The last two-book review I wrote was compare and contrast, because the material in each book related to the other book. This time, not so much: one is non-fiction, and one is fiction, and without performing some mental calisthenics at a level I’m not willing to do right now I don’t think I could write a unified review.
How to Suppress Women’s Writing
This particular book has been recommended to me a number of times by a number of people — feminist friends and writerly friends, for the most part. And I am hereby now recommending it to anyone who reads this review — male, female, or (to quote Kinky Boots) “those who have yet to make up their minds.”
[I]n short the women confined to the houses of respectable clergymen knew not less than their brothers and fathers but other and that if the women did not know what the men knew, it is just as true to say that the men did not know what the women knew […] and what the men did not know included what the women were. — p. 50
A lot in this book resonated with me, much like the quote above. Russ (primarily known for her scifi books including The Female Man and We Who are About To…) begins each chapter with a description of a way in which women’s (people of color’s, lgbtqia people’s) writing gets suppressed, and all of them were appallingly familiar. The book was written in 1983, over 20 years ago, and still we hear: “She didn’t write it.” “She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have.” “She wrote it, but she is an exception.” etc., etc., etc.
This kind of romanticizing is a form of the denial of agency, and in conjunction with distinctions of race, class, and sex can be extremely mischievous. The idea that any art is achieved “intuitively” is a dehumanization of the brains, effort, and the traditions of the artist, and a classification of said artist as subhuman. — p. 111
I found myself wondering whether a survey of today’s college syllabuses and readers would show the same 7% women’s writing, all in their own period and in isolation from each other, as Russ found when she did her survey in the late 1970s. I know many other things still remain true, including the early in the book statement “…as if female erotic fantasies were per se the lowest depth to which literature could sink.” (p. 55 and fanfic jumped immediately to my mind).
I’m being sketchy about this review; more so than I might be otherwise because so much made me angry. Not just women’s writing, but working-class writing, POC, LGBTetc writing are all suppressed in this fashion still, today, and I highlighted more in this book than I have in any other. I also discovered a Bronte work that I need to see if Project Gutenberg has because I actually want to read it (despite dodging Jane Eyre when I was in high school). I’ll let Russ have the last word* on this subject:
A thorough investigation of the history of the suppression and discouragement of women’s writing would take years of work and a good deal of money; I have attempted only to define those patterns which appear to me to have persisted for at least a century and a half and sometimes longer. — p 165
Silver on the Road (Book 1 of The Devil’s West)
No pull quotes from this one as I read it in dead-tree form and forgot the book at home.
Gilman’s Isobel is just sixteen at the start of this book, and like many sixteen-year-olds she is headstrong and determined and wishy-washy and uncertain in almost equal parts. By the end of the book, she’ll have changed a lot in a short time. Part road trip, part coming-of-age journey, part alternate history (in which California and parts west of the Sierra still belong to the Spaniards and the U.S. only comes so far before it meets the Territory. And the Territory is protected by the Devil’s Bargain: give no offense and pass relatively freely (paraphrased).
Isobel (Izzy, Iz) was left at Flood in the care of the devil (always lower-case), and at age sixteen it’s time for her to choose her path. Walk away from everything she’s known, become a rider based on the offer from one of the men gambling in the devil’s saloon, or make her own bargain with the devil. And the path she chooses has consequences — for her, for Gabriel (the rider), for the Territory itself; consequences she can’t anticipate and hasn’t really got the life experience to make decisions about. But she has to — the position she accepted requires it of her.
I hesitate to call this rip-roarin’ or other cliches; it took me a while to get fully absorbed by the story. Once I did, though, I was reluctant to put it down and I chewed through the last third in an hour and a half or so. The characters are all internally consistent, which is nice; the POV characters (Iz and Gabriel) have distinct voices without a reliance on accent, and Iz’s first instinct isn’t to attack or kill but to listen — to the land, to the creatures, to the other characters, even to those she has been told she must fear. And I’d say that’s where a lot of her strength comes from, that willingness to listen (even if there were a couple of times I hollered at her to listen to herself).
I recommend this for people who like alternate histories, for those who like western settings, for people who aren’t opposed to a little gore. Or just for people looking for something a little different.
* Okay, one other tiny word from me: I got to this in the afterward and laughed aloud as a lot of my day job involves dealing with the damned things:
(I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered It was the footnotes) — Russ, p. 170