FACTORS WHICH LIMITED WOMEN WRITING IN THE PAST

We do not have an abundance of works by women in the past. From Shakespeare to de Cervantes, most of the authors of the early classics were men. Only recently did we begin to have reputable and popular works by women, from Jane Austin with her famous ‘Pride and Prejudice’ to Emily Bronte who penned ‘Wuthering Heights’.

From my narrow point of view, I can attribute the limitations women had writing in the past to the following broad factors; patriarchy, literacy gap, interest and lack of support.

Women like attributing many of their problems to patriarchy. The fact that the world is basically in the control of men puts women at a disadvantage according to the women rights activists. When it comes to limiting women writing, patriarchy definitely contributed. Men were in charge and had all the opportunities and advantages. As a result, male writers thrived and produced classics and women offered their successful husbands support at home. All the other factors are like sub factors under patriarchy. The world was meant for men and women just had to make do with what they were given

Directly related to the factor above is the literary gap between men and women. Men were more educated than women in the past. Even in the present day, some third world countries do not consider educating females as important as educating men. The fact that men had better education meant that men would naturally write more than women. One thing that cannot be denied is that writers need to be educated and experienced, otherwise their writings won’t have substance. As women had less education and families preferred to educated their male children, women were consequently limited in writing.

Despite the limitations above, some women wrote but the third factor limited them. Less interest in works written by women meant that women would be limited and discouraged from writing. The reason for this is that women tended to write on the ‘less interesting’ topics like love, marriage, relationships and family as opposed to ‘more interesting’ topics covered by men like adventure, war, politics, games and so on. These thematic differences between the works of both genders limited women because the readers, who were predominantly men preferred the ‘more interesting works’.

The last factor I consider to have limited women was the outright lack of support for female writers. A relatively recent example is JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. She used a pen name, initials of her name, to skilfully hide her gender in the beginning. This was because she believed boys would not read her book if they found out that it was written by a woman. She did this because there was an apparent lesser support for female writers. She still uses the name JK Rowling because the name is too popular to be changed. The fact remains that the perceived lack of support led her to use the pen name and she is not the only one.

The above are in my opinion some of the factors that limited women from writing in the past. Most of the factors no longer apply today.