Why There Have Always Been Great Women Writers — Even If the World Pretended Not to See Them
- Paulo Pereira de Araujo
- 23 de nov.
- 2 min de leitura
Women Writers and the Silent Termites of Machismo
It hardly surprises me that, for centuries, the same tired refrain kept echoing: “There are no great women writers.” And why? Because the very men who spread that mantra were the ones locking the doors of libraries, schools, and publishing houses. Everything sealed shut much like their own heads.
It was never a matter of lacking talent; it was a socially engineered system designed so that only one type of voice would resonate in the literary halls: male, white, educated, and pleased with itself.
Women have always written. The problem was never the writing — it was the reading. Or rather, the refusal to read them. Their greatest obstacle was not a lack of ability but an excess of institutionalized testosterone treating women’s literature as a threat to the reigning “universal narrator”: the man.
From Sappho in Ancient Greece, to Sufi mystics, to Indigenous chroniclers of pre-colonial America, to Chinese poets of the Tang dynasty, to contemporary Black women novelists across Africa, they have always been there. Always writing. Always thinking. Always creating worlds.
The issue is that literary machismo acts like termites in a bookshelf — silent, persistent, and conveniently ignored. And by the time everyone notices, it has already eaten through three centuries of history.
Many had to sign their work under male pen names: George Sand, George Eliot… even J.K. Rowling joined the game, using initials to soothe fragile-testosterone readers. Others wrote in folded notebooks, in overheated kitchens, in forgotten nursing homes. Many wrote with blood, sweat, and silence, defying the expectation that they were meant to be decorative, not authors of themselves.
Women’s literature is as vast as the world itself: the razor-sharp wit of Jane Austen, the existential abyss of Clarice Lispector, the lyrical revolt of Audre Lorde, the raw brutality of Elena Ferrante, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s political clarity, the cutting sweetness of Sophia de Mello Breyner, the embodied soul of Nawal El Saadawi. And that is only the beginning the list is an entire constellation of women writers.
Women Writers Write About Everything
Even today, in a world that loves to believe hashtags can fix centuries of oppression, people still act surprised when women write about sex, death, war, philosophy, politics, motherhood, spirituality, or their own inner lives.
It is as if their literature belonged on a smaller shelf, a subcategory of the so-called “universal literature,” somewhere near “women’s interests,” a label that always smells of condescension.
Women who write make people uncomfortable. They unsettle because they have a voice. And a woman’s voice on the page is too much noise for ears still living in the emotional Middle Ages. What those ears really want is silence that cozy silence patriarchy has learned to call harmony.
But what women deserve is the opposite: to end that silence once and for all.
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