Women's writing

Women's writing comprises literary works written by women and, as a critical tradition, examines how gendered experiences and social conditions shape literary production and reception.

Sappho: An archaic Greek poet whose surviving fragments include lyric poems addressed to women and men. Her fragments anchor discussions of women’s authorship in ancient literary history.
Feminist literary criticism: Literary criticism that examines how gender shapes texts, authorship, and interpretation. It supplies methods for studying women’s writing and the institutions around it.
The novel: A sustained prose narrative that depicts imagined characters and events. Women used the form to explore private life, social constraint, and self-determination.
Écriture féminine: A French feminist critical concept advocating writing that disrupts phallocentric language and thought. It proposes a distinctive account of women’s writing rather than defining it only by authorship.
A Room of One’s Own: Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay on women, fiction, and the material conditions of authorship. It crystallized the argument that creative work requires time, income, and space.
Christine de Pizan: A late medieval writer whose works include defenses of women and accounts of women’s histories. Her career shows a woman establishing literary authority in a male-dominated culture.
Authorship: The creation and attribution of a work to one or more writers. Questions about who could claim authorship shaped women’s literary careers.
Autobiography: A life narrative written by the person whose life it recounts. Women’s autobiographies record lives often omitted from official histories.
Gynocriticism: Elaine Showalter’s approach to studying women as writers and the history of women’s literary production. It shifts emphasis from feminist readings of male-authored texts to women’s literary traditions.
The Madwoman in the Attic: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s 1979 study of nineteenth-century women writers and literary conventions. It showed how women writers negotiated restrictive images of femininity.

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