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How to Suppress Women s Writing
Joanna Russ
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How to Suppress Women’s Writing
F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 1 12/20/17 4:08 PM

B OOK F ORT Y-T H R E E
Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series
Books about women and families, and their changing role in society

How to Suppress
Women’s Writing
***
Joanna Russ
With a new foreword by
J E S S A C R IS PI N
U N I V E R SIT Y OF T E X A S P R E S S AU STI N

The Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series is supported by
Allison, Doug, Taylor, and Andy Bacon; Margaret, Lawrence, Will,
John, and Annie Temple; Larry Temple; The Temple-Inland
Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to W. W. Norton and Company for permission
to reprint lines from a poem by Adrienne Rich, originally published in her Poems:
Selected and New, 1950–1974.
Copyright © 1983 by Joanna Russ Names: Russ, Joanna, 1937–2011, author.

New edition © 2018 by the University of | Crispin, Jessa, writer of
Texas Press supplementary textual content.
Foreword to the new edition © 2018 by Title: How to suppress women’s writing
Jessa Crispin / Joanna Russ ; with a new foreword
All rights reserved by Jessa Crispin.
Printed in the United States of America Description: New edition. | Austin :
University of Texas Press, 2018. |
Requests for permission to reproduce
Includes bibliographical references
material
and index.
from this work should be sent to:
Identifiers: LCCN 2017048972
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University of Texas Press
paper)
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The paper used in this book meets the e-book)
minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Subjects: LCSH: Women authors,
Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of English—History and criticism. |
Paper). Women authors, American—
History and criticism. | Women in
Book design by Lindsay Starr
literature—History and criticism. |
Typesetting by Integrated Composition
Authorship—Sex differences. |
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Classification: LCC PN471 .R87 2018 |
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LC record available at https://lccn.loc
.gov/2017048972
doi:10.7560/316252

This book is dedicated to my students.

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
Contents
ix Foreword by Jessa Crispin

1 Prologue
5 1. Prohibitions
19 2. Bad Faith
22 3. Denial of Agency
29 4. Pollution of Agency
46 5. The Double Standard of Content
58 6. False Categorizing
74 7. Isolation
92 8. Anomalousness
106 9. Lack of Models
119 10. Responses
135 11. Aesthetics
151 Epilogue
165 Author’s Note
167 Afterword
179 Notes
193 Index

Foreword
J E SSA C R ISPI N
I have a vision. The streets of Midtown Manhattan are filled

with professors, professional critics, editors, and literary award
judges. They are all dressed in their ill-fitting suits—they could
afford better tailoring but that, of course, would indicate to their
audience that something like beauty is important—yet they are
tearing them off to replace them with sackcloth. They are on
their knees, they are decorating themselves in ashes.
Slowly they crawl out of their blue glass skyscrapers, their
suburban commuter rail stations, their off-campus housing to
join the mass. It’s not a howl that you hear but a low, unceasing
moan. A few, the more dramatic and in need of attention, flog
themselves with branches and nylon rope. All of these men, all of
these white men, every man who ever told a publishing assis-
tant at a party while pinning her to the wall, “You know I am in
an open marriage,” every man who ever used the word “histri-
onic” to describe a woman’s memoir or “articulate” to describe
a black man’s performance or who spent two paragraphs spec-
ulating about the body of a trans writer in what was supposed
to be a review of their work, every professor who uses Kanye
lyrics in a lecture to show he is with it but who teaches an all-
white syllabus, every man who has referred to a Brontë or
Emily Dickinson or James Baldwin as a “minor” writer: they
are all here.
They have come to atone. They have come to ask for abso
lution. They have been forced into an encounter with their

x For e word
unconscious, they have finally seen the truth of their bias—the

need they have had to believe that anyone not of their demo-
graphic was a charlatan or a bore—and they have been laid low
by this information.
The sidewalks are crowded with all those whom they have
dismissed and betrayed: everyone who has been marginalized
and written out of the history of literature. They are interested
in the spectacle, but skeptical. They have seen this type of per
formance before, this display of “How could I have been so
wrong?,” which was then followed up either by a return to previ-
ous behavior with slight modifications or an attempt to get laid.
But they are transfixed by the sight, and they find themselves
disappointed that they are still capable of hope: hope that finally
they will be seen for their true selves and not through these
men’s projections.
When the men finally reach the water, they toss their clothes
onto the bonfires that have been burning all night. The stench of
burning polyester fills the air. “Forgive us,” they cry, as they hand
over their positions to the spectators and write letters of resigna-
tion. “We didn’t realize.”
Reading Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, I won-
dered, what the hell is it going to take? For decades we have had
these types of critiques; we have had books and lectures and
personal essays and statistics and scientific studies about uncon-
scious bias. And yet, still, we have critics like Jonathan Franzen
speculating on whether Edith Wharton’s physical beauty (or
lack of it, according to his assessment of her face and body)
affected her writing; we have a literary culture that is still domi-
nated by one small segment of the population; and we have a
sense that every significant contribution to the world of letters
was made by the heterosexual white man, a sense that is rein-
forced in the education system, in the history books, and in the
visible world.

For e word x i
This complaint wasn’t even exactly fresh when Russ wrote

her book, which I do not say to diminish her accomplishment. It
is always an act of bravery to stand up to say these things and
risk being thought of as ungrateful. Your small pile of crumbs
can always get smaller.
But what is it going to take to break apart these rigidities?
Russ’s book is a formidable attempt. It is angry without being
self-righteous, it is thorough without being exhausting, and it
is serious without being devoid of a sense of humor. But it was
published over thirty years ago, in 1983, and there’s not an enor-
mous difference between the world she describes and the world
we inhabit.
Sure, there have been some improvements. The ratios of
bylines with regard to sex and race have improved, but that was
mostly due to persistent online campaigns of shaming rather
than any sort of editorial revelation. The unconscious assump-
tions that create our expectations for women writers or black
writers or gay writers often remain the same. If you look beyond
the numbers and into content, you’ll see that white men are still
the experts—still the objective and universal voice of reason.
Black writers are often only asked to write about black issues
or urban issues or sports or music. Women are often only asked
to write about their feelings or work/life balance or domestic
issues. Gay writers are asked to write about identity politics or
sexuality. And so on. (But while we are at it, we are still mostly
only hearing from white men who want to provide the objective
and universal voice of reason, not all of the weirdos and gender
noncomformists and mystics and those marginalized by some-
thing other than sex or race, and I long for their presence in the
conversation, too.)
And so I ask, again and again and again, what is it going to take
to have a full reconsideration of how literature has been domi-
nated by one small worldview, to see how our ideas of greatness

