Five Women Writers To Read for Women’s History Month
March marks Women’s History Month, but the contributions that women have made to our society are still under-represented in high-school curricula. Some of the most important contributions that women have made to politics and culture have been in the form of literature. So this month, check out these works by women that you can use to supplement, or substitute for, canonical texts by men.
Elizabeth Carey, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613)
Compare with William Shakespeare, Othello
The first woman to publish a play in English, Elizabeth Carey, Viscountess Falkland, wrote dramas when women were still banned from performing on the English stage. The play elaborates on the tragic story of Mariam, the wife of King Herod, a violent and jealous monarch who murdered her family. When Herod returns home from Rome only to find that his whole kingdom believes he was killed in his travels, Herod questions his wife’s faithfulness. Mariam maintains her innocence, but her husband orders her death, only to regret his rash decision when it is too late. Like Shakespeare’s Othello, Carey’s The Tragedy of Mariam uses iambic pentameter and dramatic irony to show the dangers of not believing women.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
Compare with Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
The young, poor, and single Mary Wollstonecraft embarked on a successful career as a full-time author at a time when such a profession was unheard of among respectable young women. In her treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft argues for women’s essential right to a “rational” (or scholarly) education, using the same Enlightenment philosophy that John Locke and Thomas Jefferson used to argue for the essential rights of men. Wollstonecraft does not endorse women’s equal political rights, instead asserting that it is important for men to be raised by educated mothers. But her argument for the moral equality of men and women would later influence the movement for women’s suffrage. (Fun fact: Wollstonecraft’s daughter was Mary Shelley, who wrote one of the first science fiction novels: Frankenstein!)
Michael Field, “Second Thoughts” (1895)
Compare with Oscar Wilde, “Endymion”
Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper were late-Victorian lesbian partners who wrote poetry together under the pen name “Michael Field.” They moved in the same literary and social circles as Oscar Wilde, favoring the Decadent movement’s elevated language and references to Classical literature and Catholic tradition. Field’s “Second Thoughts” imagines a lover who plans to spend a day away from their beloved, but they cannot break away from their lover’s kisses. Where Wilde’s “Endymion” is a tragic poem, with the lover mourning the shepherd boy’s unkissed lips, “Second Thoughts” is special because its sapphic yearning is requited.
Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” (1978)
Compare with Earnest Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants”
Much of Jamaica Kincaid’s writing draws upon her difficult childhood living in poverty in Antigua, and “Girl” captures this experience vividly. Kincaid’s short story/prose poem is told as a vivid dialogue between a strict mother, who instructs her daughter in chores and personal grooming, and the daughter herself, who infrequently and ineffectually interjects into her mother’s deluge of directions. Like Hemingway wrote in his vignettes, Kincaid tells the real story in “Girl” subtextually, beneath the dialogue. Within the mother’s long to-do list and the daughter’s plaintive questions is a clash of the maternal desire to protect and the youthful rejection of tradition.
Meena Alexander, “Lychees” (2013)
Compare with Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”
The Indian-American poet Meena Alexander wasn’t a Modernist; in fact, she published her poem “Lychees” exactly one century after Pound published “In a Station of the Metro.” But Alexander engages the same Japanese influences that Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and other Modernist poets used to create the Imagist movement. With its free verse, spare words, and sharp imagery, “Lychees” is a rich glimpse at a moment in time — not at passengers streaming from the Paris Metro, but at savoring lychees fresh from the market near the Dhauladhar mountains.
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