Gender-Constructed Silences
The Price of Being a Woman
Throughout time, to be a woman has often meant subserving one's own interests in favor or nurturing and caring for others, usually one's family members. Women pay a financial price in their careers for the time they devote to their families; women earn just 75 cents to every dollar a man earns.
In a recent newspaper article, the reasons for this discrepancy are suggested. Family and caregiving figure prominently in the explanation. Women spend less time at work than men (41 versus 45 hours per week) and women take more time off, for childbearing or to care for other relatives, such as aging parents. Educational choices also play a part in the discrepancy. Women actually earn more college degrees than men, but more often they earn those degrees in fields that are less likely to have a high earning potential, such as education.
Silencing Women Writers
The factors that explain the gendered wage gap today are factors that women have had to deal with throughout history. In Silences, Tillie Olsen that there women writer's were often silenced because of the responsibilities associated with their gender insofar as there is an ". . . insoluble situation of commitment to the real needs of other human beings and the real need to carry on one's other serious work as well" (Olsen, page 90). It is not difficult to see how the ordinary events of everyday life could interfere with a woman's career as a writer:- Women understand--only women altogether--what a dreary will-o'-wisp
is this old, common, I had almost said commonplace, experience, "When the
sewing is done," "When the baby can walk," "When housecleaning is over,"
"When the company is gone," "When we have got through with the whooping
cough," "When I am a little stronger," then I will write the poem . . .
--Elizabeth Stuart Lyon Phelps, in Story of Avis. Quoted in Silences, page 208.
Perhaps what is most instructive in Olsen's text is the listing
of women whose writing careers appear to have been influenced by a lack
of familial obligations. Olsen also provides evidence that
women writers were aware of the choices that they had to make in pursuing
their career. Male authors, on the other hand, did not have to make
those same choices:
- Now I am all for human life, and I am all for marriage and children
and all that sort of thing, but quite often you can't have that and do
what you were supposed to do, too. Art is a vocation, as much as
anything in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but
as food and water.
--Katharine Anne Porter. Quoted in Silences, page 200.
When a man becomes an author, it is merely a change of employment to home. He takes a portion of that time which has hitherto been devoted to some other pursuit . . . and another merchant or lawyer or doctor steps into his vacant place and probably does as well as he. But no other can take up the quiet regular duties of the daughter, the wife or the mother . . . .
--Elizabeth Gaskell, in Life of Charlotte Bronte. Quoted
in Silences, page 203.
- The best advice I can give you is to stop writing and go back to
the South and have some babies. The greatest woman is not the woman
who has written the finest book, but the woman who has had the finest babies.
. .
--Unknown male literary agent to Ellen Glascow. Quoted in Silences,
page 200.
- There are enough women to do the childbearing and the childrearing.
I know of none who can write my books. . .
--HH Richardson. Quoted in Silences, page 200.
Breaking the Silence: Choosing a Career
Below is a listing of women who wrote who were not entangled in either marriage or family. The list is partially taken from Olsen's text and is not meant to be complete; it is nevertheless thought provoking. Like women who were involved in feminist and other social movements, it was those who were unmarried and childless who had the time and the energy to write. As a result of the link between domestic obligations and writing, class becomes a component of the puzzle. As noted the background material concerning English Women Writers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, women who found the time to write were often members of the upper class, that is, those women who had education but also those who had assistance with their domestic responsibilities.The following women writers never married:
- George
Eliot
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Charlotte Bronte
Olive Schreiner
| Edith
Wharton
Virginia Woolf Katherine Mansfield Dorothy Richardson HH Richardson Christina Stead |
Elizabeth Bowen
Isak Dinesen Katherine Anne Porter Dorothy Parker Joyce Carol Oates |
Olsen suggests that domestic obligations caused women to be silent
as writers until the nineteenth century. Her assessment is wrong.
A
Celebration of Women Writers is a good place to get an idea of the
scope of known women writers throughout history. The
Women Writer's Project at Brown is a project designed to reclaim the
works of women whose voices, once heard, have been lost over time.
Many women writers have been silenced through the ages simply because their
works have been lost or because their identity was not known. As
Virgina Woolf noted: "For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dauten, Dale: "Some Reasons Women Still Earn Less than Men." Star Tribune,
January 27. 1999, p. D-2.
Olsen, Tillie: Silences. New York: Dell Publishing, 1978.