x ii For e word
are affected by our own need to see our selves, our gender, our
nation as great, and to see radical plurality as this exciting, beau-
tiful thing, and not a threat to your tiny little self?
Russ did not write “like a woman,” so it’s not clear what to do
with her. She did not write about domestic or interior spaces;
her writing is neither pretty nor diplomatic. As a nonfiction
writer and critic, particularly in both this work and the remark-
able Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The
Modern Gothic, she does not simply name the injustice, she goes
after the source. She understands how a fragile Self will need to
define itself against an Other, and she is wise enough to see this
is not an issue of misogyny per se but something that has the
potential to infect us all. That need for the Other to be a specific
something, so that in reflection the Self can be something better,
creates a lens that makes it impossible to see the Other clearly
without risking the Self. We can only see and judge art through
this lens, unless we stubbornly refuse to.
White women will do this to brown women, the rich will do
this to the poor, gay men will do this to lesbians or bisexuals.
And of course, if somehow we lived in a matriarchy, women
would do this to men. This might seem like a banal observation
when you read it, and yet so few have written it down before.
This makes Russ a keener critic than someone like Angela Car-
ter, whose work has entered the feminine canon because she
had a tendency, despite all her wild glory, to say rather banal
things about the male/female dynamic. She lined it up much
too neatly with the predator/prey dynamic. Carter writes “like
a woman,” so we know what to do with her. The only other
woman critic I can think of who worked on Russ’s complicated
level was Brigid Brophy, who has also been very unfairly left to
languish in obscurity.
As a novelist and short-story writer, Russ did not simply cre-
ate hazy gender utopias out of her science fiction space operas,

For e word x iii
nor did she write in the way of her male peers like Heinlein, Halde-
man, or Ellison, with their big(ish) dicks in space. In books like
We Who Are About To and The Female Man, she used speculation to
question the present, not simply to reframe it, putting her more
on a par with Samuel Delany than more womanly writers like
Marge Piercy or Octavia Butler. She had a remarkable mind, one
that found it easy to see through tropes and lazy, self-satisfied
plotlines to mess with the trouble underneath. In We Who Are
About To, she firmly and eruditely reveals stories of survival
against the odds, a theme all demographics are quick to indulge
in unthinkingly, which in her case are not heroic tales of endur-
ance but truly about people who are willing to do any amount of
damage to the world, to others, or to the environment to ensure
their own comfort and safety. This woman works so deeply in
our collective unconscious that it’s surprising her work ever saw
the light of day.
It would be nice to think that a nonconforming writer bur-
dened by some sort of designator (woman writer or queer writer
or . . . ) wouldn’t slide into the cracks of literary history, but of
course this is one of the ways to Suppress Women’s Writing, as she
outlines in this work. We are all burdened by certain expectations
others have for us, but some are punished for their deviations
more than others.
One way she and other writers like her—writers of all gen-
ders and races and sexualities who refuse to meet their audi-
ence’s expectations—are punished is to not let their influence be
felt. Russ wrote about this in How to Suppress in the context of
Emily Dickinson, who, while she is finally seen as a genius, also
is often seen as some sort of singular creature without prece-
dent or antecedent in American letters. She has no mothers, she
has no daughters. People, and by people I mean critics who are
invested in shoring up male hegemony, do not draw a line from
contemporary poets back to Dickinson because, critics assure

xiv For e word
us, “she had no influence on anyone.” We read her, yes, but she is
not integrated; critics do not place anyone within her tradition.
Writers like Dickinson become outliers, then, and are isolated
from their own nation’s or art form’s history. It’s rejection
dressed up as flattery.
And so it is with Russ. She is mentioned and name-checked
from time to time, but she has not been incorporated into the
wild world of 1970s and ’80s science fiction, or women’s writing,
or American literature, certainly. We do not see her mothers, we
do not see her daughters, because critics don’t care to tease them
out. (This might seem like a minor complaint—not finding a
writer’s space—and yet it is not a compliment to treat a writer
like she is a changeling, or beamed down from a UFO, or sprung
up from the earth fully formed. Writers are influenced—they
work within traditions—and if that tradition is dominated in
the academy by, let’s say, Hawthorne and Hemingway, or Hein-
lein and Dick, that reinforces the singular importance of these
writers, and it tells aspiring writers looking for a tradition to
help shape their work to read these and not those. Thus hege-
mony is reinforced.)
But her influence is felt all the same, mostly in other under
appreciated or marginalized voices. Christopher Priest, who
uses speculation’s interrogative powers in much in the same
way as Russ, is clearly in her thrall. It would be hard to see a place
for Katherine Dunn’s deeply weird Geek Love in the conservative
1980s literary scene if Russ hadn’t made a little space for it by
fighting for publication for years. The most exciting voices in
contemporary genre or genre-influenced writing, like Nnedi
Okorafor and Sarah Hall, work in her wake.
I came at Russ sideways, through Riot Grrl and AK Press dis-
tro and those hideously ugly Grove Press Kathy Acker paper-
backs, seeing her name-checked by the punk rock chicks who
created their own culture through zines and mix tapes when

