coldhearted scientist وداد

I was born already tired of hearing about Tillie Olsen because in graduate school, the older students would insist she be included on every woman related syllabus, and they evinced some sort of secret knowledge that she was the answer (she was always to be assigned as the final reading in the course, the period). She was a remarkable person.

Here are some key words and phrases from her essay on women writers in Working It Out (her essay [323-340, the last in the book of course] is really smart):

excluded
silent
not doing (“man does, woman is” [326])
powerless
subject to
fear of expressing capacities
appeasing
infantilized
punitive difference in circumstance
“this past … though objectively obsolete … continues so terribly, so determiningly to live on” (326)
only in the context of this past can the question of women’s lack of artistic-cultural contributions be understood (326)
to be a writer is difficult for any male not born into a class that breeds … confidence (327)
“the leeching of belief, of will, the damaging of capacity, begin so early” (327)
the alienating experience of studying only mens’ writing, if one studies (327)
being “minor” by definition (327)
self-doubt
“the growing conviction that going on will threaten other needs” (328)
the idea that a woman has to sacrifice all other claims to be a writer
quoting a. nin: “the aggressive act of creation; the guilt for creating” (328)
the requirement to renounce family life for art (a requirement not exacted of men)
a society hostile to growing life (330)
the lack of help and support (see W.E.B. DuBois, “The Damnation of Women”)
motherhood as it is structured: distraction, not meditation; interruption, not continuity; “work interrupted … makes blockage”
virginia woolf “killing” the angel in the house inside her, for “she would have plucked out my heart as a writer” (331)
rilke’s “essential angel” who would run the house while he wrote (332)
sylvia plath’s suicide as the result of the situation of the woman writer
not not putting writing first, but not being in a position to put writing first (334)
olsen because of the habit of deferring writing when she was younger, is a slow writer now (335)
devaluation
restriction and also constriction that is not always recognized as such (337)
the pressures toward self-censorship are extreme (339)

Axé.