack's work about women's long road to literacy that one realizes what an extraordinary accomplishment women's writing is.
To your pens, gals!
Dear Anca, thanks for sharing this fascinating book. I cannot help thinking of my reading of Madame du Chatelet's biography where I realized that she was an extraordinary woman in so many ways, one being the fact that she knew how to write in a time with so few people (women in particular) could.
ReplyDeleteWe discussed how writing gave her a voice and allowed to be part of a conversation among scientists in a time where women could not attend the Academy of Science. Yet, she had the luxury to be able to write and read.