For e word x v
they failed to see themselves in the wider culture. And so her

very legitimate lineage, in my eyes, also includes all those girls
who gave themselves purposely bad haircuts, who spent hours
copying their manifestos at Kinkos on hot pink paper, who
sharpied Sleater-Kinney lyrics onto their jeans, who were really
into Livejournal for a while. This unofficial passing down of
women’s writing from girl to girl, from woman to woman, is
something Russ notes here as an antidote to women missing
from the academy. If the official history neglects to tell you
where you came from, you can always create those pathways
yourself.
This book, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, is familiar, yet
strange; it is part of a recognizable genre of writing, yet differ-
ent. She refuses to come to easy conclusions, she refuses to let
her exasperation overtake her thinking, and she refuses to let
anyone—anyone—off the hook here. She does not apologize for
her serious tone, either. After all, what is art but an expression
of how we all live and feel? It is not separate from life, it is not
frivolous or decadent, it is an articulation of our souls. And if
our souls are sick due to unexamined racism, misogyny, or
homophobia, then looking at and criticizing art is another way
of looking directly at and diagnosing our souls. Or it can be, in
the right hands.
Here is my fear: that if Russ is rediscovered, reshelved, and
reintegrated, her work will be mistakenly put among all of the
other books by women and other marginalized populations:
Here Are My Grievances. (Put her where she belongs, in a space
with zero qualifications, Literary Criticism or Essays or just Lit-
erature. Spare her the indignity of the subgroup.)
It’s popular, now that women are gaining voices and power,
for us to refuse to see our own hidden unconscious biases and
to distract others from seeing them by pointing out the biases
held against us. There is a wider and wider market for this in

x v i For e word
women’s writing, because it does not require any thinking and,

as another singular weirdo with no mothers and no daughters,
Simone Weil, once put it, “There is nothing more comfortable
than not thinking.”
White (straight, middle-class, gender-conforming) women
are now an established market, and because of that, we are pan-
dered to. And it turns out that women often like the same Self-
reinforcement that men do. As women gain entry into the halls
of power, which have been occupied and protected by men, they
show that they will behave in the ways that their predecessors
did. They too will demonize, willfully misunderstand, and com-
partmentalize all of the Other demographics. You can see it in
awards for women’s writing (it should not surprise anyone that
the powerful elite consistently find the writing of this small sliver
of women, the sliver that most closely resembles themselves, to
be the “best”), you see it in the way women critics review other
people’s books, and you even see it in the way women now write
about powerful men. They use the same exact tactics Russ out-
lines in this book. In 2015 a white woman complained about sex-
ism in publishing, a black man responded by complaining about
the racism of the white women who work in publishing, and
another white woman in the New Republic (echoed by other white
women across the knee-jerk spectrum) told him to please shut
up, sexism is definitely worse.
I am worried that new readers of this book will mostly see
themselves as the suppressed and not the suppressors—that
they will refuse to see their own unconscious biases and the
forms they take, such as turning up their noses at a Caribbean
writer, for example, for being too localized and not universal
enough, or that they’ll refuse to read a queer writer because “it’s
just not my taste, you know?” I am worried that we’re all sub
dividing into tiny, highly specific demographics, and that I’m
only going to be encouraged to read the works of other white,

For e word x v ii
middle-class, heterosexual, spinster, Cancer-sun and Taurus-

rising women who come from the rural Midwest but now live in
an urban area, because only they can truly understand and speak
directly to me. It’s a cliché that literature builds empathy. It can
help you along in that process, but only if you aggressively work
against the impulse to treat literature like a mirror. The first step
is to notice that you are doing that.
I think what Joanna Russ was doing was trying to figure out
how we can truly encounter one another: how we can cross the
line from seeing the individual to seeing a shared humanity.
That is a radical project. So I urge you, as a reader, not to look
here for your own name, your own gender. Not to let this book
be a reinforcement of your own worldview. Not to use it to keep
from thinking. We owe Russ a bigger debt than that. We are all
her daughters.

How to Suppress Women’s Writing

Prologue
GLOTOLOG, n., stand. Intergalactic, current:

Dominant sapients Tau Ceti 8 noted for the practice of fru-
ment, an art form combining aspects of Terrestrial hog calling,
Martian slipping involuntarily upon the ice, and Uranian drof
(lovingly nurturing the growth of slowly maturing crystals by
enfolding them in all eight of one’s limbs). Frument, an activity
highly valued by the Glotolog, is performed (according to offi-
cial histories of the practice) almost exclusively by the Whelk-
finned (or “Pal-Mal”) Glotolog. Extra-Glotologgi students of the
art have found evidence of considerable contributions made by
Crescent-finned, Spotty, or Mottled individuals, but historians
of frument (who are almost always of the Whelk-finned form)
tend to either ignore such efforts or condemn them as mediocre,
lacking in structure, of technical interest merely, or, above all, na
poi frumenti (“lacking in the proper spirit of frument”). Without
the all-necessary poi frumenti, according to one famous Glo-
tologgi critic, frument loses its artistic character and becomes
“merely a lot of inartistic hollering, all the while belly-whopping
about in a meaningless and foolish manner on uncontrollably
slippery surfaces” (Frument Kronologa, q.v.).
It is a traditional and widely held Glotolog belief that the
behavior and outward appearance of the Spotty, C rescent-
finned, Spiny, and Mottled Glotolog—as well as their relative
non-success at the practice of frument—indicate that the central

2 Prolo gu e
essence (or nerd) of these types differs from that of the Whelk-
finned Glotolog, whose superior essence (super-nerd) enables it to
constitute not only the artistic but also the social and economic
aristocracy of the planet and thereby to enjoy advantages too
numerous and varied to be listed here.
Needless to say, Intergalactic science has found among these
typically self-deluded brachiopods only the usual minor dif
ferences, reproductive and chromatic, which have little direct
bearing on behavior and certainly not the overwhelming impor-
tance ascribed to them by the Glotolog.
Thus “Glotologgish” has recently entered Intergalactic slang
as a synonym for ridiculous self-deception bolstered by wide-
spread and elaborate social fictions leading to the massive dis-
tortion of information. Thus:
Na potukoi natur vi Glotologi ploomp chikparu. (“You claim that
your subordinate classes are green by nature, yet once during
every diurnal period you immerse them in chikparu juice; you
are behaving Glotologgishly.”)—Aldebaran 4.
Shloi mopush gustu arboretum, li dup ne, voi Glotolog! (“When the
female weevil displays unusual competence in climbing the tree,
you avert your eyes and claim it is a male weevil; how disgust-
ingly Glotologgish of you!”)—Dispar 2.
GLOTOLOG, n., colloq. Intergalactic, current:
Information control without direct censorship.
If certain people are not supposed to have the ability to produce

“great” literature, and if this supposition is one of the means
used to keep such people in their place, the ideal situation
(socially speaking) is one in which such people are prevented
from producing any literature at all. But a formal prohibition
tends to give the game away—that is, if the peasants are kept
illiterate, it will occur to somebody sooner or later that illiteracy

