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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: Feminist authors
Message-ID: <1878@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-Oct-85 23:53:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1878
Posted: Tue Oct 15 23:53:52 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 17-Oct-85 07:59:56 EDT
References: <4033@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 32

In article <4033@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> FONER%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA writes:

>If you're interested in this sort of thing, take a look at _How to
>Suppress Women's Writing_, by Joanna Russ.  [Citation at end.]

>It's a very angry book.  It'll probably make you angry to read it,
>too; it sure did for me.  Russ writes SF and "mundane" fiction and
>essays, and teaches English and Literature at the college level.  In
>this book, she details the tactics, sometimes accidental, sometimes
>deliberate, that have been used to cover up, belittle, miscategorize,
>and otherwise lose the contribution of half of the human race's
>literary output for the last few hundred years.

>I highly recommend it.  It is extensively footnoted, with a good
>bibliography, and hence will give you many other jumping-off points in
>thinking about feminism and writing in general.  Russ talks about SF
>only incidentally, since (at least in recent years) that particular
>field has been more receptive to female writers---at least a little.
>(One reason for this may be that people don't often teach courses
>about literary "classics" that includes anything from modern SF.)
>Her main points span just about every literary category, rather than
>being limited to SF.

Another book on the same subject is _Silences_ by Tillie Olsen.  Olsen does
not write SF, and she's not as agressively feminist as Joanna Russ (for one
thing, she does not write kill-the-men stories).  Its tone is more sorrow
than anger.

_Silences_ will probably be hard to find in a bookstore, but any reasonably
good library is likely to have it.

Charley Wingate