Writing against self-prohibition

Nonetheless, a fact remains: we have very little by women that intentionally and directly addresses the subject of their own art.


[...] But I believe that the paucity of these accounts by women also testifies to something endemic to the situation of the woman writer: the difficulty of acknowledging she is a writer. Even now a woman who acknowledges her creative power goes against deep prohibitions. 


To reveal oneself is to be open to criticism, and women have not been trained to sustain commitment in a hostile critical arena. To acknowledge publicly the satisfaction of serious work, the fact the one is doing it, is to face a host of inherited fears and real dangers: loss even of creative potency, for women have learnt to punish self-claims with self-negation.

Julia Alvarez

"Preface"

in Janet Sternberg (ed)

The Writer on Her Work: Seventeen Essays by Twentieth-Centrury American Writers