Prologu e 3
absolutely precludes written literature, whether such literature

be good or bad; and if significant literature can by definition be
produced only in Latin, the custom of not teaching Latin to girls
will again, sooner or later, cause somebody to wonder what
would happen if the situation were changed. The arguments for
this sort of status quo are too circular for comfort. (In fact, such
questions were asked over and over again in Europe in recent
centuries, and eventually reforms were made.)
In a nominally egalitarian society the ideal situation (socially
speaking) is one in which the members of the “wrong” groups
have the freedom to engage in literature (or equally significant
activities) and yet do not do so, thus proving that they can’t. But,
alas, give them the least real freedom and they will do it. The
trick thus becomes to make the freedom as nominal a freedom
as possible and then—since some of the so-and-so’s will do it
anyway—develop various strategies for ignoring, condemning,
or belittling the artistic works that result. If properly done,
these strategies result in a social situation in which the “wrong”
people are (supposedly) free to commit literature, art, or what-
ever, but very few do, and those who do (it seems) do it badly, so
we can all go home to lunch.
The methods indicated above are varied, but tend to occur in
certain key areas: informal prohibitions (including discourage-
ment and the inaccessibility of materials and training), denying
the authorship of the work in question (this ploy ranges from
simple misattribution to psychological subtleties that make the
head spin), belittlement of the work itself in various ways, isola-
tion of the work from the tradition to which it belongs and its
consequent presentation as anomalous, assertions that the work
indicates the author’s bad character and hence is of primarily
scandalous interest or ought not to have been done at all (this
did not end with the nineteenth century), and simply ignoring

4 Prolo gu e
the works, the workers, and the whole tradition, the most com-
monly employed technique and the hardest to combat.
What follows is not intended as a history. Rather, it’s a sketch
of an analytic tool: patterns in the suppression of women’s
writing.

1.
Prohibitions
I
n considering literature written by women
during the last few centuries in Europe and the
United States (I’m going to concentrate on literature
in English, with some examples drawn from other
literature and from painting), we don’t find the abso-
lute prohibition on the writing of women qua women that has
(for example) buried so much of the poetic and rhetorical tradi-
tion of black slave America, although many of the same devices
are used to trivialize the latter when it does get written down;
James Baldwin’s “long line of great poets, some of the greatest
poets since Homer”1 can be easily dealt with by a majority cul-
ture in which what is written down is what counts. The frag-
ments that remain are dealt with largely by simply ignoring
them, though when such things do surface, more sophisticated
methods—to be discussed below— come into play. (For exam-
ple, education was at first against the law. Then, after emancipa-
tion, it became rare, inferior, and unfunded. Such is progress.)

6 How t o Su ppr e ss Wom e n ’ s Wri t ing
But some white women, and black women, and black men,
and other people of color too, have actually acquired the nasty
habit of putting the stuff on paper, and some of it gets printed,
and printed material, especially books, gets into bookstores,
into people’s hands, into libraries, sometimes even into univer-
sity curricula.
What do we do then?
First of all, it’s important to realize that the absence of for-
mal prohibitions against committing art does not preclude
the presence of powerful, informal ones. For example, pov-
erty and lack of leisure are certainly powerful deterrents to
art: most nineteenth-century British factory workers, enduring
a fourteen-hour day, were unlikely to spend a lifetime in rigor-
ously perfecting the sonnet. (Of course, when working-class
literature does appear—and it did and continues to do so—it can
be dealt with by the same methods used against women’s art.
Obviously the two categories overlap.) It’s commonly supposed
that poverty and lack of leisure did not hamper middle-class
persons during the last century, but indeed they did—when these
persons were middle-class women. It might be more accurate
to call these women attached to middle-class men, for by their
own independent economic exertions few middle-class women
could keep themselves in the middle class; if actresses or singers,
they became improper persons (I will deal with this later), and,
if married, they could own nothing in England during most of
the century (1882 was the year of the codification of the Mar-
ried Woman’s Property Act). The best an unmarried lady could
manage was a governess-ship, that anomalous social position
somewhere between gentlewoman and servant. Here is a Miss
Weeton in 1811, who, rescued from oblivion by Virginia Woolf
in Three Guineas, “burned to learn Latin, French, the Arts, the Sciences,
anything”—a desire perhaps exacerbated by her duties as governess, which

Prohibi t ions 7
included sewing and washing dishes as well as teaching.2 Thirty years

later we find the author of Jane Eyre paid twenty pounds a year,
“five times the price of laundering a governess’ not very extensive ward-
robe” (four pounds a year was deducted for washing) and “about eleven
times as much as the price of Jane Eyre,” according to Ellen Moers in Liter-
ary Women.3 According to M. Jeanne Peterson, Mrs. Sewell, writ-
ing in 1865, equated the salary of a nursery governess with that
of a lady’s maid, that of an informed but not accomplished gov-
erness with that of a footman, and that of a highly educated
governess with that of a coachman or butler.4 Emily Dickinson
had no money: she had to ask her father for stamps and for money
to buy books. As Woolf puts it in A Room of One’s Own, “all those
good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch” were
written “by women so poor that they could not afford to buy
more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write.”5
As for the leisure that, one would suppose, attended this odd
kind of poverty, Emily Dickinson seems to have had it (although
she participated in the family housekeeping and nursed her
mother during the latter’s last illness), but according to biogra-
pher Gordon Haight the time of the famous Marian Evans (later
to become George Eliot) was demanded, through her late twen-
ties, for managing the household and caring for her dying
father, she “nursing him night and day . . . looks like a ghost.” In
1859, after ten years in lodgings, the famous novelist and George
Henry Lewes bought a house; hers were “the responsibilities of
housekeeping—buying furniture . . . finding and managing a
servant, ordering meals—a task which Lewes sometimes under-
took to leave her free to work.”6 Marie Curie’s biographer, her
daughter Eve, describes her mother’s cleaning, shopping, cook-
ing, and child care, all unshared by Pierre Curie and all added to a
full working day during Madame Curie’s early domestic years,
which were also the beginnings of her scientific career.7

