title: How to Suppress Women's Writing
author:  Joanna Russ 
description: "She didn't write it. She wrote it but she shouldn't have. She wrote it but look what she wrote about. She wrote it but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art. She wrote it but she had help. She wrote it but she's an anomaly. She wrote it BUT..." <b>How to Suppress Women's Writing</b> is a meticulously researched and humorously written "guidebook" to the many ways women and other "minorities" have been barred from producing written art. In chapters entitled "Prohibitions," "Bad Faith," "Denial of Agency," Pollution of Agency," "The Double Standard of Content," "False Categorization," "Isolation," "Anomalousness," "Lack of Models," Responses," and "Aesthetics" Joanna Russ names, defines, and illustrates those barriers to art-making we may have felt but which tend to remain unnamed and thus insolvable. With the apparent proliferation of women writers in the last decade, is this book still relevant? Ask yourself how many women you know who are trying to make art? And how many find the time, resources, and support to succeed? So long as poverty, lack of leisure, and sexism - those "powerful, informal prohibitions against committing art" - exist, <b>How to Suppress Women's Writing</b> remains timely. <i>-- For great reviews of books for girls, check out <a href="/exec/obidos/isbn=0140257322/${0}">Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14</a></i>. -- <i>From <a href="/exec/obidos/isbn=0140175903/${0}">500 Great Books by Women</a>; review by Jesse Larsen</i>
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  ##### WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO …
  
  
  Joanna Russ was an American writer, academic and feminist. Born in 1937 in New
  York City, she is best known for her satirical science fiction novel _The
  Female Man_. Over the course of a prolific career, she wrote many other
  novels, such as _Picnic on Paradise_ and _On Strike Against God_ , as well as
  essays, plays and non-fiction. Later in her career, she became increasingly
  active in the field of feminist science fiction scholarship, and her feminist
  literary criticism in works such as _How to Suppress Women’s Writing_
  continues to be influential today. Joanna Russ is widely regarded as one of
  the finest science fiction novelists of the twentieth century. She died in
  2011.
  
  
  Naomi Alderman is the author of three novels: _Disobedience, The Lessons_ and
  _The Liars’ Gospel_. She has won the Orange Award for New Writers and the
  _Sunday Times_ Young Writer of the Year Award, and each of her literary novels
  has been broadcast on BBC 