Invisible Women, 1983–2021

Abstract

• One of the many pleasures of attending a symposium1 where there are no concurrent sessions is the natural, ongoing conversations that arise over its course as panelists connect with each other about their topics, about the challenges of their work, and about the strategies for negotiating them. While many of the writers discussed in the “Women in Book History” symposium were already familiar to me— from Elizabeth Montagu, Charlotte Smith, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Burney to Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft—I also encountered what one speaker termed “a multitude of stars,” also called by some “obscure women”: women known only to their family circle or their immediate social group. At this symposium, I was the wrap-up speaker in the program; as I listened, I found myself recalling and reflecting on some of my own first encounters some thirty years ago with obscure women writers, evolving methodologies, and our findings back then. In 1983, the year after I began teaching in an American university, the feminist scholar and science fiction writer Joanna Russ (1937–2011) published How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Highlighted by its witty cover art (fig. 1) was the book’s ironic attack on the ways in which British and American women’s writing—and, by extension, the writing of any marginalized social group—had been systematically explained away. These strategies ranged from denial of agency (women didn’t write back then) to declassification (she wrote it, but it’s not “art”) to diminution (she wrote it, but she had help; or she wrote it, but it isn’t any good). The overall effect was to weave a veil of unexamined beliefs about women and other marginalized writers and their writing that, if it did not indeed suppress them, rendered the people and their