8 How t o Su ppr e ss Wom e n ’ s Wri t ing
Nor does the situation change much in the twentieth cen-

tury. Sylvia Plath, rising at five in the morning to write, was—
as far as her meager work-time went—fortunate compared to
Tillie Olsen, a working-class woman, who describes the triple
load of family, writing, and full-time outside job necessary for
family survival. Olsen writes:
When the youngest of our four was in school . . . the world of

my job . . . and the writing, which I was somehow able to
carry around within me, through work, through home.
Time on the bus, even when I had to stand . . . the stolen
moments at work . . . the deep night after the household
tasks were done. . . . There came a time when this triple life
was no longer possible. The fifteen hours of daily realities
became too much distraction for the writing. I lost craziness
of endurance. . . . Always roused by the writing, always
denied. . . . My work died. 8
Olsen also quotes Katherine Mansfield:
The house seems to take up so much time. . . . So often this

week you and Gordon have been talking while I washed
dishes. . . . And after you have gone I walk about with a
mind full of ghosts of saucepans and primus stoves. . . . And
you [John Middleton Murry] calling, what ever I am doing,
writing, “Tig, isn’t there going to be tea? It’s five o’clock.”
Mansfield continues, blaming herself (“I loathe myself today”)

and asks for Murry to say, “I understand.” 9 (She does not ask
for help.)
It is also Olsen, in her heartbreaking biography of Rebecca
Harding Davis (in Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills),10 who studies,
detail by detail, the impossibility of being artist, full-time

