Joanna Russ

Discusses the obstacles women have had to overcome in order to become writers, and identifies the sexist rationalizations used to trivialize their contributions

How to Suppress Women's Writing

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What is frightening about black art or women’s art or Chicano art—and so on—is that it calls into question the very idea of objectivity and absolute standards: 

One side of the nightmare is that the privileged group will not recognize that “other” art, will not be able to judge it, that the superiority of taste and training possessed by the privileged critic and the privileged artist will suddenly vanish. 

The other side of the nightmare is not that what is found in the “other” art will be incomprehensible, but that it will be all too familiar. That is: 

Women’s lives are the buried truth about men’s lives. 

The lives of people of color are the buried truth about white lives. 

The buried truth about the rich is who they take their money from and how. 

The buried truth about “normal” sexuality is how one kind of sexual expression has been made privileged, and what kinds of unearned virtue and terrors about identity this distinction serves. 

There are other questions: why is “greatness” in art so often aggressive? Why does “great” literature have to be long? Is “regionalism” only another instance of downgrading the vernacular? Why is “great” architecture supposed to knock your eye out at first view, unlike “indigenous” architecture, which must be appreciated slowly and with knowledge of the climate in which it exists? Why is the design of clothing—those grotesque and sometimes perilously fantastic anatomical-social-role-characterological ideas of the person—a “minor” art? Because it has a use?

An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. I may seem, in the foregoing sketchy pages, to have followed her advice rather too well. Yet one’s choice in life is often between doing something partially and not doing it at all and the best choice is not necessarily the latter

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