About The Site

 

Hi

This site has been built for those who love reading, writing, and literature. Especially when it highlights Literature from a woman’s point of view.

If you love reading about those “damned scribbling women,” and the works they’ve written, you are in the right place.

Welcome to Those Damned Scribbling Women

In way too many Literature classes, women who write and are part of the general literary canon are often treated as unicorns. But a deeper dive into literature tells another story. It turns out that women have put quill and pen to paper as long as men have. In every period of history you can find women who write.

But why do you have to look so hard to find them? They have been devalued even in their own genre of belles letters. They have been hidden behind the men they married, hidden among all the anonymous books, erased by men in publishing and the literary world; and out of place within what is known as the literary canon.

Unfortunately the story the literary canon currently tells has generally been written by men who would have you believe male writers wrote in the more important categories and genres of life and literature. As they designed the canon, women’s writing was deemed secondary to male works. Later in the 20^th century women’s writing was devalued through labeling. She’s just a regional writer; she just writes children’s books, etc. Women simply don’t write in areas of importance.

To learn more, people often have to go beyond what they learn in school. Personally I learned about the same six women from junior high all the way through high school. It wasn’t until I went to college that more women were taught in literature classes. But even then I sat through two quarters of British Literature only to find out that Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf were the only two women writers who were deemed worthy of more than a five-minute commentary.

You have to DIY to find out that there have been women who were well known during their lifetime and only after their death, their work disappeared, or is critiqued by others as women’s writing and seen as somewhat lesser than their male colleagues. That devaluation nearly erases women as writers.

But in truth, women have always written down their thoughts, their lives, their stories and dreams. Women always have something to say even though they know it might sound controversial, and that publishers might not touch it.

These days there are new more inclusive literary canons being put together, because women are only one of many groups of people who have been left out of things even while they are actually right there.

Now the Internet has made it possible for more people to get their voices heard. Hopefully at some point we can add a multiplicity of voices to the canon to make it a living breathing changeable gathering of great writers from all walks of life.