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woman could have worn the helmet and shot the arrow, could have
led troops to attack, ruled with indomitable justice barbarian hordes
and lain under a shield noseless in a church, or made a green grass
mound on some primeval hillside, that woman was Millicent Bruton.
Debarred by her sex and some truancy, too, of the logical faculty
(she found it impossible to write a letter to the Times), she had the
thought of Empire always at hand, and had acquired from her
association with that armoured goddess her ramrod bearing, her
robustness of demeanour, so that one could not figure her even in
death parted from the earth or roaming territories over which, in
some spiritual shape, the Union Jack had ceased to fly. To be not
English even among the dead—no, no! Impossible!
But was it Lady Bruton (whom she used to know)? Was it Peter
Walsh grown grey? Lady Rosseter asked herself (who had been
Sally Seton). It was old Miss Parry certainly—the old aunt who used
to be so cross when she stayed at Bourton. Never should she forget
running along the passage naked, and being sent for by Miss Parry!
And Clarissa! oh Clarissa! Sally caught her by the arm.
Clarissa stopped beside them.
“But I can’t stay,” she said. “I shall come later. Wait,” she said,
looking at Peter and Sally. They must wait, she meant, until all these
people had gone.
“I shall come back,” she said, looking at her old friends, Sally and
Peter, who were shaking hands, and Sally, remembering the past no
doubt, was laughing.
But her voice was wrung of its old ravishing richness; her eyes not
aglow as they used to be, when she smoked cigars, when she ran
down the passage to fetch her sponge bag, without a stitch of
clothing on her, and Ellen Atkins asked, What if the gentlemen had
met her? But everybody forgave her. She stole a chicken from the
larder because she was hungry in the night; she smoked cigars in
her bedroom; she left a priceless book in the punt. But everybody
adored her (except perhaps Papa). It was her warmth; her vitality—
she would paint, she would write. Old women in the village never to
this day forgot to ask after “your friend in the red cloak who seemed
so bright.” She accused Hugh Whitbread, of all people (and there he
was, her old friend Hugh, talking to the Portuguese Ambassador), of
kissing her in the smoking-room to punish her for saying that women
should have votes. Vulgar men did, she said. And Clarissa
remembered having to persuade her not to denounce him at family
prayers—which she was capable of doing with her daring, her
recklessness, her melodramatic love of being the centre of
everything and creating scenes, and it was bound, Clarissa used to
think, to end in some awful tragedy; her death; her martyrdom;
instead of which she had married, quite unexpectedly, a bald man
with a large buttonhole who owned, it was said, cotton mills at
Manchester. And she had five boys!
She and Peter had settled down together. They were talking: it
seemed so familiar—that they should be talking. They would discuss
the past. With the two of them (more even than with Richard) she
shared her past; the garden; the trees; old Joseph Breitkopf singing
Brahms without any voice; the drawing-room wall-paper; the smell of
the mats. A part of this Sally must always be; Peter must always be.
But she must leave them. There were the Bradshaws, whom she
disliked. She must go up to Lady Bradshaw (in grey and silver,
balancing like a sea-lion at the edge of its tank, barking for
invitations, Duchesses, the typical successful man’s wife), she must
go up to Lady Bradshaw and say....
But Lady Bradshaw anticipated her.
“We are shockingly late, dear Mrs. Dalloway, we hardly dared to
come in,” she said.
And Sir William, who looked very distinguished, with his grey hair
and blue eyes, said yes; they had not been able to resist the
temptation. He was talking to Richard about that Bill probably, which
they wanted to get through the Commons. Why did the sight of him,
talking to Richard, curl her up? He looked what he was, a great
doctor. A man absolutely at the head of his profession, very
powerful, rather worn. For think what cases came before him—
people in the uttermost depths of misery; people on the verge of
insanity; husbands and wives. He had to decide questions of
appalling difficulty. Yet—what she felt was, one wouldn’t like Sir
William to see one unhappy. No; not that man.
“How is your son at Eton?” she asked Lady Bradshaw.
He had just missed his eleven, said Lady Bradshaw, because of the
mumps. His father minded even more than he did, she thought
“being,” she said, “nothing but a great boy himself.”
Clarissa looked at Sir William, talking to Richard. He did not look like
a boy—not in the least like a boy. She had once gone with some one
to ask his advice. He had been perfectly right; extremely sensible.
But Heavens—what a relief to get out to the street again! There was
some poor wretch sobbing, she remembered, in the waiting-room.
But she did not know what it was—about Sir William; what exactly
she disliked. Only Richard agreed with her, “didn’t like his taste,
didn’t like his smell.” But he was extraordinarily able. They were
talking about this Bill. Some case, Sir William was mentioning,
lowering his voice. It had its bearing upon what he was saying about
the deferred effects of shell shock. There must be some provision in
the Bill.
Sinking her voice, drawing Mrs. Dalloway into the shelter of a
common femininity, a common pride in the illustrious qualities of
husbands and their sad tendency to overwork, Lady Bradshaw (poor
goose—one didn’t dislike her) murmured how, “just as we were
starting, my husband was called up on the telephone, a very sad
case. A young man (that is what Sir William is telling Mr. Dalloway)
had killed himself. He had been in the army.” Oh! thought Clarissa, in
the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought.
She went on, into the little room where the Prime Minister had gone
with Lady Bruton. Perhaps there was somebody there. But there was
nobody. The chairs still kept the impress of the Prime Minister and
Lady Bruton, she turned deferentially, he sitting four-square,
authoritatively. They had been talking about India. There was
nobody. The party’s splendour fell to the floor, so strange it was to
come in alone in her finery.
What business had the Bradshaws to talk of death at her party? A
young man had killed himself. And they talked of it at her party—the
Bradshaws talked of death. He had killed himself—but how? Always
her body went through it first, when she was told, suddenly, of an
accident; her dress flamed, her body burnt. He had thrown himself
from a window. Up had flashed the ground; through him, blundering,
bruising, went the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud
in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it. But
why had he done it? And the Bradshaws talked of it at her party!
She had once thrown a shilling into the Serpentine, never anything
more. But he had flung it away. They went on living (she would have
to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept on coming).
They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of Peter, of Sally),
they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing,
wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let
drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved.
Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people
feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically,
evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone.
There was an embrace in death.
But this young man who had killed himself—had he plunged holding
his treasure? “If it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy,”
she had said to herself once, coming down in white.
Or there were the poets and thinkers. Suppose he had had that
passion, and had gone to Sir William Bradshaw, a great doctor yet to
her obscurely evil, without sex or lust, extremely polite to women, but
capable of some indescribable outrage—forcing your soul, that was
it—if this young man had gone to him, and Sir William had
impressed him, like that, with his power, might he not then have said
(indeed she felt it now), Life is made intolerable; they make life
intolerable, men like that?
Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the
overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands,
this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was
in the depths of her heart an awful fear. Even now, quite often if
Richard had not been there reading the Times, so that she could
crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that
immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another,
she must have perished. But that young man had killed himself.
Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment
to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this
profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening
dress. She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly
admirable. She had wanted success. Lady Bexborough and the rest
of it. And once she had walked on the terrace at Bourton.
It was due to Richard; she had never been so happy. Nothing could
be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she
thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf,
this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the
process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose,
as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Bourton when they
were all talking, to look at the sky; or seen it between people’s
shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep.
She walked to the window.
It held, foolish as the idea was, something of her own in it, this
country sky, this sky above Westminster. She parted the curtains;
she looked. Oh, but how surprising!—in the room opposite the old
lady stared straight at her! She was going to bed. And the sky. It will
be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning
away its cheek in beauty. But there it was—ashen pale, raced over
quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her. The wind must
have risen. She was going to bed, in the room opposite. It was
fascinating to watch her, moving about, that old lady, crossing the
room, coming to the window. Could she see her? It was fascinating,
with people still laughing and shouting in the drawing-room, to watch
that old woman, quite quietly, going to bed. She pulled the blind now.
The clock began striking. The young man had killed himself; but she
did not pity him; with the clock striking the hour, one, two, three, she
did not pity him, with all this going on. There! the old lady had put out
her light! the whole house was dark now with this going on, she
repeated, and the words came to her, Fear no more the heat of the
sun. She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She
felt somehow very like him—the young man who had killed himself.
She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was
striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the
beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must
assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the
little room.
“But where is Clarissa?” said Peter. He was sitting on the sofa with
Sally. (After all these years he really could not call her “Lady
Rosseter.”) “Where’s the woman gone to?” he asked. “Where’s
Clarissa?”
Sally supposed, and so did Peter for the matter of that, that there
were people of importance, politicians, whom neither of them knew
unless by sight in the picture papers, whom Clarissa had to be nice
to, had to talk to. She was with them. Yet there was Richard
Dalloway not in the Cabinet. He hadn’t been a success, Sally
supposed? For herself, she scarcely ever read the papers. She
sometimes saw his name mentioned. But then—well, she lived a
very solitary life, in the wilds, Clarissa would say, among great
merchants, great manufacturers, men, after all, who did things. She
had done things too!
“I have five sons!” she told him.
Lord, Lord, what a change had come over her! the softness of
motherhood; its egotism too. Last time they met, Peter remembered,
had been among the cauliflowers in the moonlight, the leaves “like
rough bronze” she had said, with her literary turn; and she had
picked a rose. She had marched him up and down that awful night,
after the scene by the fountain; he was to catch the midnight train.
Heavens, he had wept!
That was his old trick, opening a pocket-knife, thought Sally, always
opening and shutting a knife when he got excited. They had been
very, very intimate, she and Peter Walsh, when he was in love with
Clarissa, and there was that dreadful, ridiculous scene over Richard
Dalloway at lunch. She had called Richard “Wickham.” Why not call
Richard “Wickham”? Clarissa had flared up! and indeed they had
never seen each other since, she and Clarissa, not more than half a
dozen times perhaps in the last ten years. And Peter Walsh had
gone off to India, and she had heard vaguely that he had made an
unhappy marriage, and she didn’t know whether he had any
children, and she couldn’t ask him, for he had changed. He was
rather shrivelled-looking, but kinder, she felt, and she had a real
affection for him, for he was connected with her youth, and she still
