Women's writing

The Target Audience: First Year Master

The course Objectives

The students will be able to :

To identify The academic discipline of Women's Writing as an area of literary studies

To label all women writers who plays an important role in literature.

To locate the position of a woman within the literary world.

To point out mainly or exclusively on texts produced by women

The Summary

At first, literature by women was being recorded in Britain as far back as the old age (18th century). There are instances in the 18th century of catalogues of women writers, including George Ballard's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts, and Sciences (1752). Most of this literature was in the form of diaries, autobiographies, letters, protests, stories, and poems. When women noted down, they touched upon experiences rarely suggested by men, and they spoke in different ways about these experiences. They wrote about childbirth,  housework, relationships with men, and friendships with other women. They spoke about themselves as girls and as mature women, as wives, mothers, widows, lovers, workers, thinkers, and rebels. They also wrote about themselves as writers and about the unfairness against them and the pain and courage with which they faced it.

       However, most women literature before 1800 as Aphra Behn (1640-1689) did not see their writings as a feature of their women’s experience or an expression of it.Writing was not an acceptable profession for women.There were women who were interested in women’s writings, and women writers often knew and praised each other’s works. But all these women as Fanny Burney (1752-1840) were dependent upon men because it was men who were the critics, the publishers, the professors, and the sources of financial support. It was men who had the power to praise women’s works, to bring them to public attention, or to ridicule or to doom them, too often, to obscurity. From about 1750 English women began to make inroads into the literary market place(http://www.encyclopedia.com/), but writing did not become a recognizable profession for women until the 1840s. In 1869, John Stuart Mill claimed that women would have a tough effort to rise above the influence of the male literary tradition. If women’s literature is destined to have a different collective character from that of men, much longer time is necessary than has yet elapsed before it can emancipate itself from the influence of accepted models.