had a little Emily Brontë he had given her, and he was to write,
surely? In those days he was to write.
“Have you written?” she asked him, spreading her hand, her firm and
shapely hand, on her knee in a way he recalled.
“Not a word!” said Peter Walsh, and she laughed.
She was still attractive, still a personage, Sally Seton. But who was
this Rosseter? He wore two camellias on his wedding day—that was
all Peter knew of him. “They have myriads of servants, miles of
conservatories,” Clarissa wrote; something like that. Sally owned it
with a shout of laughter.
“Yes, I have ten thousand a year”—whether before the tax was paid
or after, she couldn’t remember, for her husband, “whom you must
meet,” she said, “whom you would like,” she said, did all that for her.
And Sally used to be in rags and tatters. She had pawned her
grandmother’s ring which Marie Antoinette had given her great-
grandfather to come to Bourton.
Oh yes, Sally remembered; she had it still, a ruby ring which Marie
Antoinette had given her great-grandfather. She never had a penny
to her name in those days, and going to Bourton always meant some
frightful pinch. But going to Bourton had meant so much to her—had
kept her sane, she believed, so unhappy had she been at home. But
that was all a thing of the past—all over now, she said. And Mr. Parry
was dead; and Miss Parry was still alive. Never had he had such a
shock in his life! said Peter. He had been quite certain she was dead.
And the marriage had been, Sally supposed, a success? And that
very handsome, very self-possessed young woman was Elizabeth,
over there, by the curtains, in red.
(She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth,
Willie Titcomb was thinking. Oh how much nicer to be in the country
and do what she liked! She could hear her poor dog howling,
Elizabeth was certain.) She was not a bit like Clarissa, Peter Walsh
said.
“Oh, Clarissa!” said Sally.
What Sally felt was simply this. She had owed Clarissa an enormous
amount. They had been friends, not acquaintances, friends, and she
still saw Clarissa all in white going about the house with her hands
full of flowers—to this day tobacco plants made her think of Bourton.
But—did Peter understand?—she lacked something. Lacked what
was it? She had charm; she had extraordinary charm. But to be frank
(and she felt that Peter was an old friend, a real friend—did absence
matter? did distance matter? She had often wanted to write to him,
but torn it up, yet felt he understood, for people understand without
things being said, as one realises growing old, and old she was, had
been that afternoon to see her sons at Eton, where they had the
mumps), to be quite frank then, how could Clarissa have done it?—
married Richard Dalloway? a sportsman, a man who cared only for
dogs. Literally, when he came into the room he smelt of the stables.
And then all this? She waved her hand.
Hugh Whitbread it was, strolling past in his white waistcoat, dim, fat,
blind, past everything he looked, except self-esteem and comfort.
“He’s not going to recognise us,” said Sally, and really she hadn’t the
courage—so that was Hugh! the admirable Hugh!
“And what does he do?” she asked Peter.
He blacked the King’s boots or counted bottles at Windsor, Peter told
her. Peter kept his sharp tongue still! But Sally must be frank, Peter
said. That kiss now, Hugh’s.
On the lips, she assured him, in the smoking-room one evening. She
went straight to Clarissa in a rage. Hugh didn’t do such things!
Clarissa said, the admirable Hugh! Hugh’s socks were without
exception the most beautiful she had ever seen—and now his
evening dress. Perfect! And had he children?
“Everybody in the room has six sons at Eton,” Peter told her, except
himself. He, thank God, had none. No sons, no daughters, no wife.
Well, he didn’t seem to mind, said Sally. He looked younger, she
thought, than any of them.
But it had been a silly thing to do, in many ways, Peter said, to marry
like that; “a perfect goose she was,” he said, but, he said, “we had a
splendid time of it,” but how could that be? Sally wondered; what did
he mean? and how odd it was to know him and yet not know a single
thing that had happened to him. And did he say it out of pride? Very
likely, for after all it must be galling for him (though he was an oddity,
a sort of sprite, not at all an ordinary man), it must be lonely at his
age to have no home, nowhere to go to. But he must stay with them
for weeks and weeks. Of course he would; he would love to stay with
them, and that was how it came out. All these years the Dalloways
had never been once. Time after time they had asked them. Clarissa
(for it was Clarissa of course) would not come. For, said Sally,
Clarissa was at heart a snob—one had to admit it, a snob. And it
was that that was between them, she was convinced. Clarissa
thought she had married beneath her, her husband being—she was
proud of it—a miner’s son. Every penny they had he had earned. As
a little boy (her voice trembled) he had carried great sacks.
(And so she would go on, Peter felt, hour after hour; the miner’s son;
people thought she had married beneath her; her five sons; and
what was the other thing—plants, hydrangeas, syringas, very, very
rare hibiscus lilies that never grow north of the Suez Canal, but she,
with one gardener in a suburb near Manchester, had beds of them,
positively beds! Now all that Clarissa had escaped, unmaternal as
she was.)
A snob was she? Yes, in many ways. Where was she, all this time? It
was getting late.
“Yet,” said Sally, “when I heard Clarissa was giving a party, I felt I
couldn’t not come—must see her again (and I’m staying in Victoria
Street, practically next door). So I just came without an invitation.
But,” she whispered, “tell me, do. Who is this?”
It was Mrs. Hilbery, looking for the door. For how late it was getting!
And, she murmured, as the night grew later, as people went, one
found old friends; quiet nooks and corners; and the loveliest views.
Did they know, she asked, that they were surrounded by an
enchanted garden? Lights and trees and wonderful gleaming lakes
and the sky. Just a few fairy lamps, Clarissa Dalloway had said, in
the back garden! But she was a magician! It was a park.... And she
didn’t know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends
without names, songs without words, always the best. But there
were so many doors, such unexpected places, she could not find her
way.
“Old Mrs. Hilbery,” said Peter; but who was that? that lady standing
by the curtain all the evening, without speaking? He knew her face;
connected her with Bourton. Surely she used to cut up underclothes
at the large table in the window? Davidson, was that her name?
“Oh, that is Ellie Henderson,” said Sally. Clarissa was really very
hard on her. She was a cousin, very poor. Clarissa was hard on
people.
She was rather, said Peter. Yet, said Sally, in her emotional way, with
a rush of that enthusiasm which Peter used to love her for, yet
dreaded a little now, so effusive she might become—how generous
to her friends Clarissa was! and what a rare quality one found it, and
how sometimes at night or on Christmas Day, when she counted up
her blessings, she put that friendship first. They were young; that
was it. Clarissa was pure-hearted; that was it. Peter would think her
sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the
only thing worth saying—what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One
must say simply what one felt.
“But I do not know,” said Peter Walsh, “what I feel.”
Poor Peter, thought Sally. Why did not Clarissa come and talk to
them? That was what he was longing for. She knew it. All the time he
was thinking only of Clarissa, and was fidgeting with his knife.
He had not found life simple, Peter said. His relations with Clarissa
had not been simple. It had spoilt his life, he said. (They had been so
intimate—he and Sally Seton, it was absurd not to say it.) One could
not be in love twice, he said. And what could she say? Still, it is
better to have loved (but he would think her sentimental—he used to
be so sharp). He must come and stay with them in Manchester. That
is all very true, he said. All very true. He would love to come and stay
with them, directly he had done what he had to do in London.
And Clarissa had cared for him more than she had ever cared for
Richard. Sally was positive of that.
“No, no, no!” said Peter (Sally should not have said that—she went
too far). That good fellow—there he was at the end of the room,
holding forth, the same as ever, dear old Richard. Who was he
talking to? Sally asked, that very distinguished-looking man? Living
in the wilds as she did, she had an insatiable curiosity to know who
people were. But Peter did not know. He did not like his looks, he
said, probably a Cabinet Minister. Of them all, Richard seemed to
him the best, he said—the most disinterested.
“But what has he done?” Sally asked. Public work, she supposed.
And were they happy together? Sally asked (she herself was
extremely happy); for, she admitted, she knew nothing about them,
only jumped to conclusions, as one does, for what can one know
even of the people one lives with every day? she asked. Are we not
all prisoners? She had read a wonderful play about a man who
scratched on the wall of his cell, and she had felt that was true of life
—one scratched on the wall. Despairing of human relationships
(people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got
from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her. But
no; he did not like cabbages; he preferred human beings, Peter said.
Indeed, the young are beautiful, Sally said, watching Elizabeth cross
the room. How unlike Clarissa at her age! Could he make anything of
her? She would not open her lips. Not much, not yet, Peter admitted.
She was like a lily, Sally said, a lily by the side of a pool. But Peter
did not agree that we know nothing. We know everything, he said; at
least he did.
But these two, Sally whispered, these two coming now (and really
she must go, if Clarissa did not come soon), this distinguished-
looking man and his rather common-looking wife who had been
talking to Richard—what could one know about people like that?
“That they’re damnable humbugs,” said Peter, looking at them
casually. He made Sally laugh.
But Sir William Bradshaw stopped at the door to look at a picture. He
looked in the corner for the engraver’s name. His wife looked too. Sir
William Bradshaw was so interested in art.
When one was young, said Peter, one was too much excited to know
people. Now that one was old, fifty-two to be precise (Sally was fifty-
five, in body, she said, but her heart was like a girl’s of twenty); now
that one was mature then, said Peter, one could watch, one could
understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling, he said. No,
that is true, said Sally. She felt more deeply, more passionately,
every year. It increased, he said, alas, perhaps, but one should be
glad of it—it went on increasing in his experience. There was some
one in India. He would like to tell Sally about her. He would like Sally
to know her. She was married, he said. She had two small children.
They must all come to Manchester, said Sally—he must promise
before they left.
There’s Elizabeth, he said, she feels not half what we feel, not yet.
But, said Sally, watching Elizabeth go to her father, one can see they
are devoted to each other. She could feel it by the way Elizabeth
went to her father.
For her father had been looking at her, as he stood talking to the
Bradshaws, and he had thought to himself, Who is that lovely girl?
And suddenly he realised that it was his Elizabeth, and he had not
recognised her, she looked so lovely in her pink frock! Elizabeth had
felt him looking at her as she talked to Willie Titcomb. So she went to
him and they stood together, now that the party was almost over,
looking at the people going, and the rooms getting emptier and
emptier, with things scattered on the floor. Even Ellie Henderson was
going, nearly last of all, though no one had spoken to her, but she
had wanted to see everything, to tell Edith. And Richard and
Elizabeth were rather glad it was over, but Richard was proud of his
daughter. And he had not meant to tell her, but he could not help
telling her. He had looked at her, he said, and he had wondered,
Who is that lovely girl? and it was his daughter! That did make her
happy. But her poor dog was howling.
“Richard has improved. You are right,” said Sally. “I shall go and talk
to him. I shall say good-night. What does the brain matter,” said Lady
Rosseter, getting up, “compared with the heart?”
“I will come,” said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this
terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills
me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.
THE END
Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed
without notice. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have
been standardized. The following printer errors have
been changed.
CHANGED FROM TO
“word poetry of “word of poetry
Page 159:
herself” herself”
“lent a little “leant a little
Page 248:
forward” forward”
All other inconsistencies are as in the original.
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Textbook How To Suppress Women S Writing Joanna Russ Ebook All Chapter PDF

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How to Suppress Women s Writing

Women s complete guide to running Galloway

Writing to persuade how to bring people over to your

McCurnin s Clinical Textbook for Veterinary Technicians

The Anteater s Guide to Writing and Rhetoric Uci

Forensic Psychology Joanna Pozzulo

Writing African Women Gender Popular Culture and

The St Martin s Guide to Writing Short Edition Rise B.

To Live Here You Have to Fight How Women Led

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 1 12/20/17 4:08 PM

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 2 12/20/17 4:08 PM

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 3 12/20/17 4:08 PM

Copyright © 1983 by Joanna Russ Names: Russ, Joanna, 1937–2011, author.

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 4 12/20/17 4:08 PM

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 5 12/20/17 4:08 PM

ix Foreword by Jessa Crispin

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 7 12/20/17 4:08 PM

I have a vision. The streets of Midtown Manhattan are filled

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 9 12/20/17 4:08 PM

unconscious, they have finally seen the truth of their bias—the

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 10 12/20/17 4:08 PM

This complaint wasn’t even exactly fresh when Russ wrote

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 11 12/20/17 4:08 PM

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 12 12/20/17 4:08 PM

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 13 12/20/17 4:08 PM

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 14 12/20/17 4:08 PM

they failed to see themselves in the wider culture. And so her

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 15 12/20/17 4:08 PM

women’s writing, because it does not require any thinking and,

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 16 12/20/17 4:08 PM

middle-class, heterosexual, spinster, Cancer-sun and Taurus-­

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 17 12/20/17 4:08 PM

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 19 12/20/17 4:08 PM

GLOTOLOG, n., stand. Intergalactic, current:

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 1 12/20/17 4:08 PM

If certain people are not supposed to have the ability to produce

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 2 12/20/17 4:08 PM

absolutely precludes written literature, whether such literature

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 3 12/20/17 4:08 PM

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 4 12/20/17 4:08 PM

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 5 12/20/17 4:08 PM

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 6 12/20/17 4:08 PM

included sewing and washing dishes as well as teaching.2 Thirty years

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 7 12/20/17 4:08 PM

Nor does the situation change much in the twentieth cen-

When the youngest of our four was in school . . . the world of

Olsen also quotes Katherine Mansfield:

The house seems to take up so much time. . . . So often this

Mansfield continues, blaming herself (“I loathe myself today”)

F.Russ, How to Suppress.indd 8 12/20/17 4:08 PM

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

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middle-class, heterosexual, spinster, Cancer-sun and